Mercedes Schneider is heartened by the signs of disillusionment with standardized testing, which has been federally mandated since 2002 and which has enjoyed bipartisan support. Nothing seems to shake the bipartisan obsession with standardized testing.
She writes:
I am encouraged by the recent kerfluffle over the almighty standardized overtesting that is occurring across America as such is featured in this December 03, 2023, Politico piece,“‘A Bizarre Coalition’: Red and Blue States Weigh Big Changes to Testing Requirements.”
The piece focuses on goings-on surrounding “strict standardized testing and graduation requirements” in Florida, New York, and Louisiana.
If one offers even a cursory consideration of the legislative novelties foisted upon America’s K12 classrooms in recent decades, the red-and-blue “bizarre coalition” noted in the Politico title is not all that bizarre. Indeed, “coalition” of red and blue has introduced a lot of chaos into American education, including the pinnacle test-and-punish legislation, No Child Left Behind (the reauthorization of which was abandoned by Congress in 2007 because by then NCLB was seen as a political liability).
Red and blue also stood behind Common Core. Republican lawmakers were for it until they were against it, but former Florida governor and 2015 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush held onto Common Core but avoided calling it by its “poisonous” name on the 2015 campaign trail. “Rebrand” became the name of the game. Both national teachers unions accepted money from the Gates Foundation to promote it, then turned. Regarding Common Core backlash, Democratic secretary of ed Arne Duncan blamed “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
And charter schools: Still bipartisan despite rampant fraud and waste of underregulated taxpayer money (including embezzlement, wire fraud, corruption, graft, and scandal after scandal).
So, yeah, the “bizarre ” as it concerns modifying state standardized overtesting comes in the form of surprise at officials’ once sold on standardized testing even considering scaling back the testing.
The supposed reason for common standards and the NCLB-reworked, appendaged testing was to make students “ready for college and careers” and to make the US “globally competitive.”
Obama’s Race to the Top was little more than federal funding doled out for a Common Core fizzle.
Of course, at the official release of Common Core in June 2010, no one saw a pandemic coming ten years down the road, and it takes no test scores to know that the US has exceeded expectations for 2023 as concerns the state of our post-pandemic economy. And here is another important point: Nations worldwide must balance international competition with international cooperation.
It must be both.
I have yet to read any expert research crediting standardized testing in schools as contributing to post-pandemic economic recovery, for better or worse, for that matter.
I suspect that some of the Republican softening on standardized testing might reflect the rift in the party as moving away from the education agenda preferences of the likes of George and Jeb Bush. What’s fashionable now is the far-right purge of library books.
The library book purge central force is facing its own bad press as the Florida Republican power couple, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, are apparently living lives that are making the morality policing of Moms for Liberty, group that the Zieglers fiscally and politically enabled, difficult to carry off.
You know you’re in a bad spot when the phone video of you (top-ranking conservative fire-breather) having sex with a woman who is not your wife (but whom your wife also had sex with in a previous three-way) is the best way you have to counter the rape charge brought by that woman. And you stiff-neckedly refuse to resign from your conservative perch. And so does your wife.
Now that’s bizarre.
Please open the link to finish the post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Educators should be asking the question how has standardized testing helped and benefited students. Standardized tests confirm what most teachers already know. Good students will do well, and poor students will generally score low. Test and punish policy has been an anathema for the poor and vulnerable. Students do not benefit when their schools close, their teachers are fired or when young people are needlessly retained.
Standardized testing wastes a lot of money that would be better spent on reducing class size, buying library books and supporting vulnerable students. Where are the benefits to this noxious testing policy? The main benefit is the profit that testing generates for the testing industrial complex that can afford to hire lobbyists to keep funds flowing in their direction. Testing is simply another pork barrel.
You said it, rt:
“Testing is simply another pork barrel.”
No surprise that Democratic politicians like campaign contributions from charter school lobbyists
Is it the unknown, about testing, that causes trouble?
Will more testing know-that, stop the state actors,
from giving them?
Is preaching testing dissent, while practicing
testing obedience (giving tests), a role model
to be followed?
“Is preaching testing dissent, while practicing
testing obedience (giving tests), a role model
to be followed?”
NO!
