Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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Opting Out: The Story of the Parents’ Grassroots Movement to Achieve Whole-Child Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2020 //
5

This is a book you will want to read if you are a parent, a teacher, a teacher educator.

Opting Out: The Story of the Parents’ Grassroots Movement to Achieve Whole-Child Schools is an essential addition to your bookshelf.

It was written by Professor David Hursh of the University of Rochester and parents leaders of the New York Opt Out movement Jeanette Deutermann, Lisa Rudley, and Hursh’s graduate students, Zhe Chen and Sarah McGinnis.

Together they explain the origins and development of the one of the most significant parent-led reactions against high-stakes testing and in favor of education that is devoted to the full development of children as healthy and happy human beings. The media liked to present the Opt Out movement as a “union-led” action, but that was always a false narrative. It was created and led by parent activists who volunteered their time and energy to save their children from test centric classrooms and wanted a “whole-child” education that helped their children become eager and engaged learners.

David Hursh has written and lectured about the assault on public education and the dangers of high-stakes testing.

https://www.waikato.ac.nz/wmier/news-events/prof-david-hursh-on-the-takeover-of-public-education

University of Rochester Meliora Address (2013): High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIQu2Hh_YkI

Keynote address: New York State as a cautionary tale (2014). New Zealand union of primary teachers and administrators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW4vZGsLiL4

The parent co-authors are leaders of the New York State Opt Out movement, primarily through their role in New York State Allies for Public Education, which has organized hundreds of thousands of parents to say no to excessive and pointless testing, whose only beneficiaries are the big testing corporations.

The parents of the Opt Out movement are a stellar example of the Resistance that is bringing an end to this current era of child abuse and test-driven miseducation.

I was happy to endorse the book and am pleased now to recommend it to you.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Courage, Education Reform, For-Profit, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Students

New York City Will Require MAP Tests for 76 Struggling Schools

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2019 //
89

 

Chalkbeat reports that New York City will require the MAP test for 76 low-performing schools three times a year, in addition to the mandated state tests and interim assessments. This is the beginning of the city’s new plan to add a new barrage of tests. A spokesman for the department said the new test is not a test, it’s actually instruction.

This reminds me of the historic Garfield High School boycott of 2013, when the entire school staff refused to give the MAP, a computer-based test, because it was not aligned with their curriculum and they considered it a waste of time. The teachers won.

This decision suggests that the New York City Department of Education has no new ideas, and the Mayor and Chancellor Carranza are adding new tests because they can’t think of anything else to do.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Education Reform, New York City, Standardized Testing

Michael Moore on Education in Finland

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
25

 

Michael Moore visited Finland with a camera crew to learn about its education system.

How could a nation post high test scores on international tests when its schools emphasize creativity, play, physical activity, and the arts and ignores standardized testing?

Watch his video and see what you think.

Categories Arts Education, Creativity, Education Reform, International, Play, Standardized Testing

New York Plans to Increase Number of Tests So Students Are Ready for State Tests

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2019 //
41

 

The New York City Council Committee on Education held a hearing to discuss overtesting in the schools, and the Department of Education’s chief academic officer announced a plan to increase testing to be sure students are ready for the state test.

The Department will add four off-the-shelf standardized tests to replace the school-selected interim assessments.

New testing requirements are in the offing for city schools—even as teachers, students and advocates blasted a culture of excessive exams at a City Council hearing Tuesday.

City Education Department officials said schools may soon be required to test students several times a year to see how they’re doing before the high-stakes, state-mandated exams arrive at the end of the year.

The irony wasn’t lost on City Council Member Mark Treyger (D – Brooklyn), who convened the hearing.

“We just had a whole discussion on the impact test have on our schools,” Treyger said, “and we’re saying we’re going to implement another one.”

Mayor Bill DeBlasio controls the Department of Education.

it seems as though most of the school year will focus on standardized tests.

