Bob Shepherd is a brilliant polymath who has worked in almost every aspect of education, as editor, author, test development and classroom teacher. I invited him to review recent changes in Florida’s testing program.
He writes:
Among the many claims that Ron DeSantis made when running for Governor of Florida was that he would do away with the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] and their associated high-stakes testing.
Both were, for good reason, in deep disrepute. In fact, the puerile, vague, almost entirely content-free Common Core standards, which Gates and Coleman and Duncan foisted on the United States with no vetting whatsoever, were so hated that at the annual ghouls’ convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, the oh-so-reverend Mike Huckabee told the assembled Repugnicans to go back home and change their name because “Common Core” had become a “tarnished brand.”
Not change the “standards,” mind you, but change their name. In other words, the good Reverend’s magisterial ministerial advice was TO LIE TO or, most charitably, TO CONFUSE people by implying falsely that the standards had been replaced with local ones like, say, the Florida Higher-than-the-Skyway-Bridge-When-We-Wrote-These Standards. And that’s just what most states did. They barely tweaked the godawful Common Core standards, or didn’t change them at all, renamed them, and then announced their “new” standards.
Hey, check out our new and improved Big Butt Burger!
This looks just like your old Ton o’ Tushy Burger.
It is. Same great burger you know and love!
So, what’s so new about it?
The name! It has a new and improved name!
Enter Ron DeSantis, stage right. Shortly after being elected, he promised to “eliminate all vestiges of the Common Core” and “to streamline the testing.” Then, when DeSantis signed an executive order replacing the Common Core State Standards (C.C.S.S.) with the new Florida B.E.S.T. standards and creating new F.A.S.T. tests to replace the Common-Core-based F.C.A.T., his Department of Education (the FDOE) posted this headline:
GOVERNOR DESANTIS ANNOUNCES END OF THE HIGH-STAKES FSA TESTING TO BECOME THE FIRST STATE IN THE NATION TO FULLY TRANSITION TO PROGRESS MONITORING
See Governor DeSantis Announces End of the High Stakes FSA Testing to Become th (fldoe.org)
Under the Governor’s new plan, instead of the Common-Core-based F.C.A.T., given in grades 3-8 and 10 in keeping with federal requirements, Florida would now give not one end-of-year test but THREE TESTS at each grade, in each subject area, Math and English, one at the beginning of the year, one at the middle of the year, and one at the end. And far from being the low-stakes progress monitoring that the FDOE headline and the Governor’s PR campaign suggested, these tests would be high stakes as well. Students would have to pass the ELA test in 2nd grade to move on to 3rd grade, and they would have to pass the 10th-grade ELA test, in addition to other state high-stakes assessments, to graduate from high school.
So, there would be MORE, not fewer, assessments. There would be no end to the attached high stakes. And there would be no end to PRETENDING (see below) that these tests measure proficiency or mastery of the state “standards.” And then, as the cherry on top of this dish of dissembling BS served warm, Florida hired AIR, a maker of Common Core standardized state tests given across the country, to write its new F.A.S.T. tests. Same old vinegar in wine bottles with fancy new labels.
Before I discuss the many problems with the old and new Florida testing regimes, let me just pause to congratulate the state of Florida and the people on its standards team, which, unlike the group that developed Common Core, included a lot of actual teachers and textbook developers. They did a great job with the B.E.S.T. standards. These are a VAST improvement on the idiotic Common Core. They return to grade-appropriate, developmentally appropriate math standards at the early grades. The ELA standards are also much improved. These use broader language generally, thus covering the entire curriculum, as CCSS did not, while allowing for much more flexibility with regard to curricular design than the CCSS did. A curriculum developer could easily create sound, coherent, comprehensive ELA textbook programs based on these new Florida standards as they certainly could not based on the CCSS, which instead led to vast distortions and devolution of U.S. curricula and pedagogy. The Florida B.E.S.T. standards also do not deemphasize literature and narrative writing, as Coleman so ignorantly and so boorishly did in the CCSS.
Now, here is how curriculum development is SUPPOSED to work: A textbook authorship team (or district-or school-based curriculum team) is supposed to sit down and design a coherent, grade-appropriate curriculum with the goal of imparting essential knowledge while at the same time checking the standards from time to time to make sure that those are all being covered. So, the coherence of the curriculum and the knowledge to be imparted are first, and the standards coverage is second—that is, IT COMES ABOUT INCIDENTALLY. STANDARDS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A CURRICULUM MAP. They are a list of desired educational outcomes based on teaching sequenced according to the curriculum map. So, a group might design a unit for eighth graders on The Short Story and plan to cover first its origins in folk tales and traveler’s tales and then, in turn, such short story elements as setting, character, conflict, plot structure, and theme. Throughout, they might illustrate the main ideas with examples of these elements from orature before moving on to literary examples. They might then conclude with lessons on planning and writing a folk tale and then a full-scale short story. And all along, while writing the unit, the group might examine the curriculum map in light of the standards and tweak the plan to ensure alignment.
That’s not what happened with the Common Core. Instead, because of the high stakes attached to the tests that purported to measure proficiency or mastery of the “standards,” people threw the whole notion of coherent curricula out the window. Instruction devolved into RANDOM EXERCISES BASED ON PARTICULAR STANDARDS—exercises based on the formats of questions on the now all-important tests on the standards. In other words, curricula devolved into test prep. I call this the “Monty Python and Now for Something Completely Different” approach to curriculum development. (BTW, a full monty is full-frontal nudity, so a monty python is a _____. Fill in the blank.) In other words, THE STANDARDS BECAME THE CURRICUM MAP. Every educational publisher in the country started hauling off every textbook development program by making a spreadsheet containing the standards list in the left-most column and the places where these were to be “covered” in the other columns. Having random standards rather than a coherently sequenced body of knowledge drive curricula was a disaster for K-12 education in the United States. Many experienced professionals I knew in educational publishing quit in disgust at this development. They refused to be part of the destruction of U.S. pre-college education. An English Department chairperson told me, “I do test prep until the test is given in April. Then I have a month to teach English.” Her administrators encouraged this approach.
The new Florida standards are broad enough and comprehensive enough to allow for coherent curriculum development in line with, aligned to, them. But will that happen? The high stakes still attached to them incentivize the same sort of disaster that happened with Common Core—the continued replacement of coherent curricula with exercises keyed to particular “standards.” Furthermore, because of the “progress monitoring” aspect of the new Florida program, there will be, under it, EVEN MORE INCENTIVE FOR ADMINISTRATORS TO MICROMANAGE what and how teachers teach—to insist that they do test prep every day based on the standards that students in their classes didn’t score well on.
