I have come to believe that there is one way and one way only that we will eliminate the federal testing mandate, which has had such blood-sucking costs over the years, direct costs and opportunity costs in loss learning, and which has brought about a dramatic devolution in our curricula and pedagogy.
The tests will remain in place until the national teachers’ unions take up the cause of ending them, until they call a national strike to do that. This would take real guts, real leadership. But until the teachers’ unions do that, until they institute a national action to end the testing, they are COMPLICIT IN CHILD ABUSE. I mean that. It’s not hyperbole. The testing is child abuse. It robs kids of large percentages of the time that they could be spending learning. And it robs them of coherent curricula and pedagogy. Instead, they get random exercises on random “skills” from the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards” bullet list and its progeny around the country.
ENOUGH. It’s been an utter failure. It’s been devastating. Time to end it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
cx: lost learning, not loss learning, ofc
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Bob, you are absolutely correct. The unions these days are really falling down on the job. They need to “get their collective act’s together” and truly support teachers.
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I love and support our unions, but this needs to happen.
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After decades of this Ed Deform occupation of our schools, enough is enough. Time to end it.
Those people claimed to be all about being scientific, all about the “data.” Well, after decades of this federally mandated state testing, there has been ZERO improvement in outcomes BY THE DEFORMERS’ OWN MEASURES.
As Karl Popper pointed out long ago, what makes a proposition scientific is that it is falsifiable. Well, the lack of improvement in the deformers’ own measures falsifies their hypothesis that scores would improve if one did this testing, at this enormous cost.
When will the accountability mavens be held accountable?
End the testing. Do not tweak it. End it. Again, not only has it gotten no results by its advocates’ own measures, but it has lead to DRAMATIC distortions and devolution of our curricula and pedagogy. Coherent ELA curricula was thrown out the window when the puerile tested Gates/Coleman skills list became our de facto national ELA curriculum outline.
ENOUGH. End the Deformer occupation of our schools. End the breathtaking waste. End the distortion of our curricula and pedagogy. End the child abuse.
END THE TESTING.
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And presidential candidates:
You want an issue with legs? END THE TESTING.
Teachers, parents, students HATE these tests, with good reason.
Want to pick up millions of votes right out of the gate? Make this issue yours.
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cx: has led, not has lead
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“They need to “get their collective act’s together” and truly support teachers.”
The teachers, NEA/AFT and adminimals have been willing implementers of the standards and testing malpractice regime. Can you say GAGA Good German?
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This has been my exprience…
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AGREE. Teachers know more than any test.
Thank you.
This obsession with standardized testing is ridiculous. But, these tests are HUGE $$$$$$-makers for the FEW.
Again, teachers know more than any test. They are the ones who has the “real-live” data every single day they are with their students.
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Completely agree, and it’s not just the soul-sucking SBAC. See the link if you want to get an idea of how much testing is done to our children, at the expense of actual learning. Predictably, data collection/analysis has shape-shifted into its own $$$-generating industry, and IMO there is no end in sight. Our high-needs children have been data-generating pawns for year, and no one questions it. OUSD just hands it over, and they are absolutely complicit in further privatization efforts by the usual cast of characters. Currently, OUSD has an agreement with Johns Hopkins to take I-Ready data, and use it to design AI-generating teaching models. This is what’s happening right now, and if teachers don’t pay attention, their jobs will disappear right under their noses and our POC kids will be taught by AI generated content/robots. That’s the end game. https://www.ousddata.org/internal-dashboard-list.html
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This is so discouraging, Oakland Mom!
INSANE. Our district-level administrators are freaking insane.
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Exactly, Yvonne!
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“Teachers know more than any test.”
No, not at all because those tests know nothing. Your statement makes no sense.
Now do they know more about their students than any standardized test might be able to ascertain? Most likely.
But to give those invalid tests any credence at being able to validly assess students knowledge or “know more” serves to continue the falsehoods of the standards and testing malpractice regime.
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There is a second way. While it is not a quick solution, it is far and away a better one. That is to render standardized tests unnecessary. We do that through the implementation of The Hawkins Model, or something comparable. My model is designed not to accept less than success from students. After a few years in which the academic achievement of students learning under the model has been demonstrated using the current standardized tests, the Verification Mastery Assessments required of my model 6 to 8 weeks after a student passes a mastery assessment for each lesson in each subject area to ensure subject mastery retention, the process could be formalized as an official result. It is comparable to inline quality assessments used in industry. It would require earning the confidence of both the public and public officials, but that is one of the objectives of my model.
Of course one would need to examine my model to understand how it would work.
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“it is far and away a better one”
Better than what?
AND, this is not a venue for hawking your magic elixir, and certainly not an elixir based upon some Behaviorist Mastery Learning Model.
I refer this to Diane, but I’m pretty sure that she does not intend her site to become a vehicle for advertising consulting services.
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Have submitted your model for peer review? If so, what was the result? Can you produce any studies attesting to the efficacy of your method? It seems to me you are making some big claims here. Can you underwrite them with evidence?
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“the academic achievement of students learning under the model has been demonstrated using the current standardized tests”
Impossible because the current standardized tests in ELA do not, in fact, validly measure what they purport to measure, as you will see if you read the article linked to above, “Combating Standardized Testing Derangement Syndrome (STDs) in the English Language Arts.” Because the tests are invalid–because they do not actually measure accurately learning in the English language arts, they cannot be used to “demonstrate” “the academic achievement of students learning under” ANY “model.”
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I don’t know. The backlash against a national strike would be, as Trump would put it, like nothing you’ve ever seen.
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People would support it. Most people hate these tests. The only ones who like them are a few privileged parents in the suburbs.
And yes, this will take some courage. Given the dire consequences for our schools of this testing–the breathtaking costs and negative consequences, and given the utter invalidity of the ELA tests, it is long, long, long past time for our union leaders to show some courage. Not doing so is like spending your time making sure the brightwork on the deck is polished when there is a freaking gaping hole in the hull.
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Yes, “people would support it.” It’s never been tried, & it MUST be. What “backlash?” Ugh…quoting it45. (I hope you were being sarcastic, Flerp!)
We’ll never know until we try it & try it we MUST.
I know we have to stop talking about it.
I’m done doing so.
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It’s time.
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It’s malfeasance. It’s irresponsible.
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It’s unethical and unjust.
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yup
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People outside schools or the educational materials publishing industry have NO NOTION of the extent to which the standards-based testing “reform” has metastasized throughout our PreK-12 system and deformed it, preventing its proper functioning. Teachers know this. It’s time for the union leaders to Wake Up.
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They know! They just want to collect their paychecks and remain in control. Education is now a business just like healthcare is now a privatized business….how has that turned out? Education has become political and it never should have come to this. The problem is that “Leadership” is now all about who has the most “Power”….and Power is all about $$$$$.
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Thanks, Lisa!
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“Setting an example is not the
main means of influencing others,
it is the only means.”
“The three most important ways
to lead people are… by example…
by example… by example.”
“The world is changed by your
example not your opinion.”
Is “Make me stop” an example
to be followed?
