Peter Greene has moved his wonderful blog Curmudgucation to Substack. Here is his first Substack submission. It describes the importance of Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s proposal to end the federal testing mandate, which was enacted 22 years ago. The tests have proved to be useless (the results come in after the students has moved to a different teacher); the ratings on the test are based on NAEP achievement levels, which is confusing and inaccurate. Most people think that most students should rank “proficient,” but NAEP Proficient is equivalent to an A. Most students are never at A performance unless standards are dumbed down.
Greene writes:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hooray! Can he also be convinced to get rid of the test ‘s evil twin, The Common C(B)ore, which is still alive and thriving (but under many different names).
The interesting thing to me is that all my extreme conservative friends hate Common Corpse with a passion and all my liberal friends do too. Yet it survives. I do not understand.
Tennessee is free to abandon CC.
The federal government didn’t mandate Common Core. States accepted it too be eligible for $$$ from Race to the Top in 2010. Any state could drop it.
But the CC is tied to the tests. The tests were designed to assure that CC was “working” (hint….it’s NOT!). CC “IS” the curriculum in the form of test prep which is fed to kids all day, every day AND in every subject in some form. It was expensive for states to purchase CC and many have “rebranded” but have never changed the standards/curriculum one little bit. Getting rid of the tests without getting rid of “the Core” of the rotten apple does little to nothing.
They can all be replaced. My point is that the federal law mandates testing from 3-8 but does not mandate CC.
I am waiting for the brave superintendent of a district or state who engages in resistance and refuses to give the tests. A waste of time.
They haven’t, though. The oh-so-Reverend Mike Huckster-bee, years ago, went to CPAC and told the assembled ghouls that CC$$ had become toxic and that they should gov back home and rename it–issue supposedly “state” standards that were simply CC$$ warmed over. And that’s what they did. They followed the Reverend Huckster-bee’s advice to go back home and pull a fast one, a bait and not switch–to lie about it.
So, most states are still using a version of the puerile, idiotic Gates/Coleman bullet list.
So Bob, you and I will have to write a new set of standards, collaborating with the readers of the blog. You can’t beat something with nothing.
As you doubtless know, in the past, in lieu of a bullet list of supposed “standards,” some states published, instead, a short list of HIGHLY GENERAL statements, collectively called a framework, meant to guide curriculum development and pedagogy. So, framework statements might look like the following:
Students will learn how to apply to their interactions with literary works a wide variety of major critical and interpretive (in the many senses of that word) approaches.
Students will learn to communicate effectively and creatively in speech and writing.
Students will read a wide variety of works of significant literary merit and cultural influence, including works of poetry, theatre, fiction, history, science, and philosophy by authors of diverse origins.
The student will participate in and become familiar with significant traditions of orature within his or her and other communities of creative oral transmission.
The student will become a competent critical consumer of public information, including founding documents, laws, regulations, and news.
The student will learn to recognize and to employ in his or her or their own work the major genres, structures, and rhetorical and literary techniques of literary works.
The advantage of such HIGHLY GENERAL STATEMENTS OF GOALS, as opposed to something like the Gates/Coleman bullet list, is that they provide the degrees of freedom within which millions of classroom practitioners, scholars, researchers, parents, students, and so on can innovate while at the same time hewing for the most part to the tried and true. Such a list of general frameworks should be accompanied by a national wiki of curriculum outlines, assessment models, model lessons, reading lists, open source texts, and so on, posted by said practitioners (teachers), scholars, researchers, students, parents, and so on, from which teachers in departments at the building level CAN CHOOSE, as needed, for their particular students. So, no grand poohbahs appointing themselves the “deciders” for everyone else (oh, the hubris of the Gateses and Colemans of the world!!!!). Instead, we would have democratic fora of curricular and pedagogical POSSIBILITIES.
And, ofc, the lists should be constantly revised in light of arguments about their contents taking place in the commentaries/blogs of said national wiki.
Such an alternative avoids the reductive idiocies associated with crap like the Gates/Coleman bullet list–that “one ring to rule them all,” including the lack of ability to test validly for mastery of the generalities on that list, the lack of content in the list, the tendency to mistake the list for a curriculum outline, and so on. (See the detailed summary of issues with the CC$$ in my essay on STDs.)
