Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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Teacher: I Opted Out All My English Classes from Taking SBAC!

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
33

A daily reader and commenter who calls him/herself LeftCoastTeacher left the following comment:

I’m off topic, sorry, but I am excited.

Congratulate my students! I have just been able to Opt Out all my English classes from taking the SBAC Interim Assessments. I work in a district with criminals on the board and their deform appointees in administration, so the entire district is being forced to take the computer-based interim assessments made by the Smarter (dumber) (un)Balanced Assessment (not) Consortium (conspiracy), or SBAC. You know those interim tests are just a stepping stone toward Competency Based data collection taking over instruction time completely.

In California, schools and districts are required to inform parents of their right to Opt Out of state tests. So, I went to admin and asked for the form letter to parents before Back to School Night so I could ‘make sure parents are informed of their rights’. Admin said, Gulp. There was some back and forth about whether state law was in play for tests required by the district versus by the federal government. I insisted that California parents always have the right to have their children receive instruction instead of standardized testing, and always have the right to refuse having their children forced to sign in to a website that collects testing data.

I am being granted a waiver Out of the SBAC IAB’s. I get to instead design and implement my own formative assessments. We are going to read — together — some great, whole fiction and poetry (on paper), and write some essays about what we read. On paper. With pens. We will discuss the results — together — and learn from the experience. I won. My students won.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Opt Out, Standardized Testing

Daniel Koretz, Testing Expert, on the Misuse of Standardized Testing and the Failure of the “Reform” Movement

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2017 //
15

In this post, Valerie Strauss interviews Daniel Koretz of Harvard University about his new book The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.

I just finished reading the book, which is a devastating critique of the current “reform” movement because of its reliance on standardized testing. Koretz is not anti-testing or even anti-standardized testing. He is upset by the misuse of standardized testing. He says that it was completely predictable that putting high stakes on tests would lead to score inflation, gaming the system, and cheating (I said the same things in The Death and Life of the Great American School System in chapter 8, about the false promise of accountability). He says that the so-called reform movement has been completely misled by its obsession with high stakes. Consequently, none of the gains that it claims can be trusted. He also lambastes the deeply flawed Common Core state standards, which presumes the value of having a single standard for all students regardless of their different ambitions, abilities, and interests.

I intend to review the book at a later date, and I will express both my admiration for the book and my concerns about the position Koretz takes about the value of standardized testing under the “right” circumstances. I appreciate the fact that he demolishes the “reform” movement and its alleged but nonexistent gains.

I don’t agree with him about the value of standardized tests. Remove the high stakes and they have a limited purpose. Unfortunately, as he points out, the “reformers” see test-based accountability as the heart and soul of their movement. If they can’t use tests to punish students, teachers, principals, and schools, then what is the point?

But for me, the current obsession with standardized testing is pernicious for other reasons. It reduces learning to multiple choice questions and answers. It rewards test-taking skills more than thinking skills. It punishes divergent thinking.

I could go on, but I will save it for a review.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Standardized Testing, Testing

You Are Invited to Hear Linda Darling-Hammond At Wellesley

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2017 //
13

If you live within driving distance of Wellesley, Massachusetts, I hope you plan to attend Linda Darling-Hammond’s lecture on October 19.

I endowed an annual lecture series to bring the best thinking about education to the campus. The program will be live-streamed and available on videotape afterwards so it reaches the maximum number of people. So, if you live far from the Boston-Wellesley hub, you will have a chance to see and hear the lecture. Pasi Sahlberg gave the Ravitch lecture last year. With the collaboration of Professor Barbara Beatty of the Wellesley Department of Educarion, we will select the best thinkers in education each year.

This is my personal gift to my alma mater. My gift also includes funding for student research and internships.

After my death, there will be a Ravitch Professorship in the Department of Education devoted to Education and the Common Good.

For now, enjoy listening to one of the nation’s most thoughtful educators.

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

New SAT scores Released, and Confusion Reigns

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2017 //
45

David Coleman led the creation of the Common Core, which has been mired in controversy since it was released.

Now he is president of the College Board, where he oversaw the redesign of the SAT. Confusion reigns.

The good news is that nearly 1,000 colleges and universities are now test-optional, meaning students don’t have to take the SAT or the ACT to apply. The word is out than the students’ four-year grade-point-average is a better predictor of college performance than a standardized test.

What next for David Coleman?

Categories Higher Education, Standardized Testing

Arise, Patriots, and Save Our Nation’s Children from the Machine

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2017 //
7

Joanne Yatvin is now retired. She has been a teacher, principal, and superintendent, as well as President of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is a literacy specialist.

Allons Enfants de la Patrie

Arise Children of Our Country

During the last quarter of the 20th century powerful American politicians decided that human learning was a fixed process in which all healthy young people could and should acquire a specific body of knowledge, information, and skills over a fixed period of time. With that belief, the low scores of American students on international tests were a hard pill for politicians to swallow.

