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Paul Thomas: Big Lies of Education: Confusing NAEP Proficient with “Grade Level”

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2024 //
25

I served on the National Assessment Governing Board from 1998-2004. NAGB is the governing agency for NAEP, the federal test. I was appointed by President Bill Clinton. I learned about the inner workings of standardized testing, much of which made me skeptical of it.

I have often observed that critics of public schools assume that NAEP Proficient is the same as “grade level,” when in fact NAEP warns readers explicitly in every score report that NAEP Proficient is NOT “grade level.” In fact, NAEP Proficient represents mastery of what was tested, which I would characterize as an A or A-.

In 2010, when the anti-public school documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” was released, I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and criticized it for confusing NAEP Proficiency with grade level, then claiming that most American kids can’t read, all because of their terrible public schools, their terrible teachers and those awful unions. The way to a better future, the documentary claimed, was charter schools. Not true. Even Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has repeated this erroneous claim. Apparently neither he nor his speech writers reads NAEP reports with care and no one has briefed them.

I have explained this confusion on several occasions on the blog. I even called the Commissioner of the National Center on Education Statistics and proposed that NAEP Proficient be renamed “NAEP Mastery,” to clarify its meaning. She sounded enthusiastic about the idea (which came from a reader of this blog) but nothing changed.

I am very happy to see that Professor Paul Thomas at Furman University in South Carolina has launched a series called “Big lies in Education,” and this claim is one of the Big Lies. It is a lie because the fact that NAEP Proficient is not grade level is stated plainly in every release of NAEP scores.

Thomas begins:

One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.

Kristof’s piece in 2023 can be traced back to a similar claim by Emily Hanford in 2018: “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s,” including a surprisingly ineffective graphic.

Open the link to see this and other graphics.

The student reading proficiency Big Lie grounded in misrepresenting or misunderstanding NAEP is likely one of the most complicated Big Lies of Education.

In media and political rhetoric, first, the terms “reading proficiency” and “grade level reading” are commonly jumbled and used inappropriately as synonyms.

Achievement levels such as “basic” and “proficient,” such as used in NAEP for reading, are misleading and complicated for most people not familiar with technical terminology.

NAEP “basic” is approximately grade level (although even that claim is problematic since no standard exists in the US for “proficient” or “grade level”), and “proficient” on NAEP is high: 

Another important graph. Open the link.

Hanford’s and Kristof’s Big Lie, then, is a combination of blurring NAEP achievement levels with grade level reading achievement and manufacturing a reading crisis with that misinformation.

Ironically, NAEP grade 4 reading scores for a decade show that 2/3 of students are reading at or above grade level, the inverse of the false crisis claims of the media:

Open the link for the graph.

This is an excellent expose, which everyone should read. The claim that most kids read below grade level is foundational to the claim that public schools are in crisis. Its a Big Lie.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Fake, Lies, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing

What Do Test Scores Measure? How I Lost My Faith in Their Value

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
58

For many years, I was a staunch advocate of standardized testing. But I lost my enthusiasm for standardized testing after spending seven years on the governing board of NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress). NAEP is the federal test administered every two years to measure academic progress in reading and math, as well as testing other subjects. The test takers are randomly selected; not every student answers the questions on any test. There are no stakes attached to NAEP scores for any student, teacher, or school. The scores are reported nationally and by state and for nearly two dozen urban districts. NAEP is useful for gauging trends.

Why did I lose faith in the value of standardized testing?

First, over the course of my term, I saw questions that had more than one right answer. A thoughtful student might easily select the “wrong” answer. I also saw questions where the “right” answer was wrong.

Second, it troubled me that test scores were so highly correlated with socioeconomic status. Invariably, the students from families with the highest income had the highest scores. Those from the poorest families had the lowest scores.

Third, the latter observation spurred me to look at this correlation between family wealth and test scores. I saw it on the results of every standardized test, be it the SAT, the ACT, or international tests. I wondered why we were spending so much money to tell us what we already knew: rich kids have better medical care, fewer absences, better nutrition, more secure and stable housing, and are less likely to be exposed to vermin, violence, and other health hazards.

Fourth, when I read books like Daniel Koretz’s “Measuring Up” and “The Testing Charade” and Todd Farley’s “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry,” my faith in the tests dissipated to the vanishing point.

Fifth, when I realized that the results of the tests are not available until the late summer or fall when the student has a new teacher, and that the tests offer no diagnostic information because the questions and answers are top-secret, I concluded that the tests had no value. They were akin to a medical test whose result is available four months after you see the doctor, and whose result is a rating comparing you to others but utterly lacking in diagnostic information about what needs medication.

