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Exemplary Program for Homeless Students May Fall Victim to Low Test Scores

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2016 //
13

Do you want a definition of educational insanity? It is not just the old chestnut about doing the same thing over and over again, after seeing that it fails every time. It is taking a holistic program intended to support the social, emotional, mental, and physical needs of homeless children and judging its success or failure by standardized test scores. This is madness!

 

Yet as Marilena Marchetti explains in this article, that is exactly what is happening in New York City. The city has a huge population of homeless families and children. Mayor Bill de Blasio created a “community schools” initiative to help these children with the multiple supports that they need. Marilena teaches in one of these schools.

 

She writes:

 

 

I work as an occupational therapist in Bronx District 10 where the highest number of homeless students are enrolled. A cornerstone of the Initiative is that school sites become resource hubs for vulnerable families, thereby making access to social services and programs easier. The program adopts a “whole child” approach that sees schools as places where social-emotional, mental and physical health are valued as much as academics. Quality and accountability to performance measures are emphasized to reassure families, communities and donors that success matters. Without a doubt, it is a tremendous step in the right direction.

 

High expectations have taken hold, flowing from the desperate circumstances of so many school communities alongside the financial investments and political clout associated with the program. Despite the many positives, I fear the Community Schools Initiative is operating with an internal contradiction that may doom it to fail if it is not corrected. The major problem is this: All the wonderful programming and promises of the Community Schools Initiative could be taken away if, after three years’ time, standardized test scores are not raised. Interestingly, nowhere in the 43-page Community Schools Strategic Plan are the terms “standardized test” or “high stakes test” used, as those phrases have been rightfully maligned by the Opt Out movement. No matter the semantics, the writing is on the wall. The plan talks about “tiered interventions that impact large numbers of students and families,” “aligned program supports and services that promote student proficiency in Common Core standards,” “processes for on-going review of student data” and “established performance improvement metrics and processes,” all of which are references to testing and its repercussions.

 

Later in the document, the following is stated:

 

“Within the Community Schools Initiative, on-going data collection will inform practice, track progress, and connect data with targeted outcomes [emphasis added]. Data collection will include both qualitative and quantitative data, both of which will allow City government leadership and researchers the opportunity to track Community Schools’ outcomes (pp. 29).”

 

It isn’t necessary to say directly what teachers, families and students in Community Schools can read between the lines: You must pass or you will perish. Just like adding one drop of red dye to a glass of water turns the entire liquid red, so goes the entire school culture when standardized testing is applied and laden with grave possible consequences. Tying test scores to funding streams and to the possibility that a school would be protected from being shut down reinforces the fear, anxiety and sense of instability that is meant to be alleviated for our children living on the brink. Must the issue of survival for them always remain an open question? Imagine struggling to improve teaching and learning under this pretext.

 

Chalk it up to the forcefulness of the Opt Out movement that high-stakes testing has finally been dialed down, albeit only slightly. Thanks to the many parents, teachers and students who spoke up, we can no longer deny that high stakes testing leads to a narrowing of the curriculum and all manner of stress for our young people. It undermines children’s interest in learning and teachers’ ability to engage them. When standardized-test results play even the tiniest part in determining if a Community School be allowed to stay open and continue receiving financial support for special services and programming, it sabotages the goal to boost academic achievement for students who need it most.

 

Using standardized test scores to judge a program serving homeless children is like judging fish by their ability to fly or judging horses by their ability to read or judging all children by their ability to run a mile in four minutes.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Common Core, New York City, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: The Fordham Assessment Study Did Not Consider Readability of the Tests

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2016 //
6

One more view of the report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on the “next generation assessments,” this one from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider.

Mercedes, as you would expect, questions the independence of TBF. She reprints a statement from ACT, which did not agree that their tests were less valuable that the Common Core tests funded by the federal government.

And she includes a statement by Louise Law, director of elementary education for a middle-income district in western Massachusetts, who believes that the test complexity of PARCC makes it an inappropriate and flawed instrument.