In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas Moore, the Chancellor of England, knows that he will lose his head if he doesn’t accede to King Henry’s appointing himself head of a new Church of England, but being a person of conscience, Moore can’t bring himself to do this. There’s an affecting scene in which Moore is taking the ferry across the river Thames and this exchange takes place:
MOORE [to boatman]: How’s your wife?
BOATMAN: She’s losing her shape, Sir.
MOORE: Aren’t we all.
That’s what results from high-stakes testing based on state standards lists. Instead of the curriculum teaching concepts from the standards, the curriculum BECOMES teaching the standards. Instead of giving a lesson on reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” teachers are pressured by administrators, whose school ratings and jobs depend on the test outcomes, to teach a lesson on Standard CCSS.ELA.R.666, the text becomes incidental, and the actual purposes of reading are ignored. Any text will do as long as the student is “working on the standard,” and the text is chosen because it exemplifies it (for example, the standard deals with the multiple meanings of words and a random text is chosen because it contains two examples of words used with multiple meanings). In this way, curricular coherence is lost, teaching becomes mere test prep, and without a coherent curriculum, students fail to learn how concepts are connected, to fit them into a coherent whole, even though one of the most fundamental principles of learning is that new learning sticks in learners’ minds if it is connected to a previously existing body of knowledge in those learners’ heads. In summary, putting the cart before the horse, the standard before the content, undermines learning. People like Gates and Coleman don’t understand this. They haven’t a clue how much damage to curricula and pedagogy their standards-and-testing “reform” has done. It’s done a lot. They are like a couple drunks who have plowed their cars through a crowd of pedestrians but are so plastered as to be completely oblivious to the devastation they’ve left behind them.
BTW, when he created the egregious Common Core, Coleman made a list of almost content-free “skills” (the “standards”) and then tacked onto it a call for teachers to have students start reading substantive works of literature and nonfiction, including “foundational documents from American history” and “plays by Shakespeare.” At the time when these standards were introduced, and Coleman doesn’t seem to have known this, almost every school in the United States was using, at each grade level, a hardbound literature anthology made up of stories, poems, essays, dramas, and other “classic” works from the traditional canon—substantive works of literature, including foundational documents of American history and plays by Shakespeare. So, Coleman’s big innovation—wasn’t an innovation at all. It was like calling on Americans to start using cars instead of donkey carts for transportation. Coleman was THAT CLUELESS about what was actually going on in the nation’s classrooms. And far from leading to more teaching of substantive works, the actual standards and testing regime led to incoherent curricula and pedagogy that addressed individual standards using random and often substandard texts and deemphasized the centrality of the works read. And so the processes of reading and teaching, in our schools, lost their shape, became monstrous exercises in dull and seemingly pointless scholasticism. Despite the fact that the new B.E.S.T. standards are broader and more comprehensive and therefore allow for more coherent curricula based on them, the persistence of high stakes in the new Florida standards-and-testing plan will lead to precisely the same sort of curricular incoherence that CCSS did.
That’s a problem, but even worse, if you can imagine that, is and will be the problem of the invalidity of the tests themselves, the old ones and the new ones. The governor and the FDOE promised shorter, low-stakes, progress-monitoring tests. We have already seen that the new tests aren’t low stakes, and we’ve seen that progress monitoring means micromanagement to ensure that teachers are doing test prep. So, what about the length? You guessed it. A typical F.A.S.T. test has 30-40 multiple-choice questions. Same as the F.C.A.T.
Now consider this: There are many standards at each grade level. For example, at Grade 8, there are 24 Grade 8 B.E.S.T. ELA standards. So, each standard is “tested,” supposedly, by one or two questions. But the standards, in the cases of both the Common Core and Florida’s B.E.S.T. are VERY broad, VERY GENERAL. They cover enormous ground. For example, here’s one of the new Florida standards, a variant of which appears at each grade level:
ELA.8.C.3.1: Follow the rules of standard English grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling appropriate to grade level.
Here’s an assignment for you, my reader: Write ONE or TWO short multiple-choice questions that VALIDLY measure whether a student has mastered this standard—that’s right, two short multiple-choice questions to cover the entirety of the 8th-grade curriculum in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.
That’s impossible, of course. It’s like trying to come up with one question to judge whether a person has the knowledge of French, of French culture, of diplomacy, and of international law and trade to be a good ambassador to France.
Well, OK. Today I am going to ask you to submit to a brief examination to see if you have the knowledge to serve as our ambassador to France. Are you ready?
Ready.
Have you ever eaten gougères?
Oh, yes. Love them.
What is an au pair?
A young person from a foreign country who helps in a house in return for room and board.
Hey, hey! Great. You passed. Congratulations, Madame Ambassador!
This is a problem with the Common Core tests, and the problem ought to be obvious to anyone. In fact, it’s shocking that given the invalidity of the state tests, which I just demonstrated, that so many people—politicians, federal and state education officials, journalists, administrators, and even some teachers actually take the results from these tests seriously, that they report those results as though they were Moses reading aloud from the tablets he carried down the mountain. “This just in: state ELA scores in sharp decline due to pandemic!” Slight problem. The scores from invalid tests don’t tell you anything. They are useless.
The tests clearly, obviously, do not measure validly what they purport to be measuring. They cannot do so, given how broad the standards are and how few questions are asked about any given standard. That you could validly measure proficiency or mastery of the standards in this way is AN IMPOSSIBILITY on the level of building a perpetual motion machine or drawing a round square. And so the tests and their purveyors and supporters should have been laughed off the national stage years ago. It’s darkly (very darkly) humorous that people who claim to care about “data” are taken in by such utter pseudoscience as this state testing is. That emperor has no clothes. It’s long past time to end the occupation of our schools by high-stakes testing.
But Florida isn’t doing that. The new policy has given us the same kinds of invalid high-stakes tests by one of the standards providers of them, but now students in Florida will take EVEN MORE of those tests, thus making them EVEN MORE invasive and EVEN MORE likely to lead to EVEN MORE onerous and counterproductive micromanagement of teachers. No sane person would want to teach under such conditions of micromanagement.
DeSantis has promised to “Make America Florida.” If I were a religious person, I would say, “God help us.” Instead, I’ll just say, “Uh, no thanks.”
Scorecard
Quality of new standards: A
Quality of new tests: D
Plan for implementation of new standards and testing regime: F
Promises kept: C–
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The only thing necessary for the triumph of
TESTING, is for the “good” to keep giving them.
So well said!!! Clever!!!
Embedded testing, while perhaps a little less disruptive, will result in the same dire consequences for students, teachers and schools. It will continue to allow schools get sucked into the politicized privatization vortex, despite the fact there is zero evidence of privatization being the great equalizer, and the fact there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
This isn’t even embedded testing. There are three complete, separate, stand-alone tests administered in a single session on one day per subject that purportedly measure attainment of the standards. These are CALLED progress monitoring but are not built into the instruction as in embedded testing.