So, all of this is background to presenting a recent study that you might find useful in assessing the value of standardized tests:

Jamil Maroun and Christopher Tienken have written a paper that will help you understand why standardized tested is fatally flawed. The paper is on the web and its title is:

The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States

Here is the abstract:

The purpose of this study was to determine the predictiveness of community and family demographic variables related to the development of student academic background knowledge on the percentage of students who pass a state-mandated, commercially prepared, standardized Algebra 1 test in the state of New Jersey, USA. This explanatory, cross-sectional study utilized quantitative methods through hierarchical regression analysis. The results suggest that family demographic variables found in the United States Census data related to the development of student academic background knowledge predicted 75 percent of schools in which students achieved a passing score on a state standardized high school assessment of Algebra 1. We can conclude that construct-irrelevant variance, influenced in part by student background knowledge, can be used to predict standardized test results. The results call into question the use of standardized tests as tools for policy makers and educational leaders to accurately judge student learning or school quality.

The paper was peer-reviewed. It was published last week.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Yong Zhao: Why Doesn’t the U.S. Scrap PISA?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2024 //
49

When I learned that the latest PISA (Program on International Student Assessment had been released, I attended a webinar, where I learned once again that the scores of U.S. 15-year-old students were somewhat below the international average. The PISA tests in math, reading, and science have been offered since 2000, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

My takeaway from the webinar was that we should try to be more like Singapore and Macau.

I have studied the results of international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS for years. Eventually, I began to wonder what the connection was—if any—between the test scores of 15-year-old students and the economic productivity of their nation 10, 15, 20 years later. We’ve been bemoaning our scores since the first international tests were given in the 1960s, even as our economy soars way beyond the nations with higher scores on the tests.

I invited Yong Zhao to share his reaction to the latest PISA scores. His response was as brilliant as I anticipated.

Yong Zhao is one our most accomplished scholars of education. Born in China to an impoverished family, he pursued his dreams, migrated to the United States, and has made his mark as a creative and innovative thinker. He is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Kansas and holds an appointment as Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Melbourne. His list of honors and publications is too long for me to recite here. But you can find it online.

Yong Zhao wrote:

It doesn’t make sense: Why Is the US Still Taking the PISA?

I have always wondered what America has got from participating the PISA every three years. Since 2000, the U.S. has been taking part in this nonsensical global academic horse race. Every time it took the test, American students stood at about the middle of the global league table. Every time the results were released, American media would point out how American students are not the best, but East Asian education systems such as China, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are the best. And then U.S. authorities would invite PISA and other pundits to tell us how to improve American education.

The same story has been going on for more than two decades, but American education has not improved, at least according to the PISA scores. According to the most recent results (NCES, 2023), American students did much worse in math in 2022 than in 2003, with an 18-point decline from 483 to 465. Their reading and science scores, however, remained about the same without significant change over the past two decades. Although PISA experts largely blame the COVID pandemic as the reason for the decline in math, it does not make much sense because there is no decline in reading and science. Did COVID-19 only affect math, not science and reading? Of course, one can try to argue that reading and science are much less sensitive to COVID, but why? 

Basically, the international standing of the US and the test scores of its students have not changed much. Whatever the PISA data revealed and/or the lessons from other countries such as China, Japan, Singapore, or Finland have not helped improve America’s PISA scores. By the way, Finland, the country Americans view with the best education system because of its early stunning PISA performance, has seen a much more dramatic decline in its PISA scores: from 544 to 484—a 60-point decline in math, from 546 to 490—a 56-point decline in reading, and from 563 to 511—a 52-point decline over the past two decades. Not sure if America still views Finland as the best education country, but its scores have dropped to almost the same point as American students. 

In fact, other than Finland, the PISA league tables have not changed much either. East Asian education systems have consistently remained the top performers and the OECD countries’ average scores have been dropping. If PISA had any impact on the world’s education quality and equity, education should not be the same as 20 years ago.

PISA does not really have much to offer to anyone, except those who benefit from the test itself—the consultants, the test makers, the data processors, and possibly some education politicians.

In a review article (Zhao, 2020), I summarized the research about  PISA and found: 1) PISA markets itself as an assessment of abilities needed in the 21st Century, but it is the same as other international tests such as TIMSS, 2) PISA ignores the overall educational purposes of different countries by primarily assessing math, reading, and science, 3) PISA’s tests are not of high quality with numerous theoretical and technical problems, and 4) PISA’s sampling has been manipulated in different countries. My conclusion is that instead of bringing positive changes to the world, PISA wreaked havoc.

