Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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A Student in Kansas Writes about How Standardized Testing Makes Her Feel

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2019 //
34

 

Kevin Bosworth, a teacher at Olathe East High School in Olathe, Kansas, wrote to tell me about a class discussion of grades and tests. A student shared her poem with the class, and Kevin shared it with me. The reformers and disrupters now say they are intrigued with social and emotional learning. Let them read this and see what they have learned.

 

Hello my name is worthless

Name number and date

State your class and hour

Let the rubric pick your fate

 

Your value as a human

Can be measured by percent

All that matters is the value

That the numbers represent

 

We promise that you matter

You’re more than just a grade

But you better score one hundred

Or else you won’t get paid

 

They require our attendance

We’re brain dead taking notes

So we can barf back up the knowledge

That they shove down our throats

 

Each human life is precious

And every childhood has worth

But if you fill in the wrong bubbles

Then you don’t belong on earth

 

They question our depression

They wonder why we’re stressed

When our futures are decided

Doing better on a test

 

They tell me that I’m gifted

That there’s no need to despair

But if you only read the numbers

I’m a living waste of air

 

I might think I have talents

But there’s no worth in art

Because it can’t be measured

By a number on a chart

 

The people say I’m flying

The numbers say I’ll crash

My letter grades ‘ll prove it

I’m worthless human trash

They use standardized procedures

To find the worth of kids

But I don’t fit in boxes

Without spilling out the lids

 

Some kids don’t fit the system

But differences can’t stay

They put us in the garbage

And throw it all away

 

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Kansas, Standardized Testing, Testing

Jose Luis Vilson: NYC’s Exam for Specialized High Schools Is Racist

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2019 //
88

 

New York City has a peculiar high school admissions system. To gain admission to the city’s five most elite high schools, one must excel on a highly competitive examination called the Secondary High School Admissions Test. Nothing else counts but that one score on one test. I am not aware of any selective institution in the nation that relies on only one score for admission.

Every year, the media reports with shock how few Black and Hispanic students were admitted. This year may have been the worst yet. Only seven Black students were offered a place of 895 admitted to StuyvesantHigh School. Last year, it was 10. Valerie Strauss wrote about the results:  “For 2019, Stuyvesant offered admissions to 587 Asian students, 194 white students, 45 of unknown race or ethnicity, 33 Latino students, 20 multiracial students and nine Native Americans.”

At the meeting of the Jackson Heights Parents for Public Schools on March 16, the discussion of the specialized high schools became heated when a debate erupted between parents who said the exam was exclusionary and racist, and Asian parents who held up posters saying that criticism of the exam is racist. Asian students study hard for the test, do well, and don’t want it to change.

Jose Luis Vilson, who teaches middle school math, has no doubt that the exam is racist.

He writes:

“When news broke this week that only seven black students were accepted into New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, an elite public school that supposedly only takes the most advanced students in the city, I wasn’t surprised. In my 14-year career as a middle school math teacher in Manhattan with majority black or Latinx students, I’ve had thousands of kids who were rejected from magnet public schools like Stuyvesant. It breaks my heart every time.

“Every year, sometime in March, thousands of New York City adolescents receive a letter that tells them which high school selected them. That school day is always a tough one. Some students run up and down the halls, excitedly telling their friends about where they will be spending the next four years. Others, disappointed in their placement, sit solemnly or find a comforting shoulder to lean on.

“I’ve had to console far too many brilliant students who didn’t get chosen for the high school they wanted to go to. They checked off all the proverbial boxes: great attendance, high grades, strong work ethic, and had positive relationships with adults and peers. They studied hard for the Specialized High School Admission Test — an assessment given to eighth or ninth graders for entry into eight of the elite magnet public schools in New York City — for months. Because a student’s score on that test is the only criterion for high school admissions, the stressful three hours spent taking this exam could determine a student’s future.