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National unions need to develop a strategy that includes right to work states. Having spent my entire career in the South, I have regularly been disillusioned by the lack of foresight and imagination on the part of these organizations. I did not participate in the NEA in North Carolina because when I was interested, I couldn’t afford it, and when I could pay the freight, the state leadership was more interested in position than advocacy (Yes we had significant dues). In Alabama I joined the chapter and when I ran into difficulties with the district I got no support from the AEA. I helped lead the move to an elected school board in Chattanooga, Tn. as a high school student in the late 1970s. We worked with the local AFT and NEA. These two organizations acted as mutual antagonists. The same meeting our referendum was approved by our City Council, the unions showed up in force. Not for our cause, but for a collective bargaining agreement they won that day. It was one of the few times I witnessed a union victory. Around 1990, in North Carolina, teachers marched on Raleigh the thousands to protest against the Governor’s decision to hold salaries “harmless” that year. The state government then approved a raise. Unions can work in “right to work”” states if ground work is laid and when what we call “professional organizations” get support for individual members who run into the tyranny of our bureaucracy. Having two national unions that do not work together is not going to get teachers in the fight. I would suggest real consultation with Stacy Abrams to get the model for a grassroots movement. Educators will not rise to the challenge if there is little evidence of unity and support.
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The ’90s were the best decade I saw in education. Lots of the labor disputes from the ’70s and ’80s had been resolved, and there was a willingness to invest in public education. The coffers will full of all the dot com cash that did trickle down to education, and there was trust in educators, at least in the North. Then, GWB and NCLB arrived with a wrecking ball that continues now and seeks to dismantle public schools.
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A wrecking ball
Exactly
And that wrecking ball has been particularly effective in the English language arts. It completely ended coherent curricula in ELA.
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I think the Clinton administration over focus on standards got us on this path. Ironically, after A Nation at Risk was published, I began working with teachers who focused on more progressive concepts like portfolios and site based decision making. However, as soon as North Carolina introduced one of the models for NCLB, teacher autonomy went out the window. We seem to be stuck in a high stakes mindset that executives, in the public schools and private sector, are incapable of relinquishing either due to power, greed, or simple ignorance about how we learn.
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We were planning portfolio assessment when NCLB hit like like a ton of bricks with its test and punish agenda. GW sets the stage with NCLB, and his brother, Jeb, makes a ton of money from what happens next. Privatization.
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“Then, GWB and NCLB arrived with a wrecking ball that continues now and seeks to dismantle public schools.”
It wasn’t just Georgie the Least. The Dims, through T. Kennedy, had as much of a hand in the process, not to mention Obama and Duncan.
This is not an exclusive Rethug sourced problem.
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There are so many damaging practices in education, starting with pre-K where reading and writing are pushed, and moving into kindergarten where play – the very best way that five and six-year-olds learn – has been banished. And that is only the beginning of the story of the broken system that is education in this country. Testing is one damaging, counterproductive component of the giant machine that just keeps chugging along – nothing and no one seemed to be able to stop it or even slow it down.
And the situation is only getting worse because young teachers are indoctrinated. They leave their Teacher Ed programs with the idea that these things are “normal”. They don’t know any differently so no thought is given to how practices like over-testing and paper-based activities in pre-k and k, and shoving “sight words” into the brains of 3-4 year olds is doing much more harm than good. It’s not their fault, it is indoctrination.
No, Bob, I don’t see anything changing in any meaningful way anytime soon. How can it?
So I do what I can as a teacher. I stay out of the spotlight, and do what I know is best for my students. And there are others like me out there who are old enough to have seen a time when things were done differently, with no testing for young children and very little as you go up the grade levels. A time when kindergarten was a joyful place to learn by using all of the senses. Never were paper and pencil pushed on five-year-olds – unless they wanted to write. And writing was drawing gorgeous pictures.
No matter what statistics show about depression and anxiety in school-age kids, or how miserable and damaging and abusive the practices are- nothing changes year after year after year.
If I were a parent of young kids right now, I would never put them in most of the public schools out there. Hell no! I would hope to have the money to send my kids to a private, progressive school like Discovery Natural Learning Center in Maryland. In fact, I’d move – change states! – to find a school like this! Or any other school that is swimming upstream in education and doing the right things. I suppose if I didn’t have the money I would homeschool.
We are in an we are in a time when depression and anxiety in our young population are epidemic. Yet no one – neither young parents, nor young teachers seem to be aware of the connection between a damaging education system, and a stressed, depressed, and anxious young population. They just go along with it all.
I would love to end my message by saying I have great hope that someday we will actually follow best practices like Finland, and other places that are doing so very much better than we are serving and educating future generations.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it happening.
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A moving note, KI. I did the same. Closed the door and tried my best to teach DESPITE the tests, DESPITE the test-i-fied curricula, DESPITE the pressure form admin to spend all my time doing test prep.
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I think we get caught up in the bad news as the disruptors have communicated so disastrously. As a Principal, I struggled with a testing mantra while trying to create a working environment where teachers could interact and prepare. The system certainly limited my ability to do this. I have three adult aged children who all benefitted from their public schools K-12. I have two nephews the same age who attended a highly regarded private school. My three all seem to have developed a positive intellectual and social focus that has made them independent and engaged. My two nephews have not settled on a direction in their path. In the old days I attended public K-12 with no AP or honors offerings. I then attended a demanding private liberal arts university. In the years that followed I often felt that I got my social preparation in K-12 and academic chops in College. Yes, I learned to study, conduct research, and work hard to gain insight in undergrad, but I later realized that I gained significant intellectual bearing in K-12 through the time to play and interact with children of similar interests during a time when homework or quantified activity wasn’t so overvalued. There remain many public schools that produce students ready to take on the world. We just have to allow them to do their work based on their expertise and not interfere with tests that tell us little about what children are learning.
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“The system certainly limited my ability to do this.”
An excellent example of adminimal justification for implementing educational malpractice.
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You obviously had bad experiences with administrators, but you don’t know me or the efforts I, and many of my colleagues, made to turn the tide against stiff opposition. Blaming colleagues serves no purpose. The principalship is important and simply dismissing the effort serves no one, especially notteachers.
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Sorry, Paul, but. . . did you refuse to have “your” school not participate in that educational malpractice? That’s the bottom line–refusing to implement unethical, unjust and harmful to the students malpractices.
Attempting to “turn the tide” (and failing) is not refusal to implement unjust and unethical practices.
And yes, the vast majority 99% of the adminimals (and I was certified to be one, Masters and all-BFD) that I knew and dealt with implemented those malpractices with nary a peep. The few teachers like myself who did stand up, speak out against and refuse to help implement those policies paid a heavy price while the adminimals continued to make their $$ off of our backs, proving how “tough” they were by stomping on our throats (metaphorically speaking of course) that had very real repercussions for us for a long time.
I’m not doubting that you tried, or even had good intentions is trying to mitigate the harms, but the fact is that you and all the GAGA Good German administrators failed spectacularly in doing so.
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It’s called staying in the game to change the outcome.
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It’s called bastardizing the teaching and learning process harming all students in the process.