How many days of testing there are per subject per test depends upon the subject and grade level. The Reading tests are given on two separate days.
On two separate days, three times a year. So six days of testing for Reading alone.
If this would have been “nipped in the bud” years ago, there would NOT be the push for voucher schemes to private or religious schools. Angry parents will do just about anything to keep their children from “harm”. Contrary to what teachers/people on this blog believe, most parents pulled their kids from public schools because of the over testing and the stupid CC and not because of race/poverty issues. But, the fights will continue, the tests and renamed CC will continue on and the kids will continue to suffer by being denied a decent public education on the taxpayer’s dime…..and the angry private school parents will want to be “reimbursed” for having to pay for something twice.
So you would agree that the presence of testing was a deliberate attempt to devalue public education on the part of those who benefited from negative feelings toward public ed?
I don’t know if it was to devalue public education specifically, but it was definitely of monetary value to people like Gates and Coleman (grifters) who then sucked a ton of $$$ from the DoE under the guise of their agenda of a “better public education”. Marketing and free market Capitalism reigns and we lowly folks and our lowly opinions don’t matter.
And BTW, I live in MD and we had State AND County testing along with some weird test prep curriculum (mostly for the Title I schools) plus MAP testing way before NCLB and RttT. By the time I pulled my 2nd kid out for private HS, it was testing all the time and test prep as curriculum. It kind of ticked me off that my kids went to school and then came home not knowing the basics of what they needed to get by in life….(makes most parents pretty angry).
Roy,
I have no doubt that the testing regime and the absurd expectations that all students would be proficient by 2014 were meant to make public schools look bad and promote choice (to worse schools that don’t take the tests)
“Contrary to what teachers/people on this blog believe, most parents pulled their kids from public schools because of the over testing and the stupid CC and not because of race/poverty issues.”
Contrary to what some people on this blog believe, most parents pulled their kids from public schools because they liked the food at private schools better. I mean because they thought it would help their kid get into a more selective college. I mean because they wanted their kid to have more rich friends. I mean because they liked the uniforms, and not because of over testing and the stupid CC.
Actually, no one can say definitively why “most” parents chose private schools or parochial schools, but given that “most” parents who left public schools enrolled their kids in charter schools that EMPHASIZED standardized testing and CC, they weren’t concerned about over testing.
That comment seems to be talking about a small subset of affluent parents who can afford private school tuition and want smaller class sizes.
Maybe it’s true that there is a small area of MD full of affluent parents who have left public schools for privates as a reaction to overtesting. Maybe that part of Maryland is different from NYC.
But in NYC, most decent public schools don’t waste much time on the tests. They learn, just like in private schools. And NY state high school students have been taking Regents Exams for 50 or 60 years. Maybe more.
I would like to see some statistics about how many kids left public schools for private schools where students are discouraged from doing any prep for SATs and parents would not spend a penny to hire tutors, and how many left public schools for charters that emphasize their good results on standardized tests? That isn’t running away, it’s running to…
You are correct that there is too much testing, but it doesn’t have to be cumbersome, and it ends in 8th grade. Many private high schools have AP classes,too.
^^^Everyone has their own experiences, but I paid some attention to what my kid was learning in school and it wasn’t all test prep all the time. Far from it. It was 100x more interesting and engaging than when I went to school in the pre-testing era many decades ago.
And they read whole novels in class, too. Not just excerpts. Maybe some public schools in some states (like NY) can more easily ignore this. And probably the schools that teach the most disadvantaged students get the worst pressure to teach to the test. But all parents don’t hate their public schools nor bash them so negatively because of “testing”. Many parents don’t like the testing days, but it’s just a small part of the entire learning experience, which always has some good and bad parts.
and it [the mandatory testing] ends in 8th grade
No, it doesn’t. There are federally mandated tests in ELA and Math at Grade 10 in all states. In addition, most states have additional examination requirements in high school. Below, I have pasted a list from tests.com of high-school level tests that are required for graduation.
From my perspective inside several major educational publishing houses during this period, I can say definitively that coherent curricula went out the window and were replaced by random exercises based on random CC$$ “skills.” Yes, there were individual teachers and schools that pushed back against this trend–that continued to teach coherent, substantive units despite the tests. Praise be. But generally speaking, there was a miasma across the land that resulted from the testing. The testing-mad fools at the Fordham Institute likewise claimed, falsely, that the testing only took “a small amount of time.” But that’s bs. They did not count, in addition to the actual testing time, which is considerable, the breathtaking number of hours taken away from instruction by a) giving mandated or optional practice tests and benchmark tests to prepare for the exam; b) doing online and print test prep; c) doing exercises and activities in online and print textbooks that had been rewritten to be test prep exercises or exercises on individual standards to prepare students for test taking; d) doing data chats with individual students to discuss their practice test results; e) reviewing data walls based on practice and benchmark test results; and f) doing remediation work, often in the form of special tutorial sessions and homework, based on the practice and benchmark test results. A fifth of the school year, consumed by testing? That’s probably a major UNDERESTIMATE.
Bob,
That’s your experience. It just isn’t the case in the NYC public schools (especially high schools).
Kids take Regents exams, but that has been the case long before common core testing.
Do you really think affluent parents would keep their kids in good public schools if they did nothing but read excerpts and essentially prep for a standardized exam?
I understand that for students in disadvantaged schools who come in way behind, there is extreme pressure on schools to have them pass the test.
But that isn’t all public schools. It should be no public schools, but why paint a picture of public education that would drive every middle class parent into a private school when their schools are rarely like that?
I have zero interest in getting into another long back and forth with you about a subject that you know very little about but consider yourself expert in.
Bob,
Ok, you win. Public schools all suck and have sucked ever since Common Core. I defer to the experts.
Parents, run from public schools stat. There is no longer any coherent curricula, and your kid will spend most time doing random exercises based on random Common Core “skills”.
If your kid isn’t doing “skills” exercises, their public school is likely giving them practice tests and benchmark tests and forcing them to do online and print test prep. Teachers will meet with them to discuss their practice test results and give them more test prep homework to improve those results.
Parents, the education at public schools is now breathtakingly vapid, chock full of exercises in how to answer the questions on a state ELA exam. Your child will learn “ALMOST NOTHING” about folks like Transcendentalists except maybe that they like trees, since they will read only excerpts and not books.
Parents, don’t be fooled by what ignorant parents at NYC public schools tell you. Your public school is going to offer your child the most vapid education, and you should get out now.
Don’t believe me. Believe the knowledgeable educators at Diane Ravitch’s blog who know much better about how vapid and worthless your child’s education will be if you send them to public schools.
Bob, I am on your side about over testing. But to me, there is a huge difference between helpful and important criticism about curricula and the type of criticism that wholesale demonizes the academics and curricula at all public schools.