America has never excelled in international tests since the beginning of such assessment in the 1960s, but the low scores have not seemed to affect it much. In fact, a correlational analysis done in 2007 showed a negative correlation between international test scores and economic development (Baker, 2007). That is, countries with higher scores in the first international study did worse than countries with lower scores. If PISA or any other international tests truly measure what matters in education, America should no longer be a developed country. On the contrary, East Asian countries have always scored well in international assessments, but their economic development has been more related to economic, political, and international orders than their test scores.

What matters to economic development and prosperity is perhaps the non-cognitive factors that PISA does not typically emphasize. For example, in an analysis, I found that PISA scores are negatively correlated with entrepreneurship confidence across countries (Zhao, 2012b). American students, despite their lower scores, have always had more confidence than their peers in other countries. In fact, confidence has been found to have negative correlations with test scores (Zhao, 2012b, 2014, 2018b). High score education systems, except Finland, have always had a negative impact on students’ social and emotional wellbeing (Zhao, 2012a). Even PISA’s own data show that PISA scores are negatively correlated with life satisfaction of students (OECD, 2019).

Many education systems participate in PISA because they are fooled by its claim to measure global competitiveness. Somehow these educational systems are convinced that their PISA scores and rankings mean how competitive they are globally. But this is not true and cannot be true. In 2022, over 80 education systems took part in the PISA but these systems are hugely different. For example, the U.S. has three hundred million people and does not really have an education system (it has over 50 education systems based on the number of states and over 12,000 systems if we treat each school district as a system). How can it be compared with Macao, China, a tiny place with about 688,000 people and one education system? Likewise, how can the U.S., with a per capita GDP of over $70,000 be compared with Albania, whose per capita GDP is about $6,000.

Moreover, PISA has been operational for over 20 years. The first cohort of 15-year-old students took the test in 2000. If PISA truly has predictive power, it should have produced a longitudinal study to show how these students do in society. They are about 39 years old today. But we haven’t seen any such report except the wild guesses made by some scholars (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2010).

If PISA offers nothing, why does the U.S. spend the money and effort to join the game? For monitoring of basic education conditions, it already has the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) or the national report card, which has been in existence since 1969. Why continue to participate in PISA?

Frankly, it’s inexplicable, for there is truly no reason the U.S. should continue to participate in PISA, let alone to pretend to learn from high performing countries. The lessons PISA offered have not been productive. For example, the lesson that high performing systems (e.g., Singapore, South Korea, and Finland) recruit high performing high school graduates to be teachers (Barber & Mourshed, 2007) is not based on real evidence and does not really produce better education outcomes (Gronqvist & Vlachos, 2008). The lesson that high performing systems have clear definitions of learning expectations, a good structure of different stages, and tough measures to ensure that students have met the expectations (Tucker, 2011) is intended largely to copy East Asian education systems; but, ironically, the East Asian countries have been working very hard to change these practices (Zhao, 2014). International learning may make sense sometimes, but there are great limitations (Zhao, 2018a). American education should focus on developing its own way to improve education instead of trying to catch up with others (Zhao, 2009). 

This is not to say that American education is perfect. Rather, it is to say the way forward is not to look at what others have been doing. The U.S. needs to solve its own problems and work on creating a better future. With the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, the world has changed again. If ChatGPT had taken the 2022 PISA, it is highly likely that it would outscore all the students in the world. It would be the best education system accordingly. Today, many students use AI tools to do their schoolwork, and teachers use AI in their teaching. PISA has become even more irrelevant.

Since 2000, our scores on PISA have barely changed. While there’s much chatter about learning from other systems, it has not happened. There is no reason that the U.S. should continue its participation in PISA.

References:

Baker, K. (2007). Are International Tests Worth Anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104. 

Barber, M., & Mourshed, M. (2007). How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come out on Top. Retrieved from New York: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/how-the-worlds-best-performing-school-systems-come-out-on-top

Gronqvist, E., & Vlachos, J. (2008). One size fits all? The effects of teacher cognitive and non-cognitive abilities on student achievement. Retrieved from Stockholm, Sweden: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1311222

Hanushek, E. A., & Woessmann, L. (2010). The High Cost of Low Educational Performance: The Long-run Economic Impact of Improving PISA Outcomes. Retrieved from Paris: http://books.google.com/books?id=k7AGPo0NvfYC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=hanushek+pisa+gdp&source=bl&ots=2gCfzF-f1_&sig=wwe0XLL5EblVWK9e7RJfb5MyhIU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MLPCUqaOD8-JogS6v4C4Bw&ved=0CGcQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=hanushek%20pisa%20gdp&f=false

NCES. (2023). Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/index.asp

OECD. (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume III): What School Life Means for Students’ Lives. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1787/acd78851-en.