But hey, I had to stay in the $$ game allowing those harms to amass while I continued to collect my salary failing spectacularly to even make a dent in that malpractice regime.
Good intentions don’t cut it. Almost every police officer that has shot and killed, becoming the judge, jury and executioner, an unarmed suspect had good intentions. Totalitarian dictators had good intentions in their own mind. . . killing and harming many in the process of getting and keeping their power.
The administrators whom I rightly condemn all had/have good intentions while harming the children in the process of keeping their authority and power (and $$).
Seems to me the best thing to do now is to admit to being complicit in that harming, apologize for causing said harms and doing what one can to help eliminate the standards and testing malpractice regime right now.
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Many billions of lost dollars and lost instructional hours each year.
And for worse than nothing.
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The wealthy want to see working class kids sitting in front of screens and producing marketable data so that the rich can make even more money. Forget curriculum! They are selling canned cyber crap with embedded testing to public schools and calling it ‘education.’ Idiotic administrators are already buying this garbage.
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Thus the over focus on reading. Corporate executives don’t want a work force that thinks for itaself.
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Completely agree, and it’s not just the soul-sucking SBAC. See the link if you want to get an idea of how much testing is done to our children, at the expense of actual learning. Predictably, data collection/analysis has shape-shifted into its own $$$-generating industry, and IMO there is no end in sight. Our high-needs children have been data-generating pawns for year, and no one questions it. OUSD just hands it over, and they are absolutely complicit in further privatization efforts by the usual cast of characters. Currently, OUSD has an agreement with Johns Hopkins to take I-Ready data, and use it to design AI-generating teaching models. This is what’s happening right now, and if teachers don’t pay attention, their jobs will disappear right under their noses and our POC kids will be taught by AI generated content/robots. That’s the end game. https://www.ousddata.org/internal-dashboard-list.html
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That is PRECISELY the end game, and Bill Gates made this clear decades ago. He gave a speech in which he said that the costs of schooling [the children of proles] were almost entirely in a) teachers’ salaries and b) facilities, and both could be eliminated by switching to online instruction.
And that’s why he paid for the creation of the Common [sic] Core [sic]–so that there would be one national bullet list to which to key educational products that could then be sold “at scale.” It’s the Microsoft Monopoly Model for training (“Sit up, roll over, good boy”) of the children of folks who are not among the elite.
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That is the essence of all the hoopla behind so-called personalized instruction. It’s AI that dishes out electronic worksheets and bores kids to tears while they collect their data.
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Exactly right.
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Leave it to the Education Deformers to cook up the name “Personalized Learning” to describe instruction by computer rather than by a person.
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“Leave it to the Education Deformers to cook up the name “Personalized Learning” to describe instruction by computer rather than by a person.”
Exactly right!
Orwellian in misuse of language
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And they call it that because, of course, up front they give a NEVER VALIDATED diagnostic test that then drops the kids down in a particular part of the maze until he or she acquires enough test prep to move to the next task.
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It’s Pavlov’s dogs on steroids.
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well put, RT
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What do we expect someone who was an awkward adolescent hanging out in the basement of his school interacting with a mainframe computer in his spare time ( I won’t speculate about what he might have actually been doing down there)? Bill Gates, like many in the Silicon Valley space, see learning as simply inputs and outputs. He jumps into finding solutions without knowing the depth and breadth of the challenge.
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Ed Reform is his lack of understanding of human nature writ large.
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If we just got rid of the testing, think of how much time could be freed up to teach children critical race theory and to be transgendered, groomed Marxists who, if they are white, hate themselves.
–What the Republican Party pretends that we teachers are thinking. Aie yie yie.
There are two types of Republicans now: the ones who don’t believe a word of this stuff but find it useful and the ones who buy into this nonsense completely. The con artists and the conned.
But, seriously, if people want to see improvement in U.S. education, imagine what would happen if we could claw back the third of the school year that is LOST to
–standardized testing
–practice testing in preparation for the standardized testing
–post-practice-testing data chats
–preparation of data walls
–reporting on the practice tests and the standardized tests
–proctoring of the practice tests and the standardized tests
–test prep
–tutoring for standardized tests
–activities and exercises in textbooks and online that have been redesigned and dumbed down to imitate the standardized test questions
–curricula and pedagogy that take up random “standards” from the almost-entirely-content-free Gates/Coleman bullet list rather than present substantive new knowledge in a coherent manner
and devote that time to actual education
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Bob, could you post a link to the article “A Warning to Parents” ?
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Love your site, btw, KGI!!!
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But what about the value of the tests?
They have no value. The ELA tests do not validly test what they purport to test, so they have zero value. Even if the tests were valid, which they aren’t, they would be useless instructionally because they are summative. No one learns anything from them (they are not formative), and the provide no actionable information to teachers (they are not diagnostic) because the info comes after the fact, far too late, and is not disaggregated in ways that would make them actionable. Teachers cannot even see the questions to find out what kids got wrong.
They are a scam. They are a mult-billion-dollar annual pseudoscientific scam. The folks who support them are all some combination of idiots, people who never actually looked at one of these tests, people who profit from the tests, politicians who know nothing of them but can use them to say that they are doing something about education, and edu-scammers who use the test results to push magic elixirs like online instruction, charters, and vouchers for private schools.
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Please read this to educate yourself about these tests, to find out why they don’t test what is important in ELA and do not even test validly the standards that they purport to test:
It is really long past time for journalists and politicians and district, state, and federal education officials to educate themselves about these tests.
THEY ARE A SCAM. Operating in plain sight because people don’t do the minimal work needed to learn about them. READ THAT ARTICLE.
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YES!
No Child Race to the Top
by Jack Burgess
“Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams die,
life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
Langston Hughes
If up were down, and black were white,
if Jesus were Satan, and you made a sect
of that, if yin were yang,
blood came from turnips,
and penciling bubbles was as
beautiful as painting
or singing, or god-forbid,
daydreaming–or writing poetry–
it would be possible to combine “No Child
Left Behind” with “Race to the Top.”
If John Dewey were alive today
he’d be turning over in his grave.
“Learn by doing,” his legacy,
so kids today learn to take tests,
learn to get grades,
learn how little
we value them,
how bright we are.
We who sang songs,
read poems, wrote essays,
leave them the brain bending,
standardized, multiple guess.
No wonder they turn away
to the electronic matrix,
taught that Reagan the Great
was the beginning of history.
Schools will be fracked,
will be squeezed until
profits ooze out.
But can the imaginations
of childhood be wrung dry
for corporate greed?
Will children really stop
gazing at the moon
and loving one another
for either political party?
Or just burrow more deeply
into the sweetness of cyber space?
Orwellian logic would have
it that love finds a way
when Big Brother is not looking.
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Thanks, Jack!
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Excellent commentary!
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Congress could have reauthorized the ESSA three years ago without the testing mandate. It’s still up for reauthorization any time now. There is a president in the White House right now who campaigned with a clearly stated intention to end testing. It will not happen unless collective action against this unjust, racist law is taken on a large scale to expose the cruelty of lawmakers in the pockets of industry.
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a clearly stated intention to end testing
Don’t hold your breath.