But you all know best, so by all means amplify how truly terrible the education is now in public schools, and warn parents that their kid will be subject primarily to test prep and constant testing of “skills”.
How stupid of me to believe my kid got a good education in their public school and learned to think critically when that simply wasn’t true. LisaM knows — there is no choice but for all parents who care about their kids to abandon public education stat.
I agree that many parents fled public schools because of the Common Core and testing. This isn’t even controversial. It’s simply true.
stats?
Let’s compare the number of parents who fled public schools for anti-testing private schools and the number of parents who fled public schools for pro-testing charter schools. If more fled for anti-testing private schools than fled for pro-testing charters, then you are right. But if more parents left for pro-testing charters, then saying “this is simply true” seems unworthy of a teacher.
Why was there an explosion in pro-testing chain charter schools during the rise of testing?
The Republican Party’s platform of promised (but seldom delivered) goals for the country (before MAGA and Trump) have been deleted and replaced with endless lies, BS, conspiracy theories, more BS, and Traitor Trump endlessly reminding his dangerous dumber than dumb MAGARINO support base how he is the victim of a political witch hunt as he is being found guilty in one court after another.
“Having random standards rather than a coherently sequenced body of knowledge drive curricula was a disaster for K-12 education in the United States. “
True that.
The question that teachers should ponder is why they should accept standards written and paid for by a billionaire with a vested interest in selling computer hardware and software to public schools.
Exactly. That’s EXACTLY what was up. The Common Core was a Gates business plan. And the whole education establishment, just about, bought it because Gates is a rich guy, so he must be right.
Ponder away…
Is a process doesn’t enlighten, who does it benefit
beyond processors?
Thank you, rt. I don’t “get it,” too.
All true about testing. It seems to me the results of this testing regime is that students are not reading whole books and stories. They are pumped with excerpts from texts (mostly boring), asked to find something that often doesn’t exist using “close reading,” and told to use “graphic organizers,” to come up with conclusions. The only way to teach writing is by having students write. A lot. The only way to teach reading is to have students learn to love reading. Yeah phonics is good, but not the answer. Testing kills the love of learning and forgets the big picture of good literature.
@Chuck — We were forced to use a program called “StudySync.” The kids called it “StudyStink.” They hated it. “But look. It’s so easy. It’s all on the computer.” I chose to use the hard copies for “learning” because they could mark in the book, use sticky notes, and whatnot to help make sense of it all. My kids were kinesthetic learners; they need to “feel the story” and move at a very slow pace. And when I took more time to explain things, Admin said, “YOU move too slow. YOU need to follow and the curriculum.” I said, “Like a blanket?” For the life of me, I tried to figure out the stories. It took me so much time to make sense of it and I realized they were excerpts from “somewhere in the story.” Once I solved that issue, (and I think I said, F this and F that a “caption”) I had to figure out how to convey the story to “emerging readers”. I hated it. I hated the “high level thinking questions” they asked kids who could barely get through the reading because we had to stop every fifth word to figure out the meaning. After reading through the materials and looking at what they asked kids to do, I told them, “I really don’t care about those questions. I want to know, did you like the story? Could you relate to the characters? How does it add value/connection to your life?” Plain and simple. I had to go rogue. I supplemented like crazy to help them understand, but my kids hated reading (it was a built upon years of the same CRAP). But, because we HAD to do what all other teachers were doing, I HAD to assign the SAME questions (I only counted what I wanted), but one young lady told me in her responses, “Mr. Charvet, I know it’s not you. But I HATE the stories. I HATE the same “f-ing questions” they ask that make absolutely no sense to me. I HATE it all. I HATE this f-ing reading course. Why can’t we do something else?” I totally agreed with her. As you said, good readers read a lot. Good readers typically become good writers. As I told my class, “You want to get better at shooting free throws? Shoot more free throws.”
It seems to me the results of this testing regime is that students are not reading whole books and stories.
Exactly what is happening, Mr. Jordan!
And get this…in order to be fair, all kids were given the same standardized test. So, in my case, I had students who were at-risk and on a variable curriculum base. This meant, I read their transcripts and assigned them courses based on what credits they needed. Therefore, when testing came around, most stayed home. But, my job was to get 95% to show up and take the test (otherwise the overall testing didn’t really count). Kids hated testing and knew they never passed. I told them, “Look, can you help me out by coming to school? I will make sure it is worth you while. And, it WILL NOT hurt you in any way.” Most said, “Okay, Mr. Charvet, we will help you out.” I made it as painless as possible and assured them they were “professional test takers.” Here’s the fun part: the subjects tested. Algebra 2; Earth Science; English 3; and some other grade level subjects. Most of my kids were NOT on GRADE LEVEL, could do basic math (Algebra readiness) and basic English. So, like I said, I thought it was so fair for nearly all of our kids to be tested on subjects they had not studied that year — NOT. Totally made sense, right? Once the kids figured out the insanity of it all, they weren’t scared, took the tests “went through the motions” (although ticked off because they could not focus on earning their credits to graduate) while I ensured they with incentives for not “ditching.” After the silliness, we got back to business figuring out ways for them to finish, graduate, and move on to community college or get on a career path.
Not reading entire books and replacing reading with a series of online prompts is the ‘dumbing down of America.’ Behaviorism cannot replace real reading, writing, thinking and relating taught by a caring human being.
The “dumbing down of America” has apparently created a generation of 17-24 year olds who seem to know the difference between reality and lies. They are thoughtful and open-minded.
Amazing that the ones who attended public school managed to be thoughtful and can think critically when their entire education was test prep and reading excerpts!
How surprising that their lucky elders who love Trump got such “good” educations instead of all test prep all the time, which has affected the critical thinking abilities of everyone under 25. If only they could think like their elders, those Trump supporting folks, who attended public schools before they were ruined.
Not reading entire books and replacing reading with a series of online prompts is the ‘dumbing down of America.’ Behaviorism cannot replace real reading, writing, thinking and relating taught by a caring human being.
Extremely well said, RT. Yes, the curriculum and the pedagogy have both been enormously dumbed down because of the testing. As I mentioned in the article above, I was working at a very high level in a major educational publishing house at the time, and I witnessed this first-hand. Publishing houses created enormous databanks of activities and exercises from previous textbooks, keyed to the CCSS “standards,” and they instructed editors to create lessons by simply entering the standard name into these databases and using the materials spewed forth. Rivers of disconnected crap. I wish I were making that up. I’m not. One has but to compare something like the Pearson My Perspectives Literature program, which is heavy on the graphics and the fancy headings and test prep exercises and otherwise full of errors and lacking in substance to any hardbound literature anthology series from the 1980s to see what I mean. One could read the entire lesson on The Transcendentalists in the My Perspectives Program and learn ALMOST NOTHING of what the Transcendentalists thought except, I don’t know, that they liked trees. Breathtakingly vapid. But chocked full of exercises in the form of ELA state test questions keyed to the CCSS. Many, many of my colleagues–highly experienced textbook authors and editors–quit in disgust at this. They refused to be part of it.