 

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

Meet the Democrats Who Support the Betsy DeVos Agenda

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2019 //
62

 

Every year since 2014, Democrats who fervently support the privatization of public schools have gathered at a conference they pretentiously call “Camp Philos.”

https://campphilos.org/

Check the agenda of meetings present and past.

There you will see the lineup of Democrats who sneer at public schools and look on public school teachers with contempt.

These are the Democrats who support the DeVos agenda of disrupting and privatizing public schools.

They are meeting again this year, and they will slap each other on the back for supporting school closures, charter schools, high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and hiring inexperienced teachers.

They have the chutzpah to call themselves “stakeholders,” although none of them are teachers, parents of public school students, or have any stake in the public schools that enroll 85-90% of all American students. Exactly what do they have a “stake” in?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Democrats for Education Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hypocrisy, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

Andrea Gabor: What to Do When the Testing Madness Ends

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2019 //
84

Andrea Gabor, The Bloomberg Professor of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, is one of the nation’s worthy and thoughtful education writers. Her book about W. Edwards Deming has the best refutation of merit pay that I have read (chapter 9, The Man Who Invented Quality). Her latest book book, Education After The Culture Wars, gathers stories of districts where collaboration, not competition, creates a healthy environment for education.

In this post, she argues that America’s infatuation with standardized testing is waning, and it’s time to find a better way to assess how students are progressing.

America’s decades-long infatuation with standardized testing is finally waning, and for good reasons. Despite years of training students to do better on tests, the performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, has flatlined. At the same time, the focus on testing produced unintended consequences, including inattention to important educational priorities and growing teacher shortages.

That’s in part because test performance became a goal in many districts instead of a means to an end and, thus, a prime example of Campbell’s Law, which points to the corrupting influence of using a single measurement as a target, thus ensuring that “it ceases to be a good measure.

Gabor says there is a better way. She describes the work of the New York Performance Standards Consortium as a model.

The country’s best under-the-radar experiments are a useful guide. Chief among these is the New York State Performance Standards Consortium, a decades-old effort led by progressive educators and involving 38 high schools, which won exemptions from all standardized tests except English. Instead, students complete ambitious projects known as performance-based assessments — think mini theses with lots of research, writing and real-world projects in everything from social studies to physics, which students present to expert panels, including teachers (often from different schools) and community members.

Since launching in the 1990s, the consortium has racked up far higher graduation rates and college matriculation ratesfor its schools than New York’s traditional public schools.

The consortium prevailed even as New York became Exhibit A for the nation’s testing follies. New York adopted “Common Core-aligned” tests before the standards were completed, and introduced new tests almost every year — making it difficult to track student progress.

Is she right? Is there a big change coming?

 

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene on the Big Standardized Test

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2019 //
50

Our friend Peter Greene is now a regular contributor to Forbes, where he enlightens readers from the business community about education. Many years ago, I wrote a column for Forbes and visited their offices. I discovered to my surprise that my editor was married to a classroom teacher. We have friends everywhere.

Recently, Peter has been enlightening readers of Forbes about standardized testing.

In this one, he shows that standardized tests don’t show much that matters.

“There are plenty of reasons to doubt the validity of the Big Standardized Test, be it PARCC or SBA or whatever your state is using these days. After almost two decades of its use, we’ve raised an entire generation of students around the notion of test-based accountability, and yet the fruits of that seem…. well, elusive. Where are the waves of students now arriving on college campuses super-prepared? Where are the businesses proclaiming that today’s grads are the most awesome in history? Where is the increase in citizens with great-paying jobs? Where are any visible signs that the test-based accountability system has worked?”

Even a few reformers are doubting the value of the BS test.

In this piece, he explained why standardized testing is beyond repair.

Categories Education Reform, Standardized Testing

Why Standardized Tests Are Worthless for Evaluating Teachers and Students

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2019 //
25

 

This is a wonderful article that appeared in Education Week, written by Margaret Pastor, a veteran educator in Maryland.