“As a teacher, I try to assure my students that they will be fine regardless of which school they attend. But I often wonder if we educators are doing a disservice — and perpetuating the lie of meritocracy — by continuing to tell kids that if they work hard and excel then they can get what they want in life.

School segregation in New York City is reaching emergency levels

“Make no mistake: New York City is burning. But unlike the literal and metaphorical burning of the Bronx in the 1970s, the latest fire is happening in our education system as schools continue to segregate at alarming rates. Only 190 of the 4,798 slots, or 3 percent, in the eight major specialized high schools went to black students. This is in a city where a quarter of NYC’s public-school students are black.”

My view:

First, I think it is absurd to base admissions to any academic institution on a single test score. No Ivy League school does that. They ask for grades, essays, teachers’s recommendations, evidence of student interests and passions and service.

Second, when my next grandson applies for high school in New York City, I will actively discourage him from taking the exam or applying to one of the specialized schools. In my view, they are too large and they are academic pressure cookers. I hope he listens to me and applies to a school that has a balanced curriculum and gives him time to explore his interests. I also hope he goes to school with a diverse student body. Oneof thevaluesof public education is exposure to many kinds of people, with many kinds of talents, not just one dimension.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, New York City, Racism, Standardized Testing, Testing

Bob Shepherd: How Long Will the Love Affair with Standardized Testing Go On?

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2019 //
266

As a nation, we are hypnotized by standardized tests and the scores they produce. We forget that the tests and the answers are written by human beings. The tests are not objective, except for the scoring, which is done by machine. Giving the same bad questions to all students does not reveal who learned the most or who is smartest. They do reveal who is best at figuring out what the person who wrote the question wants them to answer.

Bob Shepherd, who has written about curriculum, assessment, and is now teaching in Florida, writes:

“the field testing that ensued laid bare the intellectual bankruptcy of the testing”

It’s been 18 years now since the passage of NCLB. We’ve had this two-decade-long national “field test” of standardized testing–a study larger in duration and scope than any other, ever. The verdict? Standardized testing has been far worse than a failure. Not only has it failed, completely, to improve educational outcomes. It has narrowed and distorted curricula and pedagogy and produced a whole generation of kids who think that studies in English aren’t about writing essays and poems and stories or reading and discussing great poems and plays and novels but about scanning text snippets to figure out what the correct answers are to convoluted, tortured, indefensible multiple-choice questions.

“My teachers should have ridden with Jessie James
for all the time that they stole from me.”
–Richard Brautigan

Who should write tests? Teachers should write their own tests. They know what they taught.

Who should grade tests? Teachers should be trusted to grade tests.

Any test without diagnostic value should be banned.

Categories Accountability, Standardized Testing, Stupid, Testing

Fred Smith: The Testing Expert Who Fights the Testing Combine

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2018 //
7

Fred Smith is a genuine Testing Expert. He has the technical expertise to dig deep into the numbers and understand what they mean and what they don’t mean. He spent most of his career at the New York City Board of Education. Now he is a valued consultant to the Opt Out Movement in New York. He knows fraud in testing and he’s not afraid to call it out.

Fred Smith is a hero of American education, and he here joins the honor roll.

Read this article about him, which contains links to his latest work.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Honor Roll, New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Standardized Testing, Testing

Paymon Rouhanifard: I Was Wrong About Standardized Testing and Accountability

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2018 //
104

Payman Rouhanifard was in charge of Joel Klein’s “Office of Portfolio Management” in New York City. He was appointed as superintendent of schools in Camden, New Jersey, by Chris Christie. He arrived in Camden as a “devout believer” in testing, data-based decision making, and accountability. Before he stepped down last June he had a change of mind. He began to see that the schools had turned testing into both means and end, and that testing had crowded out the arts, science, foreign languages, and Global Studies. His reflections are fascinating, as he shows the capacity to examine his beliefs and change them.

Here is the speech he delivered at MIT a few weeks ago.

I urge you to read it.