Of course, there were state “standards” before the CCSS, and these weren’t so great either, but here’s how things changed: With the advent of the CCSS, suddenly there was ONE almost universally used set of standards, instead of 50 differing sets of them. In the past, publishers would create a coherent lesson and then correlate it with each of these 50 sets of standards, and the correlations were often just marketing bs. But when those 50 sets of standards were replaced with ONE, the STANDARDS BECAME THE CURRICULUM MAP, which never was and should not be their role. The result was disjointed, incoherent curricula that was almost entirely content free–a HUGE disaster for U.S. education.
And, of course, as a C-level Executive in one of those educational publishing houses, I was privy to our market research about what was going on in schools. Then, as a teacher, after leaving that job, I saw firsthand how testing had taken over–how incredibly large a part of the instructional year had been consumed by testing and preparing for testing.
So, thank you for your comment, which is spot on. Also, regarding the Behaviorist element in the testing regime and its associated curricula, here:
Sorry, RT, but my response is in moderation.
And, as I mentioned, post CCSS, instead of giving a lesson on, say, Langston Hughes’s “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” or “Up in Michigan” or “The Cask of Amontillado” or whatever, the teacher would be encouraged to give a lesson on standard CCSS.ELA.L.11.5b.666, based on any snippet of text (or often on several snippets of text). And so kids would end up doing this pointless scholastic exercise instead of authentic reading and literary analysis. And the textbook or online source that teacher would be using would, while still listing the works of literature, be doing the same thing. Concentration on the “skill” rather than on reading the work. And in this manner, the whole purpose of reading was ignored, left out. And kids would do these lessons in the new generation of textbooks and online materials and rightly say, this is a bunch of pointless, mind-numbing bs.
Imagine a class in learning how to sail. Now imagine that an education “reformer” comes along and makes a list of stuff on a sailboat and says, this is what you will now teach. So, one day we do a lesson on spoons because there are spoons in the galley. And one day we do a lesson on gunwales because boats have gunwales on them. But no one does any actual sailing. Or learns any actual sailing. Well, that’s sort of what happened. And this was especially true of the online instructional materials.
And, of course, it is both possible for kids to have been subjected in recent years to substandard curricula based on ridiculous standards and for them to be in many ways more hip to reality than their predecessors were. The content of their literature and writing textbooks is only one part (admittedly, an important part) of what goes into forming them.
Bob,
It is also possible that the public schools that have primarily middle class and affluent students don’t subject their students to substandard curricula based on ridiculous standards. But what do I know?
Very little. And as I told you, I have zero interest in engaging you on this or any other topic. Many teachers pushed back and continued teaching despite the directives from administrators and the low-quality Common Cored curricula. All praise to those.
OK. But this is it. My experience in a middle-class, affluent school, was typical. Thus the anger on the part of so many teachers directed toward the testing regime.
A typical school year: Early in the year, we all got the directive that we had to give a Common Core practice test. And then, when the results were in, each of us had a meeting with the principal and was told that our instruction was to “focus on these Common Core Skills that you students did poorly on,” and she handed each of us a list. We were also to post these in our classrooms and hold data chats. I was handed a Common Cored literature program that was little more than test prep and required to take my students to the media center twice a week for test prep.
And I mostly ignored this, left those texts in the boxes they came in, and taught English DESPITE the pressure to do all this bullshit. And my colleagues with any integrity did as well. But some did test prep every day. And yes, I assigned novels to the kids. But this is not what my admin wanted me doing.
But I am done. I am NOT going to respond to any more of your uninformed rants, NYC.
It’s also possible that public high school students are assigned whole novels to read in class.
I mean, it is the height of irony that the far right was up in arms about the reading of entire novels they don’t approve of!
Have public schools replaced TKAM with some selected excerpts from the novel?
One more. One of the most common motifs in orature and then literature worldwide is that of the blighted land. Some malign force has placed a curse on the land, and until some hero lifts it, everyone suffers. Among the ancient Greeks, the word for this curse, this blighting of the land, was a Miasma. The people cannot see what is causing their difficulties. So, for example, at the beginning of the Oedipus trilogy, the townspeople gather because the land is not bearing crops, babies are being birthed stillborn, the cattle are dying–there is drought and pestilence. A miasma. Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land draws upon this motif as it appears in the Arthurian and related legends, in particular, on the discussion of these in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and in Sir James George Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough. And modern works like the Harry Potter and Tolkien novels, likewise, use this theme of the miasma, the waste land, brought about by a malign force (Voldemort and Sauron, respectively). The Common Core and its associated testing were and are a miasma throughout U.S. education, a deep, profound curse upon it that needs to be lifted. And anyone who has taught in the CC$$ era, if he or she has half a brain, knows the damage that has been done to curricula and pedagogy as a result of the CC$$. This is not in question, not by anyone who has a clue.
And it all goes back to a business plan conceived by Bill Gates, who wanted one skills list to key his godawful online, computerized, criterion-referenced, Behaviorist instruction to and tried to launch a company, InBloom, that would serve as the national gradebook, one that could decide by virtue of its monopoly on the national gradebook who could and could not play in the educational materials business, print or online, by virtue of controlling that national gradebook. Anyone who got to play would have to pay, ofc, and had this scheme been allowed to go through, it would have been worth billions.
Bob,
I agree I am completely uninformed about Florida and other states. But I am arguably as informed as you are about public schools in NYC.
I am just pleading with you to consider how your comments make abandoning your public school a no-brainer for ALL public school parents. As do LisaM’s comments.
I WANT you to be critical of Common Core. I just wish you would not imply that it is only the very rare public school that could rise above being a test prep factory where students almost never read entire novels.
That may very well be the case in Florida and Maryland, and of course I wonder why any of the parents I know with kids in those states would subject their children to such a worthless education.
All I know is NYC and while parents always have complaints (and did before Common Core), your description of virtually all public high schools does not describe all public high schools that have primarily middle class students. It may describe the high schools that teach at-risk and low-income students.
I am one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet with regard to the testing programs in New York, NYC. I know them freaking inside out. So, no, you have but a tiny inkling of the knowledge of these that I do. I am not going to go into why that is so because of confidentiality agreements that I signed long ago. But sorry. You are completely wrong about this.