In her commentary, Law writes:

The reading passages found in PARCC are far beyond grade levels of the students being tested, and it is difficult to believe that the evaluators were unaware of that fact. The reading difficulty level of any text depends on such qualitative variables as sequencing, language complexity, topic and theme and quantitative factors such as word and sentence length. Teachers know this principle — and so do the writers and editors who choose the reading passages and compose the questions for all these tests. A variety of well established research-based formulas readily available online can be used to determine the readability level of a given text. By any number of such formulas, several reading passages in the 2015 PARCC test are beyond the grade level being tested, some by several years.

She analyzes both the reading and math portion of the PARCC and concludes:

Passages that students cannot read are not a useful educational tool. Tests designed this way create anxiety for children as young as eight years old and frustrate teachers. Meanwhile, as students, teachers and schools are insidiously and incorrectly identified as “failing,” publishers will reap tremendous profits selling remedial and test prep materials to school districts eager to help their students score satisfactorily. At the same time, as the public is convinced of the false narrative that our public schools are failing, the proliferation of for-profit businesses that manage charter schools will continue, and the march to privatization of our schools will accelerate.

Assessments based on PARCC should be suspended until the questions have been more carefully vetted and the tests have been validated by education professionals who are not even remotely affiliated with organizations funded by those promoting a particular agenda. Until that time, we are serving the interests of corporate profit rather than of students’ academic and emotional growth, and we are wasting our time with an exercise that undermines teaching and learning.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Testing

Peter Greene Weighs in on the Great Debate about “Next Generation Assessments”

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2016 //
10

These days, no debate can move forward without hearing what Peter Greene thinks. A teacher in Pennsylvania, he has established himself as one of the most astute observers of education issues in the nation today through his writings.

Peter Greene here expresses his profound frustration with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s review of “next generation assessments.”

He begins by noting that none of those associated with the study are neutral participants. TBF has received millions of dollars to promote and advocate for the Common Core. Greene questions whether the researchers are objective, given their past connection to reform projects. [I, on the other hand, do not question the researchers’ independence, but I agree with Peter that they are enmeshed in reform assumptions that should be subjects of debate.]

Greene quotes Polikoff:

“A key hope of these new tests is that they will overcome the weaknesses of the previous generation of state tests. Among these weaknesses were poor alignment with the standards they were designed to represent and low overall levels of cognitive demand (i.e., most items requiring simple recall or procedures, rather than deeper skills such as demonstrating understanding). There was widespread belief that these features of NCLB-era state tests sent teachers conflicting messages about what to teach, undermining the standards and leading to undesired instructional responses.”

Or consider this blurb from the Fordham website:

“Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments examines previously unreleased items from three multi-state tests (ACT Aspire, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced) and one best-in-class state assessment, Massachusetts’ state exam (MCAS), to answer policymakers’ most pressing questions: Do these tests reflect strong content? Are they rigorous? What are their strengths and areas for improvement? No one has ever gotten under the hood of these tests and published an objective third-party review of their content, quality, and rigor. Until now.”

Peter questions the assumptions on which the study is built:

So, two main questions– are the new tests well-aligned to the Core, and do they serve as a clear “unambiguous” driver of curriculum and instruction?

We start from the very beginning with a host of unexamined assumptions. The notion that Polikoff and Doorey or the Fordham Institute are in any way an objective third parties seems absurd, but it’s not possible to objectively consider the questions because that would require us to unobjectively accept the premise that national or higher standards have anything to do with educational achievement, that the Core standards are in any way connected to college and career success, that a standardized test can measure any of the important parts of an education, and that having a Big Standardized Test drive instruction and curriculum is a good idea for any reason at all. These assumptions are at best highly debatable topics and at worst unsupportable baloney, but they are all accepted as givens before this study even begins.

Again, I am willing to grant that Polikoff and Doorey are objective, and that Fordham is not paying respects to its principal outside funder, the Gates Foundation. But note that the researchers and Fordham are enmeshed in the assumption that higher standards and more rigorous tests improve test scores and education. Since I don’t think that is accurate, I question the foundations of the report, not its findings. In my view, tests should not drive instruction, and tests don’t improve educational achievement. Curriculum and instruction should drive tests. Instruction drives education. The quality of one’s living conditions has more to do with test scores than the tests.