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National action is long overdue.
Well said, Bob.
The phony tests make everyone who touches them in any way, shape or form complicit to some degree in deception.
The rampant misuse of allegedly ‘standardized’ testing was one of the key reasons I decided to retire. And, If I hadn’t been supporting my family and devoted to my students, I would’ve thrown in the towel much sooner.
One could argue that the undermining of a key institution in our democracy, our public schools, through the rushed and bizarre use of nonsensical testing, was one of the factors that helped prime large parts of our citizenry for the Trumpian upheaval we are living within now.
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allegedly ‘standardized’
Yup
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Thanks, John!
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Those standardized tests are also teacher abuse explaining the growing shortage of teachers entering the profession.
Word of mouth from teachers facing burn-out from all the pressure linked to those tests is warning college students to select other professions with a lot less stress and more pay.
The often cherry-picked, manipulating lying propaganda that supports the testing industry is also misleading voters and causing parents to make test results more important than learning, causing undue stress in their children. Studies have linked this pressure to an increase of child and adolescent suicides.
The human mind is not designed to do well on multiple choice tests, because us humans forget things, even things we were taught and even learned. Hell, I can leave my home office to get a book off a shelf in another room as a resource to a blog post I’m working on and forget what I went to that room when I get there.
I’m sure an AI program on a computer with all that data in easy to access files with the answers to standardized tests would ace those tests easily because unless a hacker deleted all those files, the answers are always an instant away.
Humans are not walking algorithmes with all the answer easily accessible.
Teaching children doesn’t mean they will remember what they were taught or even learn it in the first place.
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great points, Lloyd
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People differ. They are not widgets to be standardized.
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Bob you are correct about the abusive nature of any kind of standardization for our kids including regulated curriculum. Today it is even harder I believe to rally support because of the parent’s rights movement from groups like Moms for Liberty. I did have hope at one point with Fair Test and Susan O’Hanian arguing that if parents opted out their kids that the tests would become useless to school districts (not that they are now but somehow that is the argument) It’s hard to opt out and getting harder. Yes the unions should raise this issues and of course where are the teachers liks Badass teachers and Rethinking schools and SaveourSchools to educat
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So lets get organized at the NPE conference
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yes
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I think it will take one of the major political parties abandoning the Bush-Kennedy agreement that gave us No Child. Teachers could strike, but only major political buy-in will get us past this mass sh-tshow.
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You are expecting one of the major political parties in the United States today to do anything significant about anything without being forced to?
Dreamer
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I was saying that a strike or protest would be toothless without major political buy-in. I do not expect this from either party, hence a pessimistic chink in my otherwise optimistic general demeanor. On the other hand, educators, if united against testing, might represent enough of the electorate to move the dial a bit.
The problem is that teachers are by no means united against testing. For some, testing represents a place of comfort. Their children do pretty well, which validates their sense of professional worth. They would never rock the boat that keeps them in water.
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Such people are not bright enough to be teaching.
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My experience with teachers in regard to testing is that they have little guidance in the approach needed to improve scores because the algorithms are kep[t from them. I am not advocating transparency to keep tests. I think we should get rid of all of them and put the privateers out of business. What I am saying is that teachers feel as if one hand is tied behind their backs because they are not given meaningful information in a timely manner. All of these tests are autopsy data and then they get the next years students. We would work hard to to get our teachers individual data, but time constraints and training for analysis has always been untenable. It’s all a game meant for political advantage not student growth. End it all and lets then improve preparation and support.
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I am not sure this is how I would put it. Prr err haps an anecdote will illustrate how I think about it. One day, a fellow math teacher and I were recalling the early years of our teaching. We taught at different schools during the 90s, and he came to my school the year NCLB was enacted. Both of us recalled stumbling into math problems that diverted the class attention for a significant time. We both recalled a more engaged student from that time, one that would challenge an answer and present an argument.
With the advent of testing, that student became more rare, probably because the necessity of getting the class ready for testing had overcome genuine curiosity as the years went by. The newer teachers never had this rich experience. They do not know what it feels like.
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I wouldn’t go that far. I do think Democrats have always been to cautious in regard to putting their necks out for a cause. However, there are politicians like Jamaal Bowman who give me somme fleeting hope. The Democratic Party we see now still behaves as if there is a silent majority out there ready to react to progressive policies even though polling data shows them to be popular. Part of the problem is that public education is never perceived as critical in national politics. War and the economy drown much forward thinking.
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Even Bowman’s proposal is to tweak the testing, not to eliminate it. DeSantis ran, in part, on the extremely popular platform that he would get rid of the standardized testing in Florida. What did he actually do? He replaced one annual test with THREE TESTS given through the year.
More bs, not less.
So, Bowman’s bill:
Specifically, the More Teaching Less Testing Act will:
“Allow states more flexibility to administer summative assessments and design assessment systems that support high quality teaching and learning. The bill would eliminate the current federally mandated testing schedule for summative assessments in math, reading & language arts, and science, and instead establish a menu of options for states to choose from.”
welcome to the new tests, a tiny bit different from the old tests
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I am not in disagreement, but given the reality of two parties, I think the Democratic Party is the more persuadable. What makes this a steeper hill to climb is the absolute corruption brought about by Citizens United.
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yes
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P. Bonner wrote:
“My experience with teachers in regard to testing is that they have little guidance in the approach needed to improve scores because the algorithms are kep[t from them. . . I am not advocating transparency to keep tests.”
Why would a teacher need a “little guidance in the approach needed to improve scores” when those scores are bogus, invalid and otherwise horse manure?
Why?
It has nothing to do with keeping the algorithms from them.
Why would you push your staff to “improve scores”, which by the way has nothing to do with a true teaching and learning process??
Again, adminimal thinking and justification showing through, Paul.
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P. Bonner:
“I am not in disagreement, but given the reality of two parties,”
Whose reality?
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Ours as a nation seeking to be a more perfect union. You don’t think there are ups and downs? Or would you prefer anarchy. The value of democracy is that we get to fight back. As long as that exists I’ll face the challenge. I don’t pretend that Dems are doing any favors for public schools, but I don’t cynically quit either.
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If “but I don’t cynically quit either” is directed at me you have it wrong. I haven’t quit. Now being cynical. . . I’ll let Ambrose Bierce over a hundred years ago tell it like it is:
“CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.”
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What sheep people are. They forget that we had great schools and great curricula BEFORE we started wasting billions of dollars and losing billions of instructional hours each year to this invalid and instructionally useless testing.
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One of the great political dilemmas is that too many in the “political class” have no connection to public schooling. The Democratic establishment is full of private/independent school alum who never faced a testing regimen but somehow feel such a prescription is good for everyone else. I have no idea if any in the corporate class mean well, but I do know they have rarely if ever set foot in a public school classroom.
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Excellent point, Paul. This is a huge problem.
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OK. Here’s why the state tests in ELA do not do what they claim to do. Each note I write will deal with ONE of the many issues with these tests.