Those of us who fought against the standards and testing malpractice regime and who did refuse to give the tests paid a heavy price, professionally, personally, and financially.
Those role models of whom you speak are the GAGA Good German type who willingly have implemented/implement policies and practices that harm all students. I have little respect for them (which is about 99% of all teachers and administrators) in that regard.
Fighting these tests cost me dearly. I lost jobs worth enormous amounts of money due to my public opposition to these.
Financial greed explains bizarre bi-partisanship, case in point, Bill Ackman, a DINO hedge funder (school choice) who is anti-DEI and, a zealot for unfettered capitalism.
He bullied Harvard to get his way about its leadership- the ouster of a Black woman.
Democrats who aren’t DINO’s understood what Kyle Rittenhouse really was. The internet shows Ackman’s twitter feed. He called Rittenhouse, a “patriot.” (11-11-2021). My opinion – Ackman is petrified that his head will be one of the first to roll when the downtrodden rise up with their guillotine.
Like DeVos, Ackman’s high visibility ugliness informs citizens about the enemies of American democracy and how they manipulate.
Essence reported 12-12-2023 that Ackman is a major investor in Chipotle, Popeye’s and Burger King.
Yum!!
Women who vote GOP should be transported to when women couldn’t vote or, about 50 years ago, to when women had to wear skirts on the college campuses where they faced discrimination in career choice or, to 2024 when a woman’s life counts less than the possibility that a fetus (dead or alive) exists in her womb.
“Ackman is petrified that his head will be one of the first to roll. . . .” I first read that as “Ackman’s head is petrified. . . . ” No doubt!
agree, both head and soul are rock
It’s all about $$$,$$$,$$$. There’s no better way to keep the grift going than to come up with a testing model that creates “gaps” in perpetuity. They literally will never close, but Pearson has sold this testing model to parents, along with a healthy injection of fear. I had to point out to some parents recently the absurdity of this model by using a group of Nobel prize winners as test subjects. With this same model, up to 50% of them would fail the test, any test, based on a normalized bell curve. How moronic is that? People have become so blinded by glorious data that is designed to punish and weaken the public school model only. Where are the private schools in all this? Oh, that’s right, they don’t have to take the tests. But they are more than happy to take a voucher.
“Where are the private schools in all this? Oh, that’s right, they don’t have to take the tests. But they are more than happy to take a voucher.”
Depends where one lives. In MD, if a private school takes voucher $$$, they are subjected to ALL the test mania plus Common Core…..these are what we call Parochial schools (mostly Catholic but other religions as well). The “real” private schools (mostly religious, but more generic/lax in their religious dogma) around here don’t take voucher $$$, they don’t participate in the CC and they are filled and have high levels of graduation completion.
The fact that Christopher Rufo and the legal scholar credited as most influential in advancing religious charter schools are both Fellows in Koch’s Manhattan Institute (Republican) shouldn’t be ignored. Nor should we forget that Bill Ackman, a hedge funder and school choice promoter is on the same page with Rufo against DEI and in favor of capitalism without constraint.
The Catholic Church which overtly discriminates against women joins the Ackerman view in favor of school choice. Thirty percent of Catholic schools are single sex. The right wing Catholic majority on SCOTUS will decide if states value pregnant women’s lives less than a possibility of breath for a fetus.
The handwriting remains on the wall to be noticed while the discrimination plays out in state and federal law.
Standardized testing harms vulnerable students of low socioeconomic status, especially English learners, and especially special education students. True educators support those students instead of holding them down. Proponents of the tests are not educators. Teachers students for facing challenges. Teachers do not give online drill and kill worksheets to students. Teachers teach.
Standardized testing also harms the most successful students. It causes their educations to be narrowed and distorted. Honors classes should be learning subject matter content, not showing they already know how to identify the main idea of decontextualized and therefore meaningless writing on a website that is collecting troves of what should be private, personal data.
And where are the gains? What are the benefits? Making Jeb! Bush feel superior? What? Testing causes nothing but harm.
“Standardized testing harms vulnerable students of low socioeconomic status, especially English learners, and especially special education students.”
Ummm. . . . The standards and testing malpractice regime HARMS ALL STUDENTS.