He is a reformed reformer. I question his view that we need to have standardized tests for chemistry, physics, and the arts. He thinks that may be the only way to balance the curriculum and restore what has been sacrificed to the gods of testing, but I don’t agree.

There is much good sense here. I admire anyone who is willing to do the hard work of rethinking their views. It is not easy. Unlike me, he doesn’t seem to have alienated his friends in the Reform movement. Many of them are also beginning to be disenchanted with standardized testing.

I certainly applaud his conclusion that any reform should be gauged by the measure of “would I do this to my own children?”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New Jersey, Standardized Testing, Testing

Jake Jacobs: Voters in New York Oust Charter Supporters from State Senate

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2018 //
8

Jake Jacobs describes the dramatic ouster of fake Democrats from the State Senate and a changed landscape in New York.

Until the last election, Governor Andrew Cuomo worked closely with an odd coalition of Tepublicans and fake Democrats in the State Senate to give charter schools whatever they wanted. Cuomo collected millions of dollars from hedge fund managers and Wall Street who love charter schools.

The so-called Independent Democratic Conference caucused with Republicans to assure Republican Control of the State Senate.

The new State Senators are anti-charter and anti-standardized testing.

Perhaps just as significant as the Ocasio-Cortez “earthquake” was the September 13th aftershock, where six other insurgent, grassroots-backed New York candidates won primaries in State Senate races against members of the former Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a controversial group of eight breakaway lawmakers who shared power, perks—and donors—with senate Republicans for over seven years.

All six “No IDC” challengers handily beat their Republican opponents in the general election November 6, including Alessandra Biaggi, a former legal counsel in the Governor Andrew Cuomo administration who ran on the promise to “stop siphoning money to privately run charter schools” and a call to prevent charters from expanding in New York.

Despite being outspent, Biaggi defeated Jeff Klein, the ringleader of the IDC, who funneled upwards of $700,000 in charter industry PAC money to IDC members. Working with Republicans, Klein repeatedly blocked funding for needy public schools while dramatically increasing per-pupil spending for charters. A thirteen year incumbent, Klein lost 54-46 percent, out-hustled by Biaggi who attended public schools in Pelham before hitting the Ivy league, and at thirty-two years old still owes over $180,000 in student debt.

Defeating another IDC member awash in charter PAC money was progressive Robert Jackson, a longtime New York City Councilman who was an original lead plaintiff in the original 1993 Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit seeking increased funding for impoverished schools.

A fierce critic of school privatization, Jackson is eager to take on “groups such as StudentsFirst who push a non-transparent, corporate agenda that makes money off of children’s backs, strips schools and districts of resources, and undermines public education,” his chief of staff Johanna Garcia tells me in an email. In 2011, Jackson sued the city to stop charter school co-locations, or the takeover of space in public school buildings. He has also been a staunch supporter of the opt-out movement, championing legislation in the New York City Council to reduce standardized testing.

Likely to have a profound impact in Albany, Senator-elect Jackson’s position on standardized testing is resolute: “The sooner and farther away we move from standardized testing, the quicker we can focus on supporting learning environments that are responsive and include teaching critical thinking skills, small class sizes, arts and science programs, recess, and funding for resources, social services and enrichment opportunities.”

In Queens, another progressive Democrat to unseat a pro-charter IDC member is Jessica Ramos, a former aide to Mayor Bill de Blasio with a background as a labor organizer and immigration activist. Also a public school product, Ramos is a mom of two who “cannot wait to opt-out” when her oldest son enters third grade next year. Seeing the stress and waste of the testing regime, she “absolutely” backs legislation to eliminate state testing mandates.

Ramos opposes diverting funding from public schools to charters who she sees pushing out high need students in order to preserve their “brand.” Like Robert Jackson, Ramos supports the NAACP moratorium on new charter schools as well as the longtime fight for equitable public school funding.