Tucker, M. (Ed.) (2011). Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems. Boston: Harvard Education Press.

Zhao, Y. (2009). Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Zhao, Y. (2012a, December 11). Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?  Retrieved from http://zhaolearning.com/2012/12/11/numbers-can-lie-what-timss-and-pisa-truly-tell-us-if-anything/

Zhao, Y. (2012b). World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Zhao, Y. (2014). Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Zhao, Y. (2018a). Shifting the Education Paradigm: Why International Borrowing Is No Longer Sufficient for Improving Education in China. ECNU Review of Education, 1(1), 76-106. 

Zhao, Y. (2018b). What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Zhao, Y. (2020). Two decades of havoc: A synthesis of criticism against PISA. Journal of Educational Change, 1-22. doi:10.1007/s10833-019-09367-x

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, International, Standardized Testing

North Carolina: More $$$ for Voucher Schools, More Tests for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2024 //
3

It is a strange irony that Red State legislators believe passionately in testing and accountability for public schools, yet excuse voucher schools from those same measures. If public school students must be tested, why not students who receive vouchers to attend private and religious schools on the taxpayers’ dime? Why not use the same measuring stick for all students so the voucher schools can be held accountable?

Here is a report from Public Schools First NC:

North Carolina’s voucher program has been widely criticized for its lack of accountability. The Opportunity Scholarship and ESA+ programs come with little financial oversight, no curriculum or content standards requirements, no educational or credential requirements for teachers, and no publicly available student performance testing data.

Since 1992, NC students in grade 3-8 public schools take the North Carolina End-of-Grade (EOG) Tests designed to measure student performance on the goals, objectives, and grade-level competencies specified in the NC Standard Course of Study. Standards in NC are used at the state level to ensure all students will be taught the content deemed essential and necessary by the state to allow teachers and parents to assess student progress and readiness for the next grade level.

The 2023 Appropriations Act takes a small step toward addressing the gap between the abundant regulation and accountability measures in place for traditional public schools and the state’s laissez faire approach to private schools. After spending half a billion dollars since 2014 and adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the voucher program’s annual budget this year, legislators added a small testing provision that may enable taxpayers to get a glimpse into the academic performance of voucher recipients. Starting in 2024-25, public school students and voucher recipients in grades 3, 8, and 11 will be administered the same standardized test.

But instead of requiring the estimated 4,000 grade 3 and 8 voucher-receiving private school students to take NC’s EOG tests, the approximately 220,000 public school students in grades 3 and 8 will have to take a nationally standardized test that was not developed to measure NC Standard Course of Study in addition to taking the EOG.

The common test in 11th grade will be the ACT, which is already administered to public school students statewide. Currently, voucher-receiving private schools are required to take a test (selected by the school administrator) in 11th grade. Many private schools already administer an assessment of their choice, so there will be little change other than NOW the state is picking up the tab for the new tests.

The common test for grades 3 and 8 will be recommended by the Superintendent of Public Instruction. But the 2023 Appropriations Act (p. 193) specifies that it must be a nationally standardized test, which disqualifies the NC End-of-Grade (EOG) and End-of-Course (EOC) tests. Although they are standardized tests, the EOGs and EOCs are specifically designed to assess goals and objectives of the NC Standard Course of Study, not a broad swath of national standards. Because they are only administered to students in North Carolina, they aren’t “nationally” standardized.

The national tests, often called “off the shelf” tests, are designed to appeal to as many states and districts as possible, so they measure standards common across states rather than one specific state. As a result, they may not align well with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study.

The EOG and EOC test administrations are required by federal and state law, so there is no option to replace them with a test that doesn’t specifically measure the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. However, as a condition of receiving voucher funds, the General Assembly could require the 4,000 or so voucher-receiving students in grades 3 and 8 to take the EOG tests instead of adding another test for the 220,000 public school students in grades 3 and 8.

In addition to affecting the testing burden of far fewer students, administering the EOG to private school students would be much cheaper than purchasing an “off the shelf” national test for hundreds of thousands of public school students.

Should public school students have to take another standardized test to assure lawmakers that private school students are learning? Should taxpayers have to foot the bill for hundreds of thousands of new tests instead of paying next to nothing for a few thousand EOG tests that are already developed and administered in North Carolina?

The legislative short session starts in April. This testing provision may be changed if enough people encourage their legislators to address it. Contact your legislators.

Read our fact sheet for more information on student testing in North Carolina.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, North Carolina, Republicans, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: Why Don’t Success Academy High School Students Take Advanced Regents Exams?