How about; School will expose students to a variety of experiences and activities that promote perpetual curiosity and inquiry. Being a student of the visual arts, I have always thought Leonardo da Vinci represented the idyllic model and attitude for such endeavors.
Love it, Paul!!!
That’s a superb addition to the Framework!
So, I would happily collaborate on a recommended list of stuff to study in PreK-12 English, but not on a list of mandated “standards.” One of the problems with the CC$$ is that the morons who hashed it together didn’t bother to think more fundamentally about whether the whole “making a list of putative standards” approach was a good idea.
And so they produced yet another almost entirely content free list of untestable blithering generalities that led to a breathtaking devolution of curricula and pedagogy in the K-12 English language arts.
Any opportunity to collaborate with the Divine Diane is welcomed!!!
cx:
Students will learn to communicate effectively and creatively in speech, writing, and visual and aural media, including podcasts and video.
Long ago, a teacher with the handle Mathvale suggested that teachers produce an online set of standards that can be adopted piecemeal and changed to fit their individual needs.
But of course, that makes far too much sense to ever be considered seriously by
Politicians.
And the education “experts” at places like Harvard and Stanford would balk at having “ordinary” teachers produce standards that are only voluntarily adopted because they (the experts) know if all.
The advantage of open standards is the same as the Advantage of open source software.
The good and useful standards will be selected for and the poor and I useful ones rejected.
And the selection will be done by those who are actually using the standards (classroom teachers) rather than by self proclaimed “experts” at Standard and Harvard who have never set foot in the classroom.
Great idea, SDP!
What I have seen, at least in the two states I served, is the worst of both worlds. A plethora of unwieldy standards supported by unfocused high stakes tests that don’t address any of those standards. I reflect a great deal on how universities and effective private schools have developed meaningful curricula. This is done collaboratively by teachers and professors with little administrative intervention. This happens because the competency of the faculty is acknowledged and promoted through supportive hiring and retention practices. In other words, faculty are not merely consulted, they drive the learning foci. It baffles me that this has not been the practice in K-12 public schools where autocratic management often usurps meaningful student support. I know how I would build such an effective teaching force: 4 years of liberal arts inquiry, 3 years of intensive internship in school with introduction to pedagogy, and then matriculation to classrooms with master teachers paired with novices. Yes, this would require significant resources but what good doesn’t.
While teachers are frustrated with high stakes testing, our students are stressed by the punitive consequences of “failing” the big test. High stakes testing impedes deep learning, and it narrows curricula. Our young people deserve access to a rich, comprehensive curriculum. They deserve the freedom to learn, and our teachers deserve the freedom to teach.
And we need to stop promoting reading as fundamental to learning when it is actually the other way around.
It’s just so awful. The tests are far worse than useless. They are invalid. They don’t test what they purport to test. They provide no useful information. But they do cause students enormous stress, which is one reason why so many are freaking cutting themselves or killing themselves.
Enough. The federally mandated standardized testing has resulted in nothing but billions in wasted dollars, the devolution of curricula and pedagogy, and dead kids.
Enough. Enough. Enough.
We will have to pry testing from the dying hands of its purveyors. It is the goose that laid the golden egg for some. For every body else it just laid an egg.
Our children should not be used to enrich testing companies. The goal of education must be learning, not profit.
I am concerned that there are many in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in computer centric firms who are licking their chops to profit from intense misapplications of Chatgpt and other AI formats in public education where policy makers enthusiastically diminish roles of teachers for machines..
Imagine learning from a machine! How motivating (not).
Your comment points out two things that are not computer programable and the reason ai will never work as a replacement for teachers: imagination and motivation.
I’m not really commenting on the plausibility of AI but the temptation of hyper capitalists to sell it as snake oil to gullible educators in the attempt “educate” the masses. The rise of the internet brought the same sort of disruption with ill effect.
Great learning often comes from the “peer effect.” Sitting in front of a machine that churns out electronic worksheets denies students the opportunity to discuss, debate even demonstrate for each other.