Also in Queens, former New York City Comptroller John Liu defeated former IDC state senator Tony Avella, who in 2009, claimed to be adamantly anti-charter. But in 2014, Avella joined the IDC and voted for budgets that increased funding for charter co-locations and school choice. Senator-elect Liu wants to prevent the growth of charters and make them pay rent to the city, while also reducing the emphasis on standardized testing.

Cuomo won’t be able to squash progressive legislation anymore. There’s a new posse in Albany.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York, Privatization, Standardized Testing

Long Island Is the Opt-Out from Testing Epicenter of New York

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2018 //
14

The test results are in from last March-April in New York. 85% of all 718 school districts in the state did not meet the federally mandated 95% participation rate in the state tests.

18% of the 950,000 eligible students did not take the tests at all. That’s 210,000 students who said no.

Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island, reports:

Long Island is opt-out central for New York, laying claim to 19 of the 20 school systems statewide with the highest numbers of students boycotting standardized tests, a Newsday analysis shows.

Upstate, the movement has gained a foothold, too, but still isn’t as popular as it is in Nassau and Suffolk counties, the review found.

The biggest boycotts draw students mostly from middle class communities in Suffolk. Comsewogue and Rocky Point, for example, had opt-out rates higher than 80 percent. Commack, Eastport-South Manor and Middle Country had rates of more than 65 percent.

Of 100 districts statewide with the highest numbers of test refusals, 70 are on the Island. All have opt-out rates of 45 percent or higher, according to the analysis. Statewide, opt-out rates averaged 18 percent. The average for the Nassau-Suffolk region stood about 50 percent.

Newsday reviewed the test results in English Language Arts and mathematics, released in late September by the state Education Department. More than 950,000 students in grades three though eight took the exams, while more than 210,000 opted out. Of those who boycotted the tests, more than 90,000 live on the Island.

The opt-out movement, now in its sixth year, appears most successful in middle class communities, which political experts attribute largely to close contacts there between parents and teachers. Many live in the communities; they have children in school and they carry weight with parents when they express doubt about the benefit of state exams. And educators belong to strong unions, which have pushed hard to keep student scores from being tied to mandatory teacher evaluations, the experts said.

The state offered threats and bribes, but to no avail.

Opt out is alive and well on Long Island and parts of upstate New York, driven by parents, not teachers.

Every year the eighth grade ages out. Every year, a new group of third graders is eligible. The fact that the movement has persisted and drawn roughly one-Fifth is a testament to parent power.

Why do parents opt out? They understand that the tests are not diagnostic and serve no purpose other than to compare their children to other children, a function of no value to the children.

Hats off to NYSAPE, New York State Allies for Public Education, which has led the opt out movement.

Categories Education Reform, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Testing

New York Releases Tests, Six Months After Students Took Them

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
34

The New York Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department remain firmly committed to the testing regime that has aroused so much parent rebellion and produced no gains on NAEP for 20 years. The state always finds good news in the test scores, but NAEP has been consistently flat.

Opt outs declined by a percentage point, but still nearly one of every five eligible students did not take the tests.

Long Island continues to be the epicenter of the opt out movement. About 50% of the students in Nassau and Suffolk counties did not take the tests.

Federal law (the “Every Student Succeeds Act”) says that parents have the right to opt out if their state permits it, but at the same time requires that every school must have a 95% participation rate or face sanctions–a flat contradiction.

New York has not yet clarified how it intends to punish the high-performing schools on Long Island where half the students didn’t take the tests.

This article appeared in Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island.

The number of students boycotting state tests has declined slightly statewide, but Long Island remains a stronghold of the opt-out movement, state officials announced Wednesday.

The state Education Department, in a media advisory, said the percentage of students in grades three through eight opting out of exams last spring dipped to 18 percent, down from 19 percent in 2017 and 21 percent in 2016. Tests, which are mandated by federal law, cover English Language Arts and mathematics.