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Insert here a list of 25 reasons why the tests don’t work constituting a book-length treatise, any of which should be immediately obvious to a language arts professional who has thought about the tests at all carefully. That these tests and the “standards” whose attainment they supposedly measure were not laughed off the national stage decades ago is a shocking indictment of our profession. Any district or state administrator or teacher who thinks that these tests measure what they purport to measure should be nowhere near a school. He or she is a blithering idiot.
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Very true, but it is also true that a generation of test-oriented instruction has been a sort of natural selection process that forced out those who felt a distaste for the malpractice of testing. Teachers still in the classroom have found bearable the climate change wrought by these last two decades. I wonder if the drop in enrollment in teacher programs is not heavily representative of the best potential teachers, leaving only those who got through the process with some positive view of school.
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In my last school, there were some younger teachers who thought these tests actually worked. Utter airheads.
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Perhaps it is notable that the “utter airheads” were schooled in this testing atmosphere. To deny the worth of the test would subconsciously undermine their own self image.
This is the pernicious aspect of testing: once you use the test, it becomes the only reality, even though it is a false reality. The witch burners did not question the reality of their beliefs. The entire society believed there were evil women around them. We look back at this and wonder how they could have been so foolish, but we accept things almost as silly. Testing is one of these things.
When the emphasis on testing began, I raised the question of how we were to determine if the testing was wise if the only way to determine this was more testing. Everybody laughed. Teachers, administrators, and politicians I knew took my suggestions as preposterous. The witches were real.
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I have long referred to the takeover of our schools by the Gates-funded Education Deformers as an occupation.
And this is an old, old phenomenon–collaboration with the occupation by the weaker folks among the population. New teachers rapidly learn that if they pretend that doing test prep is really great for their students, then the administrators will get their slightly increased scores, and they will get kudos from admin. It’s sickening, this toadying, but common.
My 20-something department chairperson, who was LOVED by my admin, actually told me that she does test prep until April and then has about a month in which to teach English.
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How does someone just into her twenties become Department Chair? Because it takes zero experience and lots of malleability to conduct a department meeting in this way:
Read aloud any new mandates from admin.
Ask if there are any questions.
Refer those questions to admin.
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Compare this with a department meeting from back at the beginning of my career as an English teacher:
The highly experienced English teacher who was department head by virtue of her extensive experience called on teachers to share issues that they were having with particular students or with curriculum or whatever, and these were discussed. The group discussed and debated particular textbooks and/or ancillary materials such as novels to be read at each grade level. Teachers would vote on these. The chair would ask teachers to share any lessons or approaches that a) had worked particularly well or particularly badly for them and b) any that they had run across that they were excited about trying. The group would discuss and then vote on whether to adopt the new concept, try it on a trial basis, or await a report on it from the teacher trying it.
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Re that other, mandate-reading department head: At least she was frank/honest about what she was doing.
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I’m going to extrapolate wildly from my anecdotal local district experience. Tell me if I’m wrong.
There’s a dirty little secret hidden in this picture. Annual state-stdzd testing barely musses a hair on the head of high-income districts. I’ve never heard anyone in my chi-chi community even comment on it. Why? Because the kids ace them, without a lick of test prep. Teachers here step around that little pile of dog-poo in the hall called NJ State Learning Standards [yes, another minimal tweak of CCSS] and continue best curriculum/ teaching practices, as ever. SBAC is a barely-noticed blip in the school calendar.
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exactly
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However, even those kids in the rich suburbs suffer. Here’s why: the entire ELA curriculum as instantiated in textbooks and online resources has been distorted to be practice on the tested Gates/Coleman bullet list. Compare a current-day hardbound literature anthology to one from the 1980s. It’s horrific. All substance and coherence, gone. Random bs.
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Okay, I’m sorry…one more thing. You must all see the documentary “The Disruptors,” which is about ADHD, but also provides damning reasons as to what schools are & teaching is like today & has been the tragic case for far too many decades. (It’s available on Prime & a # of other services.)
Is it really ADHD? Has ADHD been made worse?
Watch it & cry.
Then help do something about it (as I suggested way up there in the comments).
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Year after year after year goes by, and our politicians and pundits and education “leaders” and journalists continue to fail to learn enough about the mandated testing to understand that it’s billions wasted on a scam–that the ELA tests, in particular, do not measure what they purport to measure. And year after year after year I post my explanation of why these tests don’t work, and no one–NO ONE–bothers to read it to consider its arguments. What is this? Laziness? Does it hurt people’s brains to think about this stuff?
It particularly bothers me that the journalists fail to do so. That’s their job–to dig a little deeper and expose the bullshit.
We are spending billions each year on a scam, and we are stealing breathtaking amounts of instructional time from our kids, and we are using curricula and pedagogy that have been distorted to such a degree that they have lost their significance and coherence because of this testing.
It’s shameful. It is freaking an enormous indictment of our entire PreK-12 educational system that not enough people have figured this out after all these years. That’s a lot of really stupid people, folks. Millions of educators haven’t the brains to have figured this out, and 74 million Americans thought it would be just great to have Trump be our president for another four years.
I live among the brain dead.
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Not once–NOT ONCE–in all the years that I have spent explaining to people why our state ELA tests don’t do what they purport to do has anyone–ANYONE–actually engaged any one–ANY ONE–of the clear, careful arguments I make explaining why these test don’t work. I believe that those arguments are obvious, once understood, and irrefutable, but NO ONE BOTHERS to attend to them. Why? I’m beginning to think that following the argument requires thinking that people just are not willing to do.
Furthermore, I present not one or two but SEVERAL arguments, each one enough to be a definitive condemnation of the tests.
But it’s talking into a hole in the ground. Or in a padded cell. In this article, I do not talk about theoretical matters about which one might argue or about cockamamie fringe crackpot claptrap like the “you can’t measure intellectual accomplishment” nonsense from Wilson. I present a number of clear, obvious (when recognized), practical reasons why these are not valid tests of attainment or ability in ELA. Read this. Take note of the SEVERAL arguments. It’s carefully reasoned and irrefutable. I think you will agree.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/?s=STDs
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And if you agree, share it with your administrators, your school board, your district education officials, your school administrators, your politicians. Please.
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The crux of the problem is that few if any of those listed have ever taken the time to read the standards or better yet – the time to read the tests. I administered every grade 8 ELA test since the inception of NCLB through the last pre-pandemic school year – and I read every one of them, along with the standards. I can state emphatically that the Common Core English language arts tests do not remotely come close to assessing the basic reading comprehension of students. Subjective standards cannot be assessed with objective test items, End of story. The tests suck because the standards suck.
However, I do not think we should be calling for the abolishment of any and all standardized tests. Objective, simple, age-appropriate standards that focus on content knowledge and basic skills can produce assessments that are fair and reasonable. We should combine the demand for standards in all core subjects with a push for grade span testing and the elimination of punitive consequences. Think, Iowa Test of Basic Skills as a model.
Preach it Bob. Those CC ELA tests which no-nothing reporters, BOEs, and administrators take as gospel are
every bit the disgrace that you have described.
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I, as well, know these intimately. I agree that decent assessments and standards are possible. But they wouldn’t look anything like these.