But back to Peter Greene:

The study was built around three questions:

Do the assessments place strong emphasis on the most important content for college and career readiness(CCR), as called for by the Common Core State Standards and other CCR standards? (Content)

Do they require all students to demonstrate the range of thinking skills, including higher-order skills, called for by those standards? (Depth)

What are the overall strengths and weaknesses of each assessment relative to the examined criteria forELA/Literacy and mathematics? (Overall Strengths and Weaknesses)

The first question assumes that Common Core (and its generic replacements) actually includes anything that truly prepares students for college and career. The second question assumes that such standards include calls for higher-order thinking skills. And the third assumes that the examined criteria are a legitimate measures of how weak or strong literacy and math instruction might be.

So we’re on shaky ground already. Do things get better?

Well, the methodology involves using the CCSSO “Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High-Quality Assessments.” So, here’s what we’re doing. We’ve got a new ruler from the emperor, and we want to make sure that it really measures twelve inches, a foot. We need something to check it against, some reference. So the emperor says, “Here, check it against this.” And he hands us a ruler.

So who was selected for this objective study of the tests, and how were they selected.

We began by soliciting reviewer recommendations from each participating testing program and other sources, including content and assessment experts, individuals with experience in prior alignment studies, and several national and state organizations.

That’s right. They asked for reviewer recommendations from the test manufacturers. They picked up the phone and said, “Hey, do you anybody who would be good to use on a study of whether or not your product is any good?”

I nominate Peter Greene to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Imagine that: classroom experience and a built-in junk-science detector.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Testing

Richard Phelps: The Fordham Report on Assessments is “Pretend Research”

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2016 //
20

Richard Phelps, a testing expert, believes in the value of standardized testing but he does not like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s report on “next generation assessments.” To put it mildly. He calls it “pretend research.”

Phelps long ago wrote a report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, defending standardized testing. But in this case, he excoriates the TBF study. To begin with, he points out the TBF has received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote the Common Core standards, so he questions its objectivity as a funder of research.

Here are his main objections:

This latest Fordham Institute Common Core apologia is not so much research as a caricature of it.

Instead of referencing a wide range of relevant research, Fordham references only friends from inside their echo chamber and others paid by the Common Core’s wealthy benefactors. But, they imply that they have covered a relevant and adequately wide range of sources.

Instead of evaluating tests according to the industry standard Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, or any of dozens of other freely-available and well-vetted test evaluation standards, guidelines, or protocols used around the world by testing experts, they employ “a brand new methodology” specifically developed for Common Core, for the owners of the Common Core, and paid for by Common Core’s funders.

Instead of suggesting as fact only that which has been rigorously evaluated and accepted as fact by skeptics, the authors continue the practice of Common Core salespeople of attributing benefits to their tests for which no evidence exists

Instead of addressing any of the many sincere, profound critiques of their work, as confident and responsible researchers would do, the Fordham authors tell their critics to go away—“If you don’t care for the standards…you should probably ignore this study”.

Instead of writing in neutral language as real researchers do, the authors adopt the practice of coloring their language as so many Common Core salespeople do, attaching nice-sounding adjectives and adverbs to what serves their interest, and bad-sounding words to what does not.

This is his starting point. He then goes on to document his strong objections to this study. He especially objects to the claims made on behalf of Common Core testing, for example, that the CC tests are so strong that test prep will become unnecessary. But, Phelps objects, there is no evidence for such claims:

The authors continue the Common Core sales tendency of attributing benefits to their tests for which no evidence exists. For example, the Fordham report claims that SBAC and PARCC will:

“make traditional ‘test prep’ ineffective” (p. 8)

“allow students of all abilities, including both at-risk and high-achieving youngsters, to demonstrate what they know and can do” (p. 8)

produce “test scores that more accurately predict students’ readiness for entry-level coursework or training” (p. 11)