When I started reading, I recoiled at the thought of giving standardized tests to babies in kindergarten. Disgusting. But keep reading, as I did (if you are a subscriber).

Many of us in education have deep misgivings about the role standardized tests play in our schools. As a principal, I’ve had a front-row seat to incidents that illustrate why we should be seriously concerned. Let me tell you about one of them.

A few years ago, an assistant superintendent approached me about the performance of my kindergarten teachers. He had looked at the school’s scores from a commonly used standardized test and had identified an underperforming kindergarten teacher.

He pointed out that in one of my four kindergarten classes, the student scores were noticeably lower, while in another, the students were outperforming the other three classes. He recommended that I have the teacher whose class had scored much lower work directly with the teacher who seemed to know how to get higher scores from her students.

Seems reasonable, right? But here was the problem: The “underperforming” kindergarten teacher and the “high-performing” teacher were one and the same person.

I had just two kindergarten teachers. They each taught one morning and one afternoon class.

The idea that I should have the “high performing” teacher coach her lower-performing colleague was suddenly very concerning to me, not to mention impossible. It was clear to me that I couldn’t use standardized tests to distinguish high-performing from low-performing teachers. And this incident fed the doubts that I already harbored about using those same tests-which are meant to be “scientific”-to measure student learning.

I am married to a scientist. He runs tests on plant pathology, analyzes the results, draws conclusions, and uses the results to develop solutions to the problems he studies. I am in awe of the tidiness of the whole process.

I, on the other hand, am an educator. At best, every child is an experiment of one. We test the children’s learning with admittedly limited instruments-standardized tests-that were never designed to be used as a standalone analysis. A lot of classroom time is dedicated to preparing for these tests and giving them. Results are affected by dozens of variables that we can’t control: illness, hunger, sleep deprivation, unfamiliar forms of a test, limited command of English.

It gets better and better but I have quoted as much as I can.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Standardized Testing, Testing

Beto O’Rourke Adds High-Ranking Obama ED Official to His Campaign Staff

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2019 //
24

Beto O’Rourke has beefed up his campaign staff with the addition of Carmel Martin, who was Assistant Secretary for Budget and Policy in the Department of Education during the Obama administration.

Martin is a supporter of high-stakes testing and charter schools.

When my book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, was published, she joined me on a panel at the Economic Policy Institute, where she defended Race to the Top.

It will be interesting to hear what Beto’s education policy is, if he moves above 5% in the polls.

Categories Charter Schools, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: The Writer Who Could Not Answer Standardized Test Questions About Her Poems

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2019 //
42

 

Peter Greene writes here about Sara Holbrook, a poet whose poems have been used on standardized tests.

Back in 2017, Holbrook wrote an essay for Huffington Post entitled, “I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems.” The writer had discovered that two of her poems were part of the Texas STAAR state assessment tests, and she was a bit startled to discover that she was unable to answer some of the questions….

To approach any poem with the notion that each word has one and only one correct reading when language at its most rich involves shades and layers or meaning–what my old college writing professor called “the ambiguity that enriches”–is one way to stifle thinking in students. In many states, we are doing it in grades K through 12.
There are so many layers to Holbrook’s situation. The test manufacturers could have contacted her and talked to her about her poem (though Common Core architect David Coleman would argue that doing so was both unnecessary and undesirable), but they didn’t. So here we sit, in a bizarre universe where the test writer knows the “correct” answer for a question about a poem, but the person who wrote the poem does not. And at least Holbrook has the option of publicly saying, “Hey, wait a minute,” which is more than the deceased authors used for testing can do. But she was only able to do so because somebody risked punishment by sharing test materials with her. Particularly ironic is Mentoring Minds’ promise to build critical thinking skills in students, even as Holbrook, by taking reading, writing and speaking out to students in living, breathing, dynamic workshops, is doing far more to promote critical thinking than can be accomplished by challenging students to guess which one of four available answers an unseen test writer has deemed “correct.”

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Literature, Standardized Testing
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