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Focusing on reading and math are a low bar in regard to intellectual, emotional, and social development. These test results are misreported as evidence of academic proficiency. The standards articulated through the two states where I worked were garbled and often, as cited in this thread, unknown. I have worked in schools that were effective and schools that struggled. The effective schools were never focused on test results, but student development. We talk about public schools in “wealthier” districts, but I think the better academic model I have seen is in the independent and private schools that focus on critical thinking and inquiry. Many of the independent schools, there is no such thing as 100%, I have encountered develop students who are prepared for success in college and beyond because there is a depth to the student experience. Public schools could be competitive in this regard if we invested in teacher directed schools. As an elementary school principal, it was painful to see so much mandated time on process and so little on exploration. As Bob puts it so well, standardized testing needs to go.
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OOPS
SUBJECTIVE standards cannot be assessed with objective test items,
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well said
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And what they would look like is a LONG conversation.
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“Are every bit the disgrace you have described”
THIS
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Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative?” They expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
In place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, states could promulgate a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles in each field of study), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson and exercise templates, model diagnostic and formative assessments, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki, and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
—Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
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“In place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, states could promulgate a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles in each field of study), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur.”
Interesting alternative to testing, but it doesn’t answer the question, How do we know that students are learning?
There is too much distrust in classroom grading, and the inflation that goes with it.
There have always been two de-facto forms of curricula:
1) The table of contents in textbooks.
2) The “tested” standards (NYS Regents exams are a perfect example of this)
In your open-sourced frameworks, where do teachers get the curriculum guidelines? Back to the textbook contents?
“a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles in each field of study”
Not sure how this would provide enough grade level specificity. Could you provide examples in ELA?
I’ll take a stab with biology:
1) Cell theory
2) Laws of Genetics/Reproduction and Variation
3) Biological Classification/Biodiversity
4) Evolution by Natural Selection
5) Ecology/Ecosystems and Energy Flow
6) Life Processes: Photosynthesis. Respiration.
7) Anatomy and Physiology
Again, middle school and high school biology programs would need more curricular guidelines. So back to standards . . . ?
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They do what people did in the past. They freely choose among available alternatives those that make sense to them, and thus there is competition among competing curricula rather than curricula imposed top-down by the thought police.
You represent a problem for any return to normalcy. We have been doing the top-down, mandated curricula and standards thing for so long now that people do not even remember how well things worked before this.
Back before people started believing that they needed a Thought Police to tell them what to teach, here’s what happened:
Everywhere you looked, across America, people were teaching Romeo and Juliet in Grade 9 and Julius Ceasar and To Kill a Mockingbird in Grade 10 and Macbeth in Grade 11. Everywhere you looked, they were using a hardbound literature anthology program, and 90 percent of the selections in those programs were the same. Everywhere you looked, English teachers were doing a Sentence Diagramming unit. And so on. Why? Well, they were falling back upon the habits of the tribe, established in the crucible of experience and discovered by folks marketing to them what they freely chose. There was remarkable uniformity, but it was not mandated by some Thought Police. Furthermore, there was, as in the Common Law, a built-in mechanisms for innovation. Let me give you an example. Many years ago, when I was a baby editor just out of college, I took a job with an educational publishing house. That house had published a grammar and composition program that hadn’t done well in the market. Well, at the time, I was studying, on my own, symbolic logic and was really enamored with it. I had also been reading about a new approach to writing instruction called The Writing Process. So, having been given the task of revising the tables of contents of that program, I put the writing chapters up front and the grammar chapters in the back, I followed a Writing Process Model in the writing chapters, and I introduced for the first time in America, I believe, in a major basal textbook series a Critical Thinking strand. Well, guess what? That program captured enormous market share. Everyone bought it. It made the company I worked for a powerhouse, and, the following year, every basal grammar and comp had a Writing Process organization, and every conference had sessions on Critical Thinking and every textbook program had a Critical Thinking strand.
So, without the Thought Police telling people, top down, what they had to do, which results in idiots like Coleman producing garbage like the almost knowledge-free skills list that was the Common [sic] Core [sic], we ended up with breathtaking consensus nationwide due to
a) the habits of the tribe learned in the crucible of actual classroom experience
and
b) innovations tested by their marketability
To this, I propose adding a national wiki that contains detailed alternative tables of contents, curriculum progressions, sample lessons, sample assessment, and so on, created by specialists in particular fields (imagine someone who actually knows something about the science of child language acquisition writing materials on language learning, for example), classroom practitioners, would-be edupundits and edupreneurs, and so on.
And then a free people, in free local schools, could choose among these.
The monopolists Bill Gates said that we needed the freaking puerile Common [sic] Core] to spur innovation. But with top-down mandates, that is precisely THE OPPOSITE of what one gets. One gets Clippy the Paperclip and every damned computer until Bill in his ultimate wisdom makes different decisions for all of us.
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I think you identify one of the greatest chasms between the general public and those who work in schools. I have become convinced that too many outside of the school simply do not understand the dynamic of what makes a school click. I remember being thoroughly impressed with the English department at Sewanee when in undergrad and later understood that their common approach to literature was the result of ongoing dialogue about the subject matter among the professors. When Nicholas Kristof made his ludicrous op-ed on Mississippi reading scores, it was painfully obvious that he mistook touring a school guided by biased actors as some form of justification for his ability to understand what was or wasn’t working. Such judgmental reporting then becomes the reason schools and/or their districts try to keep the public at bay. The community aspect of individual schooling then gets lost and trust becomes the first casualty. Schooling has suffered from executive decisions based on perception over experience. I just don’t know how we get our polity to loosen its grip.
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So, imagine this. The English Department in a high school sits down together and decides to adopt x textbook and y and z supplementals, using a and b curriculum guidelines on the national wiki because these have proved enormously successful. And they decide to start doing an oral language syntax component in Grades PreK-3 for remediation of lack of automatic learning of standard syntactic forms from ambient environments among kids from poor homes–a hitherto unaddressed issue that is affecting their learning to read well.
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And they are free to do that because they don’t have some Thought Police Major General at the state level telling them what they must do.
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So, this is my fear. We have gone so far down the road of listening to the Thought Police–down the road of top-down “standards” and assessments imposed upon our schools, that people will not even remember how a free market of ideas works.
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How would we know that students were learning? Well, how did we know in the many, many decades before we had mandatory national testing?
We knew from grades given by teachers, from transcripts, from their success or failure in college. We treated teachers like professionals and took what they do seriously, at face value.
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Do we need something like mandated national testing to tell us what kids are learning? Well, no, we don’t.
How do I know this? Well, the state ELA tests now being given do not, for the reasons that I spell out in the article linked to several times above, actually validly tell us what kids are learning in ELA. So, we are operating RIGHT NOW without a mechanism beyond teacher-given grades that tells us what they are learning. THE TESTS DON’T VALIDLY DO THAT.
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Bill Gates’s idea of “harnessing market forces” is the monopolist’s one: give everyone a single bullet list that acts as a de facto curriculum outline so that products can be sole to them “at scale”–virtual schooling, Orwellian databases of kids’ scores, etc. My idea of harnessing the market: LET COMPETING IDEAS COMPETE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL. Competing textbooks. Competing curriculum outlines. Competing standards. The market PLUS crowd-sourcing via that national wiki of ideas in education.