NYC, every school in America has had to deal with the fact that the available print and online curricula in ELA and Mathematics have undergone devolution due to the Common Core. And even in the rare ones with enlightened leadership that didn’t and don’t take the tests seriously, the lost instructional time remained and remains an issue, and they were still subject to merit pay schemes and sanctions based on the tests. And the teachers of other subject areas have seen their subjects devalued because of the all important tests. It does no good whatsoever to pretend that despite Common Core and the testing, everything is hunky dory. As ACTUAL TEACHERS here. They will enlighten you about this.
cx: didn’t and doesn’t
“It does no good whatsoever to pretend that despite Common Core and the testing, everything is hunky dory. ”
I agree. Is there someone here who said everything is hunky dory? Because I never did. I am glad educators like you are speaking out about over testing and the problems with Common Core.
What I did say is that it does little good and arguably great harm to push the narrative that all public schools (except the rare unicorn ones) are pits of miasma, and that parents like me are deluding themselves by believing that their kids aren’t spending most of their time in glorified test prep.
In my opinion, that attitude is just playing into the right wing’s hands. Once all parents with resources embrace LisaM’s view of public schools – places that should be abandoned and demonized in order to stop them from damaging students — it’s going to destroy public schools, not save them.
I encourage your insightful criticism. That needs to be heard. But I have no idea why you think convincing parents that they are deluding themselves to believe their child is not being damaged by their public school is a good narrative to push. Common Core has affected most schools in a negative way, but the public schools that teach middle class students that I am familiar with are not as you and LisaM described. They should be better, and it’s important to fight for that. But I don’t understand why you would insult and belittle parents who are saying that their kid is getting a good education despite the very real problems of common core.
I don’t think you have to destroy public schools in order to save them. That’s the reformers’ mantra and my concern is that by presenting public schools as miasma pits where I am supposed to believe my kid and their engaged, interesting, and far better educated than I was public school friends are really just victims of a very bad education is NOT helpful. It’s not helpful for parents to be told that their kids would have been far better educated had their parents cared enough about the damage their public school was doing, and sent them to a private school.
It seems I am supposed to accept that it is only my ignorance and delusional thinking that I credit my kids’ good teachers and interesting curricula as the reason that their critical thinking skills are so much better than their elders, and certainly better than mine were at their age. I still don’t understand how the young folks today picked up that important skill that so many of their Trump-adoring elders lack, but whatever. I am the deluded one here and I will join those who pull their kids from public schools and “help” public schools by amplifying that they are now miasma pits. If that’s supposed to be what “saves” public schools, then I hope you are right. Seems unlikely to me, but I’m just an ignorant parent who knows nothing.
Bob’s deep dive into the testing doo doo, though not a pleasant image, needs to be commended.
States lost the opportunity afforded by the Covid crisis to rethink assessment. Mandated testing was suspended for a year by the feds and in the aftermath, when testing resumed, many children did and could not take them. The education world did not fly off its axis in the absence of annual testing.
Unfortunately, in the interim, better models have not been tried out. So, here we are once again — reflexively followed the failed system wrought by NCLB and its reauthorization. Now the tests will give us added value by measuring “learning loss.” Hoo hah! The testing beast keeps chasing its tail. Ignorance in perpetuity.
Here’s what I don’t get about the testing machine. Why does the media assume that scores will go up every year? And if they don’t, the sky is falling?
Surely we want to see improvement among kids at the low end of the scale, but why expect that 4th graders this year will have higher scores thann4th graders last year?
We have somehow internalized the nutty belief that all students must be above average.
It will never happen.
Exactly, Diane. And thanks for posting my piece. I hope that some will read it and take to heart its message about WHY the federally mandated state tests ARE NOT VALID.
Here’s what I wrote about that expectation years ago in another piece you were so kind as to publish:
OK, you are sitting in your year-end evaluation session, and you’ve heard from every other teacher in your school that his or her scores were a full level lower this year than last, and so you know that the central office has leaned on the principal to give fewer exemplary ratings even though your school actually doesn’t have a problem with its test scores and people are doing what they did last year but a bit better, of course, because one grows each year as a teacher–one refines what one did before, and one never stops learning.
But you know that this ritual doesn’t have anything, really, to do with improvement. It has to do with everyone, all along the line, covering his or her tushy and playing the game and doing exactly what he or she is told. Oh yes, I have been dutifully compliant. And, at any rate, everyone knows that the tests are not particularly valid and that’s not really the issue at your school because, the test scores are pretty good because this is a suburban school with affluent parents, and the kids always, year after year, do quite well.
So whether the kids are learning isn’t really the issue. The issue is that by some sort of magic formula, each cohort of kids is supposed to perform better than the last–significantly better–on the tests, though they come into your classes in exactly the same shape they’ve always come into them in because, you know, they are kids and they are just learning and teaching ISN’T magic. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s magical, sometimes, of course, but its’ not magic. There’s no magic formula.
@Diane — the kids told me, they are so sick of testing, they just don’t try. And, when I noticed (after their scores had gone up) they took a nose dive. I asked, “Just out of curiosity, what happened?” “They added a timer, Mr. Charvet. My eyes kept looking at the time and I really couldn’t concentrate.” In the end, these kids were tested to death and they just didn’t care.” They are smart and resilient. “What will happen to me if I don’t pass this test? Nothing, right?” And, they all went to high school and those who needed the most help were shoved in a corner deemed “poor students” by “the testing standards.” But, if you needed your car fixed, a water heater installed, ethernet cable run, an explanation of martial arts or help with Spanish, I knew who to turn to.
THIS
THIS
THIS
State tests have never gone through the validation process. With cut scores that can vary depending on who is doing the cutting, pass and fail results are somewhat subjective and can be easily manipulated. We have good reasons to question the results of these tests.
I must say, it’s nasty down there. LOL.
In any deep dive into state testing. One could, of course, do what American journalists do AND LEARN ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE GD TEST AND TAKE IT ON BREATHTAKINGLY NAIVE FAITH THAT THEY ACTUALLY MEAUSURE WHAT THEY PURPORT TO MEASURE, WHICH THEY DON’T.
I agree. Most parents at public schools know that these tests are flawed. If they are lucky enough to send their kids to a public school that doesn’t focus only on test prep, they don’t care about the results as the tests are high stakes for the schools but not as high stakes for the students, and most can get a passing score without needing much prep. Of course public schools that teach primarily at-risk kids are far more damaged by testing. Which is ironic and heartbreaking since those were the schools this testing was supposed to be helping.
Haven’t they thoroughly scrubbed their “New Standards” of “CRT” and the “Woke Mind Virus” (read: any reference to historical inequities in race, class, and gender)? That earns an ‘A’?!
That’s a separate matter. A whole other essay. But yes.
This affects mostly social studies and reading lists and libraries and not the ELA standards. The sample suggested readings appended to the B.E.S.T. standards do not seem to have gotten the DeSantis/Minivan Taliban/Ku Klux Karen treatment, for now.
