Denisha Jones is a lawyer, an early childhood educator, and a member of the board of DEY (Defending the Early Years). She writes here about the necessity of protecting young children from the resurgence of bad ideas. The worst of these bad ideas is standardized testing.
She writes:
As protectors of childhood, we have a duty to resist bad ideas, policies, and laws and be as vocal in our resistance as the proponents are in their insistence.
Though the effects of standardized testing have permeated certain aspects of childhood, young children typically are immune to mandated standardized testing.
When the testing accountability era began with No Child Left Behind, children below third grade escaped the yearly testing requirement.
This does not mean young children are not subject to many assessments as many schools give practice tests to first graders, but children in grades K-2 rarely take national standardized tests.
Five days into the new year, a proponent of standardized testing argues for beginning the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) tests in kindergarten.
He argues that since advances in technology make it feasible to mass test young children on iPads and computers, we should collect more data in the early years.
Though many feel that NAEP is a good standardized test because it only tests a sample of students, even if this bad idea became the norm, it would only impact a sample of young children.
A THREAT TO SOME CHILDREN’S CHILDHOOD IS A THREAT TO ALL CHILDREN’S CHILDHOOD.
Testing children in kindergarten is a bad idea, period.
We do not need more tests to know what young children learn in school.
More tests lead to more scripted curriculums, teacher-led instruction, and less time to play, explore, and discover.
Please open her article and read it all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Then start by taking smart phones, etc. away from them.
I don’t know any 4-year-olds with smartphones. Do you?
I see 5-6-7-8 yr olds with them at the bus stop every day. Parents give their old phones to their children when they upgrade. They wipe it clean and add some safeguarding software that the kids eventually learn to bypass.
“We need massive coalitions of parents shouting their support for teachers and the vital work they do every day.”
The parent piece of the puzzle is an essential tool of resistance. When teachers or unions complain, they are accused of having a special interest. Parents have the real power to push back against bad policies. It would also be helpful if pediatricians and other doctors weighed in on this bad idea as they have no vested interest in the outcome, and they understand far more about children than politicians or corporations.
Researchers are starting to study the impact of screen time on developing eyes and brains. Early childhood is a time when children need to be doing, not passively sitting and clicking. The goal of early childhood education is not to generate marketable data. The goal of education is to serve the child with an understanding of best practices for the child’s developmental stage. Most of all, none of these practices should be harmful to the child’s eyes, brain and social development. https://www.chop.edu/news/health-tip/how-too-much-screen-time-affects-kid
Clue to you…..parents showed up to complain about bad policy in the past and we were ignored and told we didn’t know what was good for our children…..eg.Arne Duncan and his White Suburban Moms tirade. We Opted-out/Refused the standardized tests, we fought the dreaded Common Bore curriculum, we protested the excess screen time and the test prep/data collecting computer programs. We were ignored and dismissed because of civil discourse and many of us walked away from public education to protect our children. What’s left now are angry, scorched earth parents and no one is liking that either. When will the Dems do what they keep promising to do and get rid of bad policy?….they won’t! Because they helped create the policy.
“Though many feel that NAEP is a good standardized test”
And they “feel” quite wrongly. NAEP suffers all of the invalidities that all standardized tests have. Noel Wilson showed us just how invalid these tests are back in 1997 in his seminal dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”. Found at: https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/viewFile/577/700
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
“Though many feel that NAEP is a good standardized test. . . . ”
They shouldn’t feel that way. They are wrong in that thinking!
Noel Wilson showed how invalid the standards and testing malpractice regime is in his seminal 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the problem of Error”. What follows is my limited summary of the work. It is certainly not a complete description but should give you an idea of what he says:
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Now all of a sudden my original post showed up. Ya gotta luv wordpress almost as much as centurylink.
Diane, please delete the second posting. Thanks!
Petrilli is an idiot.
Ofc, this might not be so. He is very well compensated for spouting this nonsense. So, this might be sheer meretriciousness.
As long as they’re in masks all day at school. Filthy vectors of disease.
Yeah, masks are so onerous. Far, far more so than dying horribly from a contagious disease.
Thanks for continuing to remind us of this, Flerp!
Decades of standardized testing-based education “reform” have led to precisely zero improvement in outcomes as determined by the very measures that proponents of standards and testing favor–the scores on those tests and have led to precisely zero decrease in gaps between white kids and POC and between rich kids and poor ones.
So, here’s a truly brilliant idea, huh? When you have a demonstrably failed policy, do more of it.
Why is there no accountability at all for the proponents of standardized-test-based accountability?
Note that Petrilli just states as fact that the tests are accurate. No consideration of their limitations or of whether they have been subjected to scrutiny to ensure that they validly test for what they purport to test for. No consideration of the key stuff that isn’t tested for.
Here’s an idea that is, I think, precisely equivalent to what Petrilli has proposed: Have all kindergarteners visit fortune tellers. This would be equally scientific.
I often wonder if Petrilli moved to Bethesda, MD so that he could use his own children and their “public” education in that area to prove his points about testing and the CCSS? His district has 0 poor children and the few schools are run much like the private schools in the neighboring wealthy areas. Bethesda is a closed kind of community and they keep it that way on purpose. The competition (based on data) to be the best, smartest and to succeed is great. It’s nothing for parents to pony up lots of cash to the PTA or for parents to provide the supplies for extra enrichment in science classes (or STEM in general). He really is the kind of creep that justifies other kids as stupid because his kids are rich and smart. He is such a BOZO and I can’t even stand the sound of his voice.
This is what the testing is good at doing. At separating kids by ZIP code.
Ed reformers propose more and more testing because they don’t have anything else to offer public school students.
They told us this at the outset of the “movement” – it would be “choice” and “accountability” and they haven’t veered from that at all.
They cheerlead, promote and market vouchers and charter schools and impose tests and measurement schemes on public schools. It’s all they’ve ever done.
Vouchers, charters and tests. That’s the whole thing. If you’re not a charter school or a publicly funded private school, all you get is the tests.
“they found a similar pattern to the one we see in NAEP data for older children: from 2010 to 2014, scores were mostly flat, followed by a significant decline through 2017 (when their time series ended).”
So using ed reform’s own metric- test scores- they accomplished absolutely nothing to “improve public schools” in the 8 year span from 2010 to 2018 and from this “data” they have concluded that what we should do is double down on the exact same ed reform agenda the echo chamber have been promoting since 2000.
The test scores don’t matter. They can go up, they can go down, and it doesn’t change the agenda or the approach at all. They don’t use these test scores to inform anything they do.
If the NEAP scores actually mattered or informed ed reform practice, nearly a decade of stagnant scores would indicate they should change something- but they don’t. Instead scores going up mean more charters and vouchers and scores staying the same mean more charters and vouchers and scores going down mean more charters and vouchers.
Collect as much “data” as you want, test them all constantly, every year. It won’t make a bit of difference in the agenda.
We must protect children from bad ideas.
The worst of these bad ideas is
STANDARDIZED testing.
Seems like deflecting attention
away from other bad ideas, like
the lavish myths that enable the
few to rule the many.
Then again, deflecting attention away
from the lavish myth of a “good” test,
continues to be a matter of adding
STANDARIZED to the mix.
Teaching that is slaved to “THE” test turns teachers into robots that probably hate their jobs, and children into losers and winners. Imagine what it does to a five year old to be labeled a loser due to a “standardized” test score.
How does being labeled a loser due to a test score turn children into learning lovers and avid readers?
Humans are not standardized. We are all individuals.