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2024 //
12

Gary Rubinstein has been following the ups and downs of New York’s highest scoring charter school chain: Success Academy. Every year, the grades 3-8 test scores at the chain are through the roof. But Gary noticed that the high school students at Success Academy do not take Advsnced a regents exams as they do at the New York City’s highest performing high schools.

Gary examines this question:

Success Academy is a charter network with about 40 schools in the New York City area. They are known for their high standardized 3-8 test scores. Though it has been proved that their test scores are somewhat inflated by their practices of shedding their low performing students over the year and also by, at some schools, focusing exclusively on test prep in the months leading up to the tests, they still have these test scores to show their funders and the various charter school cheerleaders.

In June there was an article on the website of something called Albany Strategic Advisors, some kind of consulting firm about how well middle school students at Success Academy performed on four of the New York State Regents exams: Algebra I, Living Environment, Global History, and English. The last sentence of the second to last paragraph explains that these results are important because “Taking the exams in middle school allows students to take more advanced college preparatory courses in high school.”

These ‘more advanced college preparatory courses in high school’ include 10 other courses that have Regents exams including Geometry, Algebra II, Chemistry, Physics, US History, and Spanish. The minimum requirements for getting what is called ‘a Regents diploma’ in New York is one math Regents, one science Regents, one Social Studies Regents, and the English Regents. But to get an ‘Advanced Regents diploma’ you need all three maths and all three sciences and one foreign language Regents. Most competitive high school have their students take these other Regents which are known to be fairly straight forward tests with very generous curves.

About 8 years ago I noticed that there were no Regents scores for any of the other 10 exams in the Success Academy high school. Then 6 years ago I found that some of their students actually were taking some of the more difficult Regents but they were doing very poorly on them. And now, 6 years later, I checked up on them again to find that in the three Success Academy high schools which enroll a total of about 1,100 students from grades 9 to 12, they again do not have any scores for any of the Regents that are typically taken at competitive schools.

So why does this matter?

Well, Success Academy has spent eighteen years carefully cultivating their image. They want families to think that they have the highest expectations and that families should trust them to educate their children because those higher expectations will lead to those students learning the most. And we all know about their 3-8 state tests in Math and ELA. But it is pretty ‘odd’ that their students don’t take the more difficult Regents. The most likely reason for this is that Success Academy only wants information public that makes them look good and avoids any action that could reveal public data that reveals that they do not live up to their reputation. So I believe that they don’t allow their students to take the Regents because they believe that the scores on those Regents won’t be as impressive as their 3-8 state test scores compared to other schools. If I am right then this is an example of Success Academy choosing to preserve their inflated reputation over giving their students the opportunity to challenge themselves on these competitive exams.

Please open the link to finish the article. Nobody does this kind of close review better than Gary Rubinstein.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York, New York City, Standardized Testing

Nancy Bailey: What Secretary Cardona Should Do Now

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2024 //
26

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been nearly invisible these past three years, other than lamenting test scores. Veteran educator Nancy Bailey has some suggestions about how he could help kids, schools, and teachers right now. This post was reposted by the Network for Public Education.

The secretary keeps talking about raising the bar. Nancy Bailey has some thoughts about some bars he could work on. Reposted with permission.

She writes:

Education Secretary Cardona focuses on reducing absenteeism, tutoring, and after-school programs. And he refers to raising the bar, which sounds like A Nation at Risk talk.

Yet there are so many K12 issues that Cardona and the Biden administration could address, lead, and support the states and local school districts.

Here are some educational issues Cardona should drive this new year. If you have more, please share.

1. The Arts

Poor public schools have gone without the arts for years. Cardona should push for qualified art and music teachers for every school.

The arts help students struggling with mental health difficulties, and jobs exist in the arts.

Every child in K12 should have access to a vital arts program.

2. Career Education

Career-technical education is essential, but companies pushing their agendas into high schools to get workers raises concerns.

Tax dollars should help students decide what careers they want, giving them the chance to experience high school, not creating schools for corporate preparation.

3. Class Size

Reducing class sizes would help students with disabilities in inclusion classes and is essential for student safety. Cardona must endorse lowering class sizes and showcase schools that do.

If schools can’t lower every class (classes like P.E. wouldn’t be necessary), give students access to at least one small class where they are known.

Lowering class sizes in K-3rd grade would also help children get a good start. See the STAR Study.

4. Corporal Punishment

In 2023, The Washington Post reported that 15 states still permitted corporal punishment in schools (St. George, 2023). Like Florida, which vaguely gives a nod to it. Teens who wear the wrong kind of prom dress or misunderstandings resulting in paddling are examples.

Cardona deserves praise for standing against corporal punishment last year in schools, claiming educators should favor evidence-based approaches and that there should be no spanking, hitting, or paddling.