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So, in the absence of top-down management by some Thought Police, people at the local level fall back on habits of the tribe tested in the crucible of actual classroom experience and, occasionally, the adopt some small change in their habits based on new ideas to which they are introduced. Back before the state testing and the mandated state standards, English teachers met with other English teachers in their departments and made these decisions. They were considered the experts, the professionals. They took this responsibility extremely seriously. And back then, they all subscribed to The English Journal, which was constantly delivering to them new ideas from experts–from subject matter experts like literature professors and linguists to classroom practitioners. So, they could say, “Hmmm. I was just reading this article about using Shelley’s Frankenstein for a debate unit on new technologies. AI. Genetic engineering. Climate control tech. Life expansion. What do you think?”
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I couldn’t agree more as that is the exact way that I developed my MS physical science program. I think the current distrust in teachers from politicians, the media, and unfortunately parents might be an immovable obstacle. The thought of eliminating all standardized testing in favor professional judgement should not be an issue – but it would definitely be a something close to a deal breaker for those still held captive by the cult of standardized test scores.
I worked for five years as consultant test writer and received the kind of training that all teachers should get but don’t. In order to soothe the standardized testing cheerleaders, I think it would be imperative to require this of all teachers. Frankly, too many teachers just wing it, or download their tests, with virtually zero training in test writing.
On a positive note, regarding top-down standards, NYS did a fine job of creating clear, objective, relevant, comprehensive, fair, age appropriate – and yes, teachable middle level science standards which culminated in a very clear, objective, relevant, comprehensive, fair, and age-appropriate test that combined 4 years of instruction.
Unfortunately, NYS is throwing this away in favor of the Next Generation Science Standards which are modeled after the Common Core math and ELA. A near complete rejection of structured content knowledge while embracing a hodgepodge of mumbo-jumbo . . . urging novice stuents to think like a (professional, highly trained) scientist – minus the background knowledge. Combine this with the push of abstract science topics down into the elementary grades and you can smell the impending disaster a mile away. Ha! When you get a chance give them a read.
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Here are some typical Next Generation Science Standards.
As you read, try to guess the grade level.
Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object.
Make observations and/or measurements of an object’s motion to provide evidence that a pattern can be used to predict future motion.
Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other.
Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived long ago.
Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence that plants and animals have traits inherited from parents and that variation of these traits exists in a group of similar organisms.
Plan and conduct an investigation to determine the connections between weather and water processes in Earth systems.
Use evidence to construct an explanation for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.
Grade 3
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I am familiar with these. They are ridiculous.
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RAtE asked “How do we know that students are learning?”
One can’t ever know exactly what another learns, knows, feels, etc. . . until that other person tells us what they believe that learning entails. At best we on the outside can get an inkling of what he/she learns and at worst our prognostication will be completely off-base, falsely labelling the other as something less, or even more, than what they perceive themselves to have learned.
The standards and testing malpractice regime has been proven to be harmful to all students, why would we attempt to continue that educational insanity?
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why, indeed
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“or about cockamamie fringe crackpot claptrap like the “you can’t measure intellectual accomplishment” nonsense from Wilson.”
How would you know what Wilson has to say since you have admitted that you haven’t read and comprehended his work?
Be that as it may, please tell us how one can validly measure “intellectual accomplishment.”
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I really do’t want to get into this again. I read about half of Wilson’s major work. It was obvious that it was by a crackpot. And I have explained to you again and again examples of measuring intellectual accomplishments. Explaining how that’s done, well, that’s a whole course.
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No you haven’t explained “again and again examples of measuring intellectual accomplishments.” And you’ve never rebutted Wilson’s work other than to demean through labelling it as “crackpot” or cockamamie, etc. . . . You obviously, at least to me don’t understand what he is saying, which by the way is more onto-epistemological fundamental than what you have written. Underlying what you have said, which I concur, is Wilson. Yours is derivative, his is original.
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I am not going to get into a long round of this. But everyone knows that it is a simple matter to prepare a test that will tell you, for example, whether a child knows her times table from 0 x 0 to 12 x 12 or whether an adult knows his Level 1 Kanji. These achievements can be determined with almost absolute certainty.
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No, they cannot be “determined with almost absolute certainty.”
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Wilson’s ravings do not become any more reasonable by referring to them as “onto-epistemological.” LOL.
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I realize that you don’t/can’t understand that term.
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I suppose that you intend by that to say that they are fundamental. They have to do with what is (ontology) and what can be known (epistemology). Fair enough. But he’s so confused he is not even wrong, as Wolfgang Pauli famously said of the author of some paper.
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An existence proof, Duane, is a rebuttal.
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Show Me that “existence proof”.
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LOL. Any fool can put together a test that will accurately measure whether a kid has memorized the times table. Are you saying that this cannot be done? The existence of such tests is an existence proof that some intellectual accomplishments are measureable.
But, Duane, I do not even want to get into this. What Mr. Wilson knows about educational measurement and $7.00 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I haven’t the time or energy to give you and him an introductory course in educational measurement. There are plenty of schools around, Duane. Sign up for one of those.
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Oh, almighty god Bob spare us your sick self-serving schtick.
You’re attempting to be THE savior against these malpractices, yet out of the other side you say that they are valid. Nope, things don’t work that way. You’re not the hero here, you just don’t like competition that has beaten you to the finish line.
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LOL.
I never said that the state standardized tests were valid. In fact, I wrote an article detailing some 15 ways in which they fail validity tests.
What I did say is that the idea that no intellectual attainments can be measured i simply looney tunes. I certainly don’t regret Mr. Wilson’s having beat me to the looneyland he inhabits. LOL.
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What Wilson thinks of as his profound discovery is, again, actually Day 1 of Educational Measurement class–the day on which the prof poses the measurement problem. That Wilson thinks this an Earth-shattering revelation that completely rewrites all educational theory is more than a little bit amusing.
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The GENERAL answer to the measurement problem is this: some things are measurable, some are not, and a whole lot of things are at various degrees on a continuum between the two poles. Again, take an introductory class in educational measurement, or better yet, a graduate-level one where you will get some real statistics. Then let’s talk.
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It’s not as if there isn’t room to wax philosophical about educational measurement, for it IS both an ontologically and epistemologically fraught undertaking (or, rather, variety of undertakings). And there is also a political component, for educational measurement almost always involves the exercise of unequal power, and many good questions arise because of that.
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Recommended:
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I think you meant shtick.
One could, for example, do a quite valid test of knowledge of the 30 most common Yiddish phrases in English. The domain is so small (30 items) that there could be a one-to-one mapping to the measurement, and so the intellectual attainment–knowledge of those terms–could be measured with almost complete certainty.
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Could there be issues with the measurement? Well, as is the case with NAEP tests, the test taker might think, the outcome of this doesn’t affect me in any way, so I’m not going to try. Or whatever. But in generally, the measurement would be valid and accurate, contra Mr. Wilson and his lalaland notions.