Correcto, señor. The tests are unsafe and ineffective for every single student forced to endure them. If the tests were food additives instead of curriculum additives, they would not be FDA approved. Junk science is behind them. They distort and degrade teaching and learning.
I’m with you and Wilson, Wilson the anti-testing expert, not the volleyball. Actually, I’m with the volleyball Wilson too, come to think of it. I’d rather spend my life on an island talking to a G-D volleyball than do test prep. At least the volleyball would accurately reflect what I was thinking. Standardized tests do not. The stupid autocorrect feature on my phone is more intelligent.
My comment agreeing with you and then some went into moderation. My fault, I called my phone stupid.
Extraordinarily well said, LCT. I wish every politician in America could read this.
Thank you. Allow me to take this opportunity to edit a sentence that should have read: Teachers help students facing challenges.
Teachers are elevators that only go up, not gatekeepers. Not border patrol agents. Not loan officers. Teachers.
so so well said
Linda is correct; that was sort of a knee-jerk reaction on my part. Some states require testing as part of the voucher program. I can’t get over this piece from the Cato institute; advocates no testing for privates in voucher programs for all the usual reasons, but it’s fine for public schools. Unbelievable. https://www.cato.org/commentary/state-tests-deter-private-schools-participating-voucher-programs
IMO, the author of the Cato article is a loathsome human being just like Charles Koch. (Cato is in the Koch stable.)
But I don’t know “that these tests measure family income”. As a matter of fact I know that those TESTS DON’T MEASURE ANYTHING of the sort. The test scores correlate rather closely with parental income (more specifically the educational level of the mother which is closely tied with SES status). CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL MEASURE by any stretch of the meaning of those terms.
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition-notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”]
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is not exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
“since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning”
From a false premise, one draws false conclusions. There is no UNIVERSAL standard unit of learning, but we use de facto units of learning ALL THE TIME. So, for example, consider testing of whether a student has learned his or her times table from 0 x 0 to 10 x 10. Each product pair (0 x 0, . . . 6 x 7, . . . 10 x 10) and its associated product is in this circumstance a unit of learning.
There is no disagreement about what unit of learning is being measured in this case.
Now, when it comes to the state standardized tests in English, there is indeed a problem there. The so-called “standards” are very broad and very vague, mostly. They will say something like, “The student makes correct inferences from texts” or “The student recognizes the multiple meanings of words.” And the test will typically have one mulitple-choice question per purported “standard,” and it is impossible to list all the units of learning the standard covers because it is broad, and it is certainly impossible therefore to write ONE question that validly measures this learning. So, the state ELA tests are invalid. They do not measure what they purport to measure, and that so many educators (district, state, and federal administrators, for example) don’t get this is truly shocking. The fact that they (and people like Gates and Coleman) don’t get this shows dramatically just how incompetent they are.
Duane,
Standardized tests are HIGHLY correlated with family income. Every test—whether state, national or international—that reports on both family income and scores shows that the richest are always at the top and the poorest are always at the bottom. For every additional bump in family income, the scores are higher. Of course, there are individual exceptions—brilliant poor kids and dumb rich kids—but the overall correlation is nonetheless very close.
You’re both right, Diane and Duane. What the test scores do not correlate with is teaching.
Yes the test scores are correlated (I wouldn’t say highly, but that’s okay) with family wealth and income, but even more specifically the are correlated with the mother’s level of education.
Be that as it may, the tests “measure” nothing. They aren’t measuring devices. A correlation is not a measurement.
What is confusing, I believe on purpose, is that to take measure of something and measuring something is not the same thing. Two different concepts.
I once had a conversation with Chinese educators who were puzzled by the standards movement in the US. While they tried to decouple from a test centric education policy to become more competitive with the US economically our education policy was mimicking theirs. Too many among the political elite are making assumptions about the so called failures in U.S. public education based on a profound ignorance about the public schools. Many Republicans and Democrats attended private schools or public schools segregated by wealth. They are clueless in regard to the intricate communities immeshed in pluralistic schools. They simply focus on failure based on inaccurate and misused testing data. When we add the lure of profitable privatization then the corporate centric Republican and Democratic parties become helpless tools for the ongoing grift.