Though the reading lists that accompany the B.E.S.T. standards have a tiny conservative slant (they include a reading by that towering literary figure George Bush, Jr., for crying out loud), for the most part they are inclusive. Here’s what I think happened: these were put together by teachers and other professionals BEFORE the whole wokeness spat with Disney happened and the Moms for Liberty for Christian Fundamentalist and No One Else got involved and started vandalizing school reading lists, classroom libraries, and school libraries.
Please share this widely. Send it to your school officials and administrators, for example. It’s also here:
Bob did a solid job addressing the details and fallacies of high-stakes testing in FL, which should not be a mystery to anyone who has taught K-12 in the USA over the last 20-years. Such HST regimes are not about raising literacy or education for the workforce or improving the quality of teaching and teachers, and near everything do with knee-capping teacher unions and establishing ideological control over the content and scope of public education (or what’s left of it giving the rampant privatizing of FL schools as in so many other states of Red State America – and tragically in a lot Blue States that have fallen for the HST Koolaid). And since the best predictor of student performance is the social-economic status of their families, that should be a clue as to why the Radical Right that runs FL is loathe to do anything that helps lower-class Floridians who are least likely to vote for them. And since teacher unions are often the most politically potent advocates of poor/working class Americans, they are thorn in the side of the Radical Right that must be extracted and neutralized. And what better way doing it than by undermining their professionalism via a rigged accountability testing regime and saying its all for the kids!
Well said, Bruce!
I’ve been chomping at the bit all day to get home from school and respond to this important post. I hope I’m not too late for all of you East coasters. First off, thank you. Bob, this was some of your best writing. The explanations and analogies you provided cut up with the clarity and strength of diamonds the testing insanity.
Los Angeles Unified School District, however, is doing exactly what Florida is doing but 250% WORSE! The school board voted unanimously to hire Superintendent and Yogi Bear voice impersonator Alberto Carvalho from where? Florida, of course. Miami, to be specific. He got along well with DeSantis, and now he’s here. Oh, joy.
Superintendent Carvalho also told us we would cut down on testing time by eliminating the requirement for SBAC interim tests, and then fooled the board into voting unanimously to implement three instead of one interim tests. I saw the presentation. I recognized the fast talking used car salesman pitch. The board did not. The new tests are called iReady. Oh joy.
Florida gives three tests a year with about 40 questions a test. LAUSD gives three tests a year, two of which are not required by California law (the covid era interim testing law being another discussion) with precisely 100 questions per test. They take forever to complete. (100 is 250% of 40.) And then, here’s the kicker, the iReady app recommends iReady and business related test prep apps to students who don’t measure up (pretty much everyone). The superintendent then pressures principals to force teachers to use the online test prep products. My principal decided to cancel an hour a week, all school year long, of instruction time to force teachers to implement the test prep.
Dear Florida,
Please remain in Florida from now on. Come visit California, and then leave. Looking at you, Alberto Carvalho.
LCT,
That is AWFUL!
It’s 100 questions for English three times a year. It’s 100 questions for math three times a year. That’s 600 test prep test questions a year for each student. Six hundred. Not including the test prep questions to prep for the test prep questions. No teaching or learning involved.
Thank you for the kind words, LCT. At my school, it was Study Island. And some SAT prep program the name of which I have, due to the post traumatic reaction I suppose, blocked. Same thing. I was required to steal instructional time to do this crap.
In my experience with Study Island, the more questions students answered, the more their test scores on the California NCLB tests dropped. It was test prep in reverse. Makes sense. The Study Island questions had more wrong answers considered right than the state tests.
There’s a reason teachers aren’t supposed to look at the test passages and questions, parents can’t see what their kid missed, districts can’t review what is contained in these secret tests: It’s because the tests are bullshit. The questions don’t have a right answer, just one that isn’t as bad as the others. If released, the tests in their entirety would not stand up to academic scrutiny. They don’t measure anything except how much money can be made off the data collection of kids by AIR.
This is exactly the case. I can tell that like every other teacher you have looked at the sample release questions and perhaps even glanced at the test questions (which you are forbidden to do) and have listened to the kids talk about how insane the questions were after the test, how utterly confusing. Yes, the morons who were first overseeing the PARCC and Smarter Balanced test development, some of them renowned Education Pundits in the United States, decided that they could nudge multiple-choice questions into actually testing higher-order thinking by making all of the answers plausible and one supposedly the best among these. And that is, of course, idiotic. So we’ve ended up with tests with questions where all the answers are arguably right or where one of the wrong answers is actually better than the one that is supposedly right because the tests are written by paid freelance hacks and go through very little vetting, and the whole idea of doing the plausible answer shtick on a high-stakes test is JUST LOONEY.
And then David Coleman, appointed by Gates the Decider for the Rest of Us, took over at the College Board and created his Common Cored SAT, which he should have called the SCAT, and adopted the same idiotic test-question guidelines for his new test. So that one is ALSO, now, full of these idiotic, utterly confused and confusing questions.
Bob,
I have seen many such test questions, where the “right answer” is completely arbitrary. It’s entirely plausible that the student who thinks deeply will choose the “wrong answer.”
Yes. I once annotated an entire Grade 9 FCAT sample release test to illustrate that point and copied it to every teacher and administrator at my school.
Here’s one from “The Education of Mr. Charvet.” No matter what subject, teachers had to stop teaching their own discipline to give writing tests (and when we had our professional development assessing the papers, I really wanted to read and assess while — depending on your group — others just said, “I’m done can we get out of here now?” And, sorry to say, many of the teachers in my group had zero English skills nor the capacity to anchor papers. I remember a prompt about babysitting and Pocahontas. As I recall it went something like this: “You are babysitting. The parents leave Disney’s Pocahontas for the kids to watch before bedtime. You have just studied the true history of Pocahontas. You are to leave a NOTE for the parents why you chose to show the movie or not — something like that. With students, they are given scenarios to “set the scene” to spark ideas. I thought, “If I left a NOTE, I surely would not leave a three-page essay on the fridge for the parents to read.” Mine would be, “Kids were good. We played games and had no time for the movie before bed. Maybe next time. I appreciate the job and please call again if you need someone to watch the kids. They were awesome.” Of course, name, phone, and whatnot. But, when I asked the students about the prompt and NOTE thing, they said, “Yeah, I know. It said note. I know what a note is. But, we all know if we wrote a note, we wouldn’t pass, so we wrote an essay like we always do about something we don’t care about. It is what it is.” I mean that was the gist of our conversation. On this one, I talked to the people who wrote the prompt and told them to think about the “ask” and how you will assess them. I know one of my students wrote an excellent essay; superb grammatical skills, but he basically told the people giving him this test to “f-off” because they didn’t care about him, didn’t know him, and never visited the classroom. One of the smartest students I had. He is now an electrician. But, my students were “straight shooters” — they told you exactly what they thought. I did, however, have to reel them in, but man, oh, man did I appreciate their divergent thinking. On another note, my oldest son was “flagged” for his “writing across the curriculum” and was called into the office. He is highly creative with excellent writing skills, but like I said, the writing prompts were given in ALL classes. His math teacher gave some equation and they had to creatively write about it. I can’t remember what it was, but he came up with an entire story about “crime bosses.” The crime boss had the money coming in, but soon saw that someone was embezzling a lot of his funds. Through the math equation (the one given they had to write about) he pinpointed the “who and what” and how the money was flowing somewhere else. My son was called into the office to “explain” his thinking and “why did he know so much about drug money?” Fortunately, his math teacher said, “Scott is a good student and highly creative; no need to worry about him he is not a “drug kid.” To this day when I see his old math teacher, that story still pops up.