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This is the Bible of the field, but it’s a lot more challenging:
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Paraphrasing Foghorn Leghorn: “Damn boy. . .give it a rest”!!!
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Ha! Point well made.
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Denying that any educational measurement is possible is like denying that radiology is possible. What? You mean you only read half of the book Why There Is No Radiology by Cornealius Dingbat? You admit that you only read half of it? Who do you think you are? The God of medical science?
No, I’m a person who can see that we have this thing called radiology that we use all the time, that it is a full-blown science with rules for its proper use. LOL
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Read and comprehend Wilson and get back with me in the morning!
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People continue to go to doctors who order supposed “tests” called X-rays. (The silliness of the name should be a giveaway. Where are the A-rays? The M-rays?) Clearly, these people have not read Cornilius G. Dingbat’s groundbreaking dissertation Radiology Exposed, which explains the onto-epistemological absurdities of the concept of Radiology, for clearly the INSIDE CANNOT BE OUTSIDE, any more than hot can be cold or day can be night or anything I say on this subject can make any sense whatsoever. It’s a contradiction in terms! So, when people write about getting their “X-rays” revealing tumors or other “hidden features” of their physiology, all I can say is, Poppycock! Read Dingbat! Everyone knows that a “test” requires bubble sheets and Number 2 pencils, and where, exactly, are the bubblesheets and Number 2 pencils in an “X-ray”? THERE ARE NONE! So, no test! No insides outside. The whole thing is a fraud, I say! Quod erat demonstrandum. Thank Jesus for Dingbat, who awakened me from my dogmatic slumber!
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Read and comprehend Wilson and get back with us.
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Sorry, Duane, I guess that Wilson is just too far beyond my poor cognitive powers, what with his onto-epistemological rationcinative and hermetic complexitudinousness, scientifically speaking. All else is poppycock! Pure logical insanity!
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He must be. . . no doubt! 🙂
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In general, it’s quite easy to determine via testing the possession, after x, by p, of some body of knowledge. Does little Chandra know her state capitals? Can little Hector identify by name the parts of the digestive system on a chart?
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They either can, or they can’t.
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A problem occurs when some x that people want to test cannot logically be made concrete enough to be tested–when one cannot come up with some test or series of tests that serves as a reasonable–that is a valid and reliable–objective correlative of the attainment. Wilson is far, far, far from the first to have stumbled on this fact, but like a lot of amateurs who stumble on some piece of a body of knowledge (in this case, of assessment–of the stuff covered in educational measurement classes), he has misunderstood this and over applied it. This is quite typical. This happens over and over again with crackpots. They think they have discovered the philosopher’s stone or Joseph Smith’s magic spectacles, his Urim and Thummim. And they draw conclusions from their Eureka moment that are utterly absurd, like the idea that no intellectual attainment can be measured. And please don’t bother to insert here 85 paragraphs explaining that a measurement of little Ralphie’s knowledge of the state capitols is not like measuring little Ralphie’s height. This is obvious but irrelevant. This is how language works, as Mr. Wilson could learn if he would read Emerson’s little essay “On Language” from the second series. From staying on a straight, or right, path, we get the use of “right” to refer to morality. From breathing in, we get the use of “inspiration” to refer to a suddenly acquired idea that is like having had a visitation from a spirit. The term to measure has had this perfectly acceptable extended use for a long, long time. And it has been made quite scientific. But again, it’s a waste of time arguing this with you. You are a true believer, and Wilson is your prophet. LOL.
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“But again, it’s a waste of time arguing this with you. You are a true believer, and Wilson is your prophet. LOL.”
“I am not going to get into a long round of this.”
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The reason why I get so upset about this is that I have been trying to educate people about the ACTUAL reasons why the federally mandated state ELA tests don’t work, why they do not measure what they purport to measure, and when people read this poppycock from Wilson, they recognize it as fringe kookiness and dismiss it. Oh, those folks on Diane’s blog are a bunch of crackpots. They think that no intellectual attainments can be measured, that testing is impossible. What a bunch of crazies.
Not good.
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Are you effin kidding? Glad to see that you consider yourself “Mr. Reasonable”.
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Duane, reading Wilson is like reading The Unabomber Manifesto or Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly or Marconics: The Clarion Call by Alison Bird or . It makes no sense. At a certain point, one says, OK, this is a waste of my time.
https://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/potp/index.htm
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This often happens with crackpots. They start with almost zero knowledge of some field. Then they make a DISCOVERY. Then they draw insane conclusions from it because they don’t understand the field that they suddenly think themselves experts in.
An example:
A guy experiments with rolling balls down chutes. He discovers that if he uses a lubricant on the balls and the chutes, the balls travel further and faster. He decides that if he just had a perfect lubricant, the balls would go infinitely fast and infinitely far. He then concludes and writes a long book about how his principle can be used to create perpetual motion machines. Someone reads his book and goes on an amateur physics forum and posts, every time the subject of mechanics comes up, his PROOF of the existence of perpetual motion machines. A reasonable observation + a lot of lack of knowledge and understanding of the field = wacko conclusions.
That’s how crackpots work. Wilson is a CLASSIC example of this.
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“They start with almost zero knowledge of some field. . . Wilson is a CLASSIC example of this.”
You claim to have read half of Wilson’s dissertation. If so you would know that he starts with a scientific background and is more knowledgeable about standards and testing than almost everybody.
You’re labelling him a “crackpot” is pure bullshit cojonesless garbage. Takes a scumdog to malign another person when that person is not around. Sad, Bob, very sad indeed.
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So, Wilson’s Eureka moment (LOL) is actually like, Day 1 of a standard class in Educational Measurement. OK, there is this domain that you want to measure. Perhaps that domain is not entirely objective. Perhaps it is something vague or general like, would this person make a good U.S. Ambassador to France, and the domain is all the characteristics that would make for a good U.S. Ambassador to France, which is so broad that one could not actually complete compiling it. And maybe there are very different ways of being a good Ambassador to France. And maybe one could be a terrible ambassador generally but be JUST THE PERSON IN A PARTICULAR CRISIS who knows how to do the right thing and avert a catastrophe. And equally obviously, you cannot ask ALL the relevant questions about all the characteristics that the ideal ambassador would have in every situation. You have to render “great ambassador to France” as a set of objectively measurable characteristics. Does he or she have this one? and this one? and this one?
That’s the educational measurement problem, and we are going to explore it in detail. It’s a messy one, but we know a lot about it and how to make measurements that are actually meaningful and useful.
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So, why bother with this measurement at all? Well, there are practical reasons. You have to choose an Ambassador to France. You want to make sure that this person is sufficiently knowledgeable and otherwise competent.
Knowledge of international law. Check.
Knowledge of diplomatic procedures. Check.
Knowledge of current geo-politics. Check.
Knowledge of French. Check.
Knowledge of French culture. Check.
Social skills. Check.
Or, of course, you could take the Donald Trump approach to this and invite the person into the Oval Office and see if he or she “looks the part as if right out of central casting.” HAAAAA!
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So, the question to ask of the measurement is always, is it a dependable surrogate? stand-in? And how dependable?
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“I am not going to get into a long round of this”
So much for that statement, eh!
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