5. Data

Cardona must study and draw attention to child privacy laws which are currently inadequate.

In 2018, the NEPC published Educating All Our Children: Your Kids, Their Data, No Privacy by Linda McSpadden McNeil.

She stated:

When children’s privacy is violated in ways that are overt, visible, and knowable, the violation is unquestioned. It is unacceptable. In most cases, it is illegal.

So why is it different when the violation is hidden, opaque, electronic, commercial, and complicated?

6. High-Stakes Standardized Testing

President Biden promised teachers and parents he’d end harmful high-stakes standardized tests. Instead, he pushed assessments even during the pandemic.

Can Cardona show the American people who want these tests reduced or eliminated what, if anything, the Biden administration will finally do to end high-stakes standardized tests?

7. Lead in School Pipes

The Biden-Harris team promised to repair the lead pipes in homes and schools. They’re to be commended for this. It would be nice, however, if Cardona presented a report.

No amount of lead is O.K. for developing children, and it can lead to learning disabilities.

8. Reading

Reading has become a volatile issue, and Cardona has been mostly silent. Many commercial programs with little independent study, but nonetheless called the Science of Reading, are being pushed into classrooms.

The subject of reading deserves a better forum than short, often hostile debates on X.

Cardona should call for a new National Reading Panel to study programs and address reading instruction. The panel should include teachers who teach reading since they were left off the last panel. This panel should consider the concerns of the last NRP member, the only educator on the panel, Joanne Yatvin (Yatvin, 2002). Parents should also be given a voice on this panel. A new NRP would allow for a better collection of the research, old and the latest findings, and a review of the work of the last NRP.

9. Recess

Every public school in the nation should give children several unstructured breaks throughout the school day, supervised, on safe, well-designed playgrounds.

Driving students to work nonstop with mindfulness training or a dozen other excuses to bypass recess should not be permitted.

10. School Buildings

Americans need to know the status of their public school buildings. How are the HVAC systems and air quality? How many school facilities are still falling apart? Are public school buildings safe?

Are new schools being built to support teachers?

11. School Choice

The Biden administration discussed regulating charter schools (Lieberman, 2022). But concerns about vouchers, educational savings account, nonprofit and for-profit charters, and religion in schools needs to be better addressed.

In addition, the Biden administration should describe what they mean by community schools (often called charter schools), partnerships, and social impact bonds and how these schools are still public.

12. School Libraries and Librarians

It’s an abomination to drill children to learn to read in poor schools, and then not provide them a school library with a qualified school librarian.

Closing school libraries has been a disaster in many school districts, see Philadelphia as an example.

13. School Safety

The gun lobby is unfortunately influential, so despite shootings in this country, don’t hold your breath for meaningful gun laws. It was thoughtful of Cardona to visit Parkland.

In the meantime, school administrators must devise creative ways to make schools safe and identify students in their schools who need mental health help. See class size above.

14. Social-Emotional Learning

Concerns about the data collected on students includes social-emotional learning. Teachers always want their students to be socially and emotionally healthy, but social-emotional learning seems more about collecting unnecessary sensitive data about students.

Who is using this information and why?

15. Special Education

Parents are in danger of losing special education services. The All Handicapped Children’s Act reauthorized to IDEA should have evolved into a more inclusive and better programs for students with exceptional needs, but instead it has been hijacked by those who don’t want to pay for it.

Cardona should look into special education and create a task force to study it and determine exactly how much special education funding schools receive and the kind of services students receive. He might start with Tammy Kolbe’s work and the National Education Policy Center report Funding Special Education: Charting a Path that Confronts Complexity and Crafts Coherence.

16. Teacher Preparation

School reform has changed teacher preparation dramatically. There needs to be more effort to oversee these mostly fast-track nonprofit or for-profit programs often connected to charter schools.

Cardona should step up here to promote fully university-prepared teachers, and he should work with university education programs to improve their coursework and degree offerings. The United States Department of Education might provide scholarships to attract young people who want to pursue a teaching career in university education programs, not unknown nonprofits or charter school preparation.

Fast-track groups like Teach for America are a concern because they turn those without real qualifications into the system with little understanding of child development or what’s needed to teach well, and Grow Your Own programs are ill-defined.

17. Technology

While technology is useful to learning, a recent Columbia University study indicates that children read better with paper print not online.

The Guardian cites MIT neuroscientist John Gabrieli, skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen.

Gabrieli states:

I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues.

Is Cardona behind teachers or for replacing them with technology? Actions matter.