“reliably measure the essential skills and knowledge needed … to achieve college and career readiness by the end of high school” (p. 11)

“…accurately measure student progress toward college and career readiness; and provide valid data to inform teaching and learning.” (p. 3)

eliminate the problem of “students … forced to waste time and money on remedial coursework.” (p. 73)

help “educators [who] need and deserve good tests that honor their hard work and give useful feedback, which enables them to improve their craft and boost their students’ success.” (p. 73)

The Fordham Institute has not a shred of evidence to support any of these grandiose claims. They share more in common with carnival fortune telling than empirical research. Granted, most of the statements refer to future outcomes, which cannot be known with certainty. But, that just affirms how irresponsible it is to make such claims absent any evidence.

Furthermore, in most cases, past experience would suggest just the opposite of what Fordham asserts. Test prep is more, not less, likely to be effective with SBAC and PARCC tests because the test item formats are complex (or, convoluted), introducing more “construct irrelevant variance”—that is, students will get lower scores for not managing to figure out formats or computer operations issues, even if they know the subject matter of the test. Disadvantaged and at-risk students tend to be the most disadvantaged by complex formatting and new technology.

What do you think? Is Phelps fair? Share your experience.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing

Thomas B. Fordham Releases a Report on Quality of Common Core Tests, ACT, and MCAS: A Debate

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2016 //
17

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned and published an evaluation of the “content and quality of the next generation assessments,” specifically, the Common Core assessments (PARCC and SBAC), as well as ACT Aspire, and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). The report’s introduction was written by Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern of the Institute; the report itself was written by researchers Nancy Doorey and Morgan Polikoff. The introduction and link to the report appear in this post; the following posts will debate the study and its findings.

This link takes you to the introduction.

This link takes you to the full report.

The authors of the report concluded that the Common Core assessments (PARCC and SBAC) were superior to the ACT Aspire and the MCAS.

This is the central finding:

Here’s just a sampling of what we found:

Overall, PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments had the strongest matches to the CCSSO Criteria.

ACT Aspire and MCAS both did well regarding the quality of their items and the depth of knowledge they assessed.

Still, panelists found that ACT Aspire and MCAS did not adequately assess—or may not assess at all—some of the priority content reflected in the Common Core standards in both ELA/Literacy and mathematics.

The report is long, but the meat of the report can be easily accessed. It is important that you wrap your mind around the report because the next post will challenge its findings.

Since many of you are teachers and have administered some of these tests, feel free to add your voice to the debate.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Testing

NY BATS on John King

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2016 //
29

The NY BATS. Are not happy about President Obama’s selection of John King as Secretary of Education. Say this for King. His arrogant indifference to parents set off the largest testing opt out in history. Maybe he can do the same for the nation.

BATS write:

“WE GOOFED BUT TRUST US TO FIX IT: Now headed for Senate confirmation hearings, Obama’s Acting Education Secretary John King admits in a new video that standardized testing has been harmful and wasteful, yet will continue federal tinkering to find a better balance between subjecting kids to non-stop testing hell and collecting data to improve instruction.

Reading stiffly from cue cards, King continues his “apology tour” after alienating teachers with corporate reform policies straight out of ALEC’s basement. Yet the Secretary continues to pretend outraged teacher and parent groups do not see right through to the heart of the problem – the corporate revolving door and the influence of money in politics.

Obama had always mailed in his education policy, straight from the boardrooms of Center for American Progress, the Gates Foundation and social engineers like Joanna Weiss. The policies were also favored by Wall Street and billionaires like the Waltons and Broads, yet were met with whimpers by the heads of the large teacher unions.

This untested market-based approach to changing schools exploded in opt-outs and gave Republicans an issue with great traction. Now Obama is backpedaling, but only in rhetoric as his actions only cement his commitment to upending classrooms through continuous, invasive measuring. His promises to help underperforming schools remain broken, as support for addressing actual learning obstacles flows instead into the hands of testing contractors and armies of consultants.