The advisory provided no specific percentage for Nassau and Suffolk counties, but did note that the bicounty region “remains the geographic area with the highest percentage of test refusals in both mathematics and ELA.” Newsday’s own surveys of Island districts last spring found boycott rates of nearly 50 percent.

Among students who took the tests statewide, 45.2 percent scored at the proficient level in English, and 44.5 percent in math, the education department reported. Agency officials said results could not be compared with those from prior years because the format of last spring’s tests was sharply revised.

Total testing days in the spring were reduced to four, down from six in prior years, in an effort to provide some relief for parents and teachers who had complained the assessments were too stressful.

New York’s opt-out movement has proved the biggest and most enduring in the nation. The movement first appeared on Long Island in 2013, then exploded statewide two years later, and has remained especially strong in Nassau and Suffolk, and in some suburbs of Westchester County and the Buffalo area.

On the Island, more than 90,000 students in grades three through eight refused to take the state English Language Arts exam in April, representing nearly 50 percent of those eligible, according to Newsday’s survey of Island districts at the time.

Across New York, the number of students boycotting the state tests from 2015 through 2017 has hovered near 200,000 of 1 million eligible pupils in each of the past three years.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

Steven Singer: The U.S. Shortchanged Public Schools by Hundreds of Billions of Dollars

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2018 //
18

Steven Singer describes a new report that reached a startling conclusion: the federal government shortchanged the nation’s public schools by hundreds of billions, at the same time that the top earners raked in billions of dollars.

He writes, in part:

Fun Fact: Between 2005 and 2017, the federal government withheld $580 billion it had promised to spend on students from poor families and students with disabilities.

Fun Fact: Over that same period, the personal net worth of the nation’s 400 wealthiest people ballooned by $1.57 trillion.

So, rich people, consider this the bill.

A new report called “Confronting the Education Debt” commissioned by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) details the shortfall in minute detail.

For instance:

$347 billion owed to educate low-income students most of whom are children of color.

$233 billion owed to provide services for students with disabilities.

And this is just the shortfall of the last dozen years! That’s just money due to children who recently graduated or are currently in the school system!

We’ve been cheating our children out of the money we owe them for more than half a century!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Funding, Poverty, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Gary Rubinstein Writes a Letter to the Mega-Donors Who Support Success Academy: “You’ve Been Scammed!”

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2018 //
42

Gary Rubinstein notes that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain has been a “success” in attracting huge donations from hedge fund managers. Gary was a charter member of Teach for America and a part of the Reform world. But he got woke in 2010 at the TFA 20th anniversary celebration. He just can’t stand lies and boasting; honesty is in his DNA.

In this post, he warns that the big donors are being scammed. They believe what the PR department of Success Academy tells them. It has an obvious interest in putting out information that portrays the chain as a miracle, a miracle that can be easily copied by others. But as he shows, no one has been able to reproduce Success Academy’s test scores, and attention should be paid to how those test scores are generated.

Rubinstein has made a reputation as a miracle-buster. In this post, he does it again.

Dear Seven Digit Success Academy Donor,

Obviously if you have seven (or eight!) figures to donate to Success Academy, you are a person who does not easily fall for scams. But this time, I’m afraid you did.

There are really only two possibilities: Either Success Academy is the greatest miracle in the history of education — or the greatest Hoax…

If Success Academy is hiding some secret methods that could be scaled around the country so that other schools could achieve results even in the same ballpark, these methods would be worth billions of dollars to Eva Moskowitz. If she is for real, she has found the equivalent of Ponce De Leon’s famed fountain of youth…

I assume you were inspired by the mind-blowing statistics from Success Academy’s PR department. I assume you were impressed by the way that their 3rd grade through 8th grade test scores would make them the top district in New York State. You assume that their methods can be replicated, but no other charter school in the state has done so…

Success Academy is built on a foundation of lies and it is only a matter of time before it comes crumbling down.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Discipline, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization, Standardized Testing
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