18. Third-Grade Retention

Third-grade retention is unnecessary. No child should be made to feel like a failure. Children can still learn to read in third grade, can still grow and become great learners. Speaking out on this issue would help end it.

References

St. George, D. (2023, August 10). In over 15 states, schools can still paddle students as punishment. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/10/school-paddling-corporal-punishment/.

Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(5), 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170208300509

Lieberman, M (2022). Lawmakers, Education Secretary Clash Over Charter School Rules. Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/lawmakers-education-secretary-clash-over-charter-school-rules/2022/04

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Categories Art, Arts Education, Biden, Cardona, Miguel, Class size, Corporate Reform, Creativity, Data, Education Reform, Funding, Literacy, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Nancy Bailey: It’s Time to Take Back Kindergarten!

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2024 //
34

Nancy Bailey is a retired educator who has seen the damage wrought by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the nonsensical grandchild called Every Student Succeeds Act. We can say now with hindsight that many children were left behind, we did not make it to the Top, and every student is not succeeding.

Nancy knows that the greatest casualty of these ruinous federal laws and programs are young children. Instead of playing, instead of socializing, instead of living their best lives as children, they are being prepared to take tests. This is nuts!

Nancy explains in this post (originally from 2021 but nothing has changed) why the status quo is harmful to small children and how it should change. I should mention that Nancy and I wrote a book together—although we have never met!

EdSpeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling https://a.co/d/bXKYsZG

Here’s Nancy on what kindergarten should be:

Let’s remember what kindergarten used to be, a happy entryway to school. Children attended half a day. They played, painted pictures, dressed up, pretended to cook using play kitchens, took naps on their little rugs, learned how to take turns, and played some more. They listened to stories, proudly told their own stories, described something unique about themselves during show-and-tell, mastered the ABCs, counted to 10, printed their names, and tied their shoes. They had plenty of recess and got excited over simple chores like watering the plants or passing out snacks. They had art and music and performed in plays that brought families together to generate pride and joy in their children and the public school.

Then, NCLB changed kindergarten in 2002. The Chicago Tribune described this rethinking well, which I’ve broken down.

  • In some schools, kindergarten is growing more and more academically focused–particularly on early reading. 
  • The pressure to perform academically is trickling down from above, many experts say, because of new state and federal academic standards.
  • . . . in one Florida classroom some children “cried or put their heads on their desks in exhaustion” after standardized achievement tests. 
  • One Chicago public school kindergarten teacher quit in part because of what she considered unrealistic demands of administrators who expected kindergartners to sit all day at desks, go without recess and learn to read by year’s end. The teacher wanted to create centers for science, art and dramatic play but was forbidden.
  • In some places, kindergarten, once a gentle bridge to real school where play and learning easily intermingled, is becoming an academic pressure-cooker for kids, complete with half an hour of homework every night. 
  • Some parents are alarmed enough that they’re “redshirting” their children, holding them back from kindergarten for a year so they will be more mature.

So how will they rethink early childhood again? Instead of kindergarten being the new first grade will it become the new third or fourth grade, with more standards piled onto the backs of 5-year-olds?

What happens to the children who are developing normally and can’t meet the standards, or children who have disabilities and need more time? Will they be labeled as failing, sorted into the can’t do kids who get bombarded with online remedial programs?

The harder they make early learning for young children, the more likely parents will seek more humane alternative placements that treat children like children.

It’s time to start caring more about the children and less about driving outcomes or results that don’t make sense.

I am sharing the best standards for children of all time, written by now-retired teacher extraordinaire, Sarah Puglisi.

Here’s a sample. Please go to the link and read all 100 of them. Then bring back kindergarten!

Categories Childhood, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Play, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Bob Shepherd: Testing in Florida; Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2024 //
82

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–

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Reform, Florida, Hoax, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: U.S. Education Suffers from a Bizarre, Bipartisan Love of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2024 //
30

Mercedes Schneider is heartened by the signs of disillusionment with standardized testing, which has been federally mandated since 2002 and which has enjoyed bipartisan support. Nothing seems to shake the bipartisan obsession with standardized testing.

She writes:

I am encouraged by the recent kerfluffle over the almighty standardized overtesting that is occurring across America as such is featured in this December 03, 2023, Politico piece,“‘A Bizarre Coalition’: Red and Blue States Weigh Big Changes to Testing Requirements.”

The piece focuses on goings-on surrounding “strict standardized testing and graduation requirements” in Florida, New York, and Louisiana.

If one offers even a cursory consideration of the legislative novelties foisted upon America’s K12 classrooms in recent decades, the red-and-blue “bizarre coalition” noted in the Politico title is not all that bizarre. Indeed, “coalition” of red and blue has introduced a lot of chaos into American education, including the pinnacle test-and-punish legislation, No Child Left Behind (the reauthorization of which was abandoned by Congress in 2007 because by then NCLB was seen as a political liability).