RT, I’ve been involved in cancer patient education for a long time and have learned that patients don’t care about what doctors and experts know as much as what they think. I limit didactic lectures more and more to moderate additional discussion between the experts and the audience and they get much, much more out of it. Another example of the benefit of the peer effect. It pulls people who don’t get it immediately along and it provides insightful viewpoints for those who do.
Elimination of high stakes testing would improve student teacher interaction. This is especially true for students with disabilities.
absolutely
This iis such a logical step. My question is will our corrupt information system pick this up and present it to the American public?
No, nor will the adminimals and/or GAGA Good German teachers do anything to eliminate the standards and testing malpractice regime.
I used to suggest around this time of year that our school hold a “cheat-in” during the end of course tests. Have all the students gather at the flagpole and have the teachers read and analyze (deride) the test questions. Invite the media.
I was not taken seriously. In all actuality, most teachers and admins believed solidly in testing within five years of the initial onset of testing emphasis.
After thirty years of teaching, I retired in 2005, soon after the rise of the rank and punish standardized testing mania forced on most of the public school districts across the country that profited a few but were otherwise useless for education.
During my last few years of teaching, this is what California did with the results of those useless but profitable standardized tests.
The next year, as soon as the district got the results from the previous year’s tests, our 19,000 student public school district held a long staff meeting where each teacher received print outs of the results from the previous years standardized tests for the students they were teaching in the current year.
The district created a new position that paid six figures. That individual’s job was to interpret the data from the previous years tests and create a list of students for each teacher to focus on who was close to moving to the next level if they only got a few more questions right on the current year’s end of year useless standardized tests.
In short, we were told to provide extra support and focus our attention on the students on the list we were given and ignore those that were too far behind to move up far enough to improve the average for each school and the district.
What did I do?
I was correcting essays during that meeting and didn’t pay much attention to the useless crap that we were being told, and never used that list as we were told to use it. When I returned to my room, I filed those printouts away and never looked at them again.
“I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.”
–Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician and Philosopher, from The Aims of Education and Other Essays
Thank you, Congressman Bowman! Here, some ammo:
Please share with your colleagues. Thank you, and keep up the great work!!!!!! You rock.
I sent it to Rep Bowman, who is a friend.
Thank you!!!!
Hip Hip Hooray for Jamaal Bowman! He remembers what it was like for the last ten years! It’s time Jamaal. Please let us know if we can help. As a retired NYS Teacher, I witnessed the ridiculous tests and the kids being treated with ice cream if they took them. What a sham!
A frustrating side point is that Senator Patty Murray of Washington could have ended this mandate during the writing of ESSA…but she pointedly refused to…and then she runs for reelection saying how much she has done to reduce testing. Ugh!!
Agreed.
Yeah. The old bait and not switch. DeStalin, in Flor-uh-duh, promised to do away with testing based on the Common [sic] Core [sic]. What did he do? He issued Flor-uh-duh “standards” that are a rehash of the puerile CC$$ but have a new, shiny name and broke the annual test up into several tests. Same old BS. Another day.
I followed the links until I came to a list of cosponsors. My congressman, who counts himself as part of the Progressive Caucus, was not on the list. he will receive a stern reprimand from this teacher and constituent. Shameful! Representative Ted Lieu, I’m calling you out. And all of us need to apply pressure to Rep Hakeem Jeffries. Now is the time for leadership of the party that relies on unions like teachers unions for its backbone and stop pandering to rightwing donors like Dick and Betsy DeVos. Mandatory annual testing is a failed relic of the past. Congresspeople either look to the future or go the way of the dinosaurs. Damn it, Ted!
It is long past time for this to be done. If the dems want and issue they can actually win on, this is one. MOST PEOPLE HATE the mandated annual testing, with good reason. In this, the Biden Administration is way behind where the people are.
Yet, evidenced by the line of Democrats that endorsed Vallas, they haven’t learned the lesson. Republicans remain a threat because Democrats don’t seem to want to take a stand.
“Most people hate the mandatory annual testing.”