I long for the day when every kid will simply write on the exam,
“My mind is not standardized enough to comply.”
And I love to think about how Rumi or Blake or Emerson or Plath or Ted Hughes would have responded to one of these exam prompts.
The most original response to the “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—” where most would have some philosophical answer, but the paper I read was…”Two roads diverged in a wood and I, well took the lesser traveled. Then Ninja Warriors jumped out from behind a bush. The battle began of who owned that path…” I was laughing so hard, but thought, “What an original answer and creative…” Yep, divergent thinking on a diverged road, eh?
And I have some great land in Flor-uh-duh for you, really, really cheap. No, you can’t go look at it. But don’t worry, I had my cousin Bobby inspect it from a rented Cessna. It’s great. Trust me.
You may be wonderin how we keep all these names str8 down hear in the South whut with all the Bobbies and Bubbas. Well its cause we use too names, as in Bobby Dale, Bobby Bud, Bobby Dee, n even Bobby Biggun, which I wont go into rite hyere.
Parents should refuse to let their kids take the test unless they can see the entire test and their child’s answers. I mean, maybe AIR is trying to indoctrinate the kids and no one would know!
Yes, what if those questions say gay, for example? ROFL.
Bob beautifully sets out the tragic absurdity of the achievement testing mess:
I’m reminded of the quip (I think from one of Woody Allen’s films) where customers complain about a restaurant where the food is lousy and the portions are too small.
In the testing diner–the tests are lousy and the results come back too late.
Another thing that Bob points out: How can one or two items out of forty possibly assess whether a student has met a standard–or is in any way diagnostic. The terrible fact is that to do this reliably (which is a necessary condition for validity) via paper, pencils and bubbles, tests would need to contain many more items and require more time to complete.
Ergo, continually putting tests and standards into new bottles is insanity. There is nothing that can replace good teachers to impart knowledge and spark students. Socrates is trembling in his toga.
High-school tests required for graduation, from tests.com:
Alaska High School Graduation Qualifying Examination (HSGQE): Reading, Writing, and Mathematics; 10th grade
Alabama High School Graduation Examination, 3rd Edition: Reading, mathematics, science, language, and social studies; 11th grade
Arizona’s Instruments to Measure Standards: English, mathematics, and science; 10th grade
California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE): English/language arts and mathematics, 10th grade
Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT): Reading, writing, and math in 10th grade, and science in 11th grade
Georgia High School Graduation Test and Georgia High School Writing Test: Writing test administered fall of 11th grade, second in the spring, covering English/language arts, social studies, science, math
Idaho Standards Achievements Test (ISAT): English/language arts and mathematics, 10th grade
Indiana Graduation Qualifying Exam: English and mathematics; 10th grade
Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination for the 21st century (GEE 21): English and math; 10th grade; social studies and science; 11th grade
Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System: English and mathematics; 10th grade
Minnesota Basic Skills Test: Reading and math in 8th grade and writing in 10th
Mississippi Subject Area Testing Program (MSATP): Administered at the end of courses Algebra 1, Biology 1, US History from 1877, and English 1
North Carolina Competency Test of Reading and Mathematics: Reading and mathematics; 8th grade
New Jersey HS Proficiency Assessment (HSPA): Reading, writing, and math; 11th grade
New Mexico High School Competency Examination: English, science, mathematics, and social studies; 10th grade
Nevada High School Proficiency Examination: Reading, writing, and mathematics, 11th grade
New York Regents Competency Tests: Math and science in 9th grade, global studies in 10th, and reading, writing, and United States Government in 11th.
Ohio Graduation Test: English, mathematics, science, social studies, and writing; 10th grade
High School Assessment Program: English and mathematics; 10th grade
Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program Gateway Tests (TCAP): Administered at the end of courses reading, writing, mathematics, social studies, and science.
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS): Science and social studies; 11th grade
Virginia Standards of Learning Test (SOL): Administered at the end of courses English, math, history, social science, and science.
California no longer requires the CAHSEE (and when this was waived and the only requirement holding students back from a diploma, many never got one because someone had to “do work.” It took me a year to get the diploma for my “step-son” and I was in the system). He told me many of his friends never got a diploma but deserved one). I was told, “We will be measured by who passes this exam.” My response, “So, people who teach other subjects are not important? So, if we need as many kids to pass, why not have everyone teach “test prep” prior to the big exam? Crickets on that one. Silly me. I thought EVERYONE took the test so I created scenarios in whatever subject I taught and said, “Check this out, this would be something to know for the CAHSEE.” The way I taught was more of divergent thinking. I told them if we HAVE to take this test, then let’s figure out how to pass it. I taught test prep for SAT and other tests as well. They do have patterns and if one actually reads the directions and EVERYTHING on every page, the answers are in plain sight. I mean, if we are going to be measured on our ability to teach by passing a test. When I had to study for the National Teacher Exam (cuz mE gRades were too loW and I was too stupid because of my GPA) throughout my test prep I recall, “…you may not find the exact answer, but to choose the most correct answer from the choices given…” In a teen forum class I taught (teaching kids that two people could view the same thing and come to different conclusions) I showed them the visual “Old Lady, Young Lady.” Which one do you see? I see old, you see young does that make us wrong or simply have different perspectives on the same issue? What was more interesting is I posed a question to the students. Please answer A, B, C, or D. Which one is correct? In sum, all the answers were correct depending on how the student justified their answer. As you know, multiple choice tests do not give a student a chance to justify/explain their thinking. I was always interested in the student’s “divergent thinking” on attacking art projects, English papers, math problems, science, PE (yes, I taught them all). This encouraged deep thinking, conversation, a narrative, and “next steps.” Most the time I would end up telling many of my students, “Based on your logic, I want you to look at something for me. Check it out, this person thinks the way you do.” Wow, what empowerment. As many of you stated, a student who thinks deeply may be penalized on a standardized test. Standardization is great for nuts, bolt, drill bits…but kids, c’mon now. I always took my time to “think through and visualize solutions” to issues, so I never made snap decisions. Once again, I felt like the square peg trying to fit in the round hole most of the time. Just another story from my trenches. Thanks for letting me share.