In essence, Obama is saying to America “yes we goofed” but let’s have a “fresh start”, beginning with the nomination of King, a darling of privatizers and dark money PACs that rain campaign cash onto your state legislators. This is not only tone-deaf and a thumb in the eye, it’s doubling down on corporate reform and federal centralization.

As a short-lived teacher and charter network director, King lacked the experience the education community was looking for, so his PR handlers instead launched an all-points media blitz based on his personal narrative, which credited NYC public schools for changing the trajectory of his life. Strange then, that he would pick a career in charter schools, which require pro-active completion of lottery applications, thereby leaving behind the most needy children whose parents are not as involved.

Today, the hope of students, parents and teachers across the political spectrum is that local control of schools can be restored by downsizing almost everything the megalithic USDOE does, abandoning NCLB’s federally mandated test requirements and concentrating on supporting the research-based recommendations of actual educators instead of mandating ham-handed “fixes” after meeting with lobbyists.

In short, Obama’s record on education is widely considered even “worse than Bush”, but the way forward now is no longer manufacturing fake crises and endlessly patching up failed (and unconstitutional) federal testing policies, it’s folding up shop and giving tax dollars back to districts so teachers can teach.”

Categories Common Core, Opt Out, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Florida Quietly Releases School Grades Based on Flawed Tests

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2016 //
14

When public officials want to bury a news story, they release it to the media on Friday afternoon. That’s supposed to assure minimal attention.

 

Florida officials released school grades last Friday afternoon.

 

Paul E. Barton, an eminent education researcher who retired to Florida, sent me this observation:

 

“With the problems with the new tests the student grades were not used, but the school grades were despite the fact that the outside audit said that the PARC test was invalid. It was explained that the tests would be used as a baseline to show progress next year, but if the test was not valid, how could it be used to show progress?”

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Florida, Testing

OECD Study Identifies Causes of Low Test Scores, Misidentifies Solutions

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2016 //
24

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which oversees the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA), has released a lengthy study comparing the nations that take the PISA test.

 

The conclusions of the report confirm what almost everyone knows: the students with the lowest test scores are those who live in poverty, those who have an immigrant background, and those who live in a single-parent home (which is usually a female parent, who usually lacks the income to support the family). These findings are not surprising.

 

How does the US compare? Apparently there have been no changes in reading scores since 2003—despite No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and their heavy emphasis on reading and math. There were some gains in science, which is surprising since science was not a priority subject for either of the  big federal programs.

 

 

So how does the U.S. stack up when it comes to low-performing students? Here are the results from the 2012 PISA exam – the most recent date it was administered:

 

In math, 26 percent of students were low performers compared with the OECD average of 23 percent.
In reading, 17 percent were low performers compared with the OECD average of 18 percent.
In science, 18 percent were low performers compared with the OECD average of 18 percent.
And 12 percent were low performers in all three subjects compared with the OECD average of 12 percent.
Notably, the share of low performers in math and in reading in the U.S. has not changed since the 2003 PISA test, but the share of low performers in science decreased by about 6 percentage points between 2000 and 2012….

 

Internationally, the study found that:

 

The probability of low performance in math, for example, is higher for students if they are socioeconomically disadvantaged, female, have an immigrant background, speak a different language at home from the language of instruction, live in a single-parent family, attend school in a rural area, have not attended preschool, have repeated a grade or have enrolled in a vocational program.

 

 

What conclusions does Andreas Schleicher, the director of PISA, reach?

 

 

One facet could be increasing access to early childhood education, through which “countries have been able to really make a big difference,” Schleicher said. Other policies that have had a big impact on student achievement include improving training and professional development for teachers and boosting the rigor of academic standards.

 

“The U.S. recently adopted the Common Core,” Schleicher said of the academic benchmarks being used in more than 40 states and the District of Columbia. “That has happened in many countries, and we can actually see a big impact on this.”

 

In what way will the increased “rigor of academic standards” help low-income students who are already far behind? How will it help students who live in single-parent homes, or homes where no one speaks the local language? Will Common Core reduce poverty or change the circumstances of children’s lives? I wish he would explain his logic.