Red and blue also stood behind Common Core. Republican lawmakers were for it until they were against it, but former Florida governor and 2015 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush held onto Common Core but avoided calling it by its “poisonous” name on the 2015 campaign trail. “Rebrand” became the name of the game. Both national teachers unions accepted money from the Gates Foundation to promote it, then turned. Regarding Common Core backlash, Democratic secretary of ed Arne Duncan blamed “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

And charter schools: Still bipartisan despite rampant fraud and waste of underregulated taxpayer money (including embezzlement, wire fraud, corruption, graft, and scandal after scandal).

So, yeah, the “bizarre ” as it concerns modifying state standardized overtesting comes in the form of surprise at officials’ once sold on standardized testing even considering scaling back the testing.

The supposed reason for common standards and the NCLB-reworked, appendaged testing was to make students “ready for college and careers” and to make the US “globally competitive.”

Obama’s Race to the Top was little more than federal funding doled out for a Common Core fizzle.

Of course, at the official release of Common Core in June 2010, no one saw a pandemic coming ten years down the road, and it takes no test scores to know that the US has exceeded expectations for 2023 as concerns the state of our post-pandemic economy. And here is another important point: Nations worldwide must balance international competition with international cooperation.

It must be both.

I have yet to read any expert research crediting standardized testing in schools as contributing to post-pandemic economic recovery, for better or worse, for that matter.

I suspect that some of the Republican softening on standardized testing might reflect the rift in the party as moving away from the education agenda preferences of the likes of George and Jeb Bush. What’s fashionable now is the far-right purge of library books.

The library book purge central force is facing its own bad press as the Florida Republican power couple, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, are apparently living lives that are making the morality policing of Moms for Liberty, group that the Zieglers fiscally and politically enabled, difficult to carry off.

You know you’re in a bad spot when the phone video of you (top-ranking conservative fire-breather) having sex with a woman who is not your wife (but whom your wife also had sex with in a previous three-way) is the best way you have to counter the rape charge brought by that woman. And you stiff-neckedly refuse to resign from your conservative perch. And so does your wife.

Now that’s bizarre.

Please open the link to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Paul Bonner: Our Useless Focus on Test Scores

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2023 //
68

For the past quarter-century, American policymakers have been laser-focused on raising test scores. They assumed that higher test scores equals better education equals better economy. The cost of all this testing was billions of dollars, which would have been better spent on reducing class sizes, raising teachers’ salaries, and updating schools.

From No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top to the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, federal policy has made standardized test scores the most consequential measure of all schooling. Every release of scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress produces a flurry of articles with dire predictions about the future (“a Sputnik Moment!) or the discovery of a miracle (e.g. the Texas/Florida/Mississippi 4th grade reading miracle, which strangely disappears by the 8th grade).

But an occasional outbreak of wisdom cautions us that we are looking for “success” in the wrong place.

Paul Bonner is a retired educator. He posted the following comment on the blog.

My first personal encounter with NAEP was around 2005. I was an eighth grade assistant principal facilitating the process between my staff and the NAEP testing officials who were to give the test. As I monitored the hall during the testing of selected random students, it struck me how disinterested our students were in performing on the assessment. My school at the time was a high performing magnet program with a highly motivated student body. I assumed, incorrectly, that due to the competitive attitudes of our students that they would want to perform well, as I had with standardized assessments in the 1970s no matter what it meant concerning my academic standing. What I learned in this first encounter was that students were already fed up with standardized tests particularly if it had no bearing on their academic standing. These students made a habit of blowing away all of the state tests and for them NAEP was a waste of time. The idea of NAEP as a report card might be significant if students were not already wasting three weeks of their year with state and district tests. In other words, no student benefit so why bother. How does this give us an accurate read on student capacity? Second, none of the standardized assessments, international, national, state, or local have shown meaningful movement in student performance over the decades. A few points either way does not reveal any real change in instructional efficacy or evidence of greater learning opportunities for students no matter their circumstances. The realities remain the same. Students prepared for schooling or provided significant instructional and experiential resources perform well. Those who do not have such privilege do not. Policy makers and educational leaders are simply fooling themselves when denying that fact. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is telling in this regard. Piddling about a few point improvement in a NAEP test for fourth graders isn’t going to change the fact that Mississippi and other poor states provide far less opportunity for their students and poorer outcomes than wealthier states wiling to put more resources in the classroom. Testing has become a waste of time and money that could be better used elsewhere.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Hoax, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing
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