 

Categories Common Core, International, Poverty, Testing

Obama Will Nominate John King Formally as Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2016 //
74

John King is currently Acting Secretary of Education. President Obama will formally nominate him to serve as Secretary. 

King’s autocratic behavior as state commissioner of education spurred a massive parent opt out from state testing. King adamantly supports testing, VAM, Common Core, and charter schools. He taught in a “no excuses” Uncommon Schools charter with one of the highest suspension rates in Massachusetts. 

As commissioner, King defended inBloom, a Gates-funded data-mining project. After other states had withdrawn due to parent protests, King supported inBloom. The state legislature listened to parents and passed a law forcing the state to drop inBloom. After NY’s withdrawal, inBloom collapsed. 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform

Fred LeBrun: The Opt Out Movement is Parents’ Most Powerful Tool Against Bad Education Policies

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2016 //
11

Fred LeBrun, a columnist for the Albany Times-Union, wrote a terrific column about the power of the parents who opted out.

 

Without the pressure they exerted, Governor Cuomo would never have appointed a commission to review the Common Core standards and testing.

 

Without the force of their numbers, the state education department would have proceeded to evaluate teachers by student test scores, despite the research proving its invalidity.

 

Opt Out parents caused Cuomo’s poll numbers to plummet, and that got his attention. Poll numbers can outweigh hedge fund cash.

 

Here is part of LeBrun’s perceptive column:

 

According to the latest Siena poll, education has jumped to the top of the list for what matters most to New Yorkers, ahead of jobs, taxes, and that perennial favorite, governmental corruption.

 
Granted, education is a wide umbrella covering higher and lower ed, funding, curricula, charter schools, and a lot more, plus the poll indicates the greatest concern for education is held by downstate Democrats.

 
They’ve got the numbers to dictate the poll. But at the least we can reliably say the poll affirms how important public education consistently remains for upstaters and downstaters alike.

 
When it’s that important to voters, it’s critical to politicians.

 
In the brash youth of his governorship, Andrew Cuomo confidently swaggered to war against teachers and the “educational bureaucracy,’’ which it turns out is mostly parents, by trying to impose a cockamamie Common Core system that brutally punished school children and a punitive and grossly unfair teacher evaluation system, all in the name of “reform.”

 
Washington, in the embrace of billionaire advocates of privatizing public education, applauded.

 
So did New York hedge-funders promoting charters.

 
The governor used all his cunning and considerable available resources to get his way, and even beat up the Legislature to become complicit.

 
Yet he got his ass handed to him. By whom? By the most potent force there is in public education, the public.

 
Cuomo’s poll numbers fell through the floor. In December, the governor sent up the white flag and sued for peace with a landmark Common Core review commission report that made 21 splendid, common sense recommendations to put New York public education back on track.

 
In his State of the State this year about all he had to say on the subject was urging the Board of Regents to pass all 21 recommendations.

 
That’s exactly what the Regents should do, and we have every high hope they will once two new progressive members of the 17-member Regents are appointed by the Legislature, and once the Regents leadership becomes more enlightened and attuned, which is also imminent.

 
There are several factors behind why the governor lost the war, including a change of heart in Washington, but high among them is the Opt Out movement that last spring kept 220,000 New York pupils from taking the state’s ridiculous standardized tests.

 
Opt Out has been the most powerful in-your-face, can’t-ignore referendum on the governor’s policies since he took office.

 
So here’s the irony of Opt Out for the governor, post-truce.

 
If there is another Opt Out uprising this spring, the popularity fallout will still be the governor’s to reap even though he has been forced to see the light and change course. In the public’s eye he remains the architect of that dismally failed model for public education.

 
It should come as no surprise that Opt Out is a very real possibility again this year.

 
That’s because there’s a Grand Canyon between the considerable rhetoric of change we’ve heard and the reality of where we actually stand with altering or eliminating high stakes testing and the Common Core, teacher evaluations, and inappropriate pressures on our youngest citizens.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Privatization, Testing
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