They concluded that those scores were the fault of our schools and their teachers, also parents who were shirking their responsibility to demand the best from their children. American students of all social backgrounds were growing up lazy, ignorant, and unprepared to be the competent adult workers, leaders, creators, and patriots they were meant to be.

Although there is no research evidence to confirm such beliefs about American students’ laziness or the ineffectiveness of our schools, public education has operated on those assumptions continually through the actions of Congress, the Department of Education, and state legislatures. Those bodies have also used public humiliation and punishment of students, teachers, school principals, unions and—indirectly—parents to prevent any resistance from gaining ground.

Thus far, all efforts to reverse the current concept of education and create a humane and reasonable foundation for our public schools have failed. Recently, we believed that the new federal law, ESSA, would return authority to states and their communities, but that belief was crushed by the Department of Education with its rejection of any state plans aimed to serve students’ needs and interests rather than raise test scores and improve graduation rates.

From my perspective, as the mother of four children who were public school students in far better times, and also as a teacher and school principal back then; there is only one possible solution. We must have a widespread public rebellion against the current system. Parents should refuse to have their children participate in high stakes testing and demand age-appropriate standards for all grades. Communities need to re-shape their public schools to fit the needs of their students; and state officials must fight any moves by the Federal government to punish schools for non-compliance.

We have wasted more than twenty years trying out the beliefs and programs ordered by powerful, but know-nothing politicians. For the sake of our children and our country we must take back public education and allow it to grow through wisdom and humanity.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Privatization, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Study: NAEP Does Not Assess Critical Thinking Skills: No Standardized Test Can Do That

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2017 //
40

The link was left off. It is here.

Valerie Strauss reports on an important new study by a group at Stanford University led by historian Sam Wineburg.

NAEP supporters say that the tests are able to measure skills that other standardized tests can’t: problem solving, critical thinking, etc. But this post takes issue with that notion. It was written by three Stanford University academics who are part of the Stanford History Education Group: Sam Wineburg, Mark Smith and Joel Breakstone.

Wineburg, an education and history professor in the Graduate School of Education, is the founder and executive director of the Stanford History Education Group and Stanford’s PhD program in education history. His research interests include assessment, civic education and literacy. Smith, a former high school social studies in Iowa, Texas and California, is the group’s director of assessment; his research is focused on K-12 history assessment, particularly on issues of validity and generalizability. And Breakstone, a former high school history teacher in Vermont, directs the Stanford History Education Group. His research focuses on how teachers use assessment data to form instruction.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered the “gold standard” of education testing because it is the only national longitudinal measure that goes back to 1970; no one can practice for it; no one knows which students will take the test; no single student takes the entire test; samples of students in every state take portions of the tests.

But when it comes to standardized testing, there is no gold standard. It is all dross, especially now that almost all standardized tests are delivered online. Online testing is popular because it is cheap and supposedly fast. But online testing by its nature allows no room for demonstrating thoughtfulness or for divergent thinking or for creative responses. It is the enemy of critical thinking.

Wineburg’s group tried to determine whether NAEP actually tested critical thinking, and they found that it did not.

But what would happen [they asked] if instead of grading the kids, we graded the test makers? How? By evaluating the claims they make about what their tests actually measure.

For example, in history, NAEP claims to test not only names and dates, but critical thinking — what it calls “Historical Analysis and Interpretation.” Such questions require students to “explain points of view,” “weigh and judge different views of the past,” and “develop sound generalizations and defend these generalizations with persuasive arguments.” In college, students demonstrate these skills by writing analytical essays in which they have to put facts into context. NAEP, however, claims it can measure such skills using traditional multiple-choice questions.

We wanted to test this claim. We administered a set of Historical Analysis and Interpretation questions from NAEP’s 2010 12th-grade exam to high school students who had passed the Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History (with a score of 3 or above). We tracked students’ thinking by having them verbalize their thoughts as they solved the questions.

What we learned shocked us.

In a study that appears in the forthcoming American Educational Research Journal, we show that in 108 cases (27 students answering four different items), there was not a single instance in which students’ thinking resembled anything close to “Historical Analysis and Interpretation.” Instead, drawing on canny test-taking strategies, students typically did an end run around historical content to arrive at their answers.

Their analysis is fascinating.

It is past time that we relinquished our obsession with standardized testing.

Categories History, NAEP, Standardized Testing

New York: Regents Set to Adopt Harsh Test-and-Punish Regime

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2017 //
51

Despite the failure of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, despite the cruel pressures of this approach on very young children, the New York State Board of Regents is set to adopt a punitive plan (to meet the requirements of the new “Every Student Succeeds Act”). Common sense and concern for education values appears to have disappeared from Albany.

Cruelest of all: the state will retain the absurd Common Core standards for the littlest children, K-2 (with a new name, of course).

Districts with high numbers of opt outs will be punished.

Here is the summary in Newsday, by John Hildebrand, showing how little impact parent activism has had on the Board of Regents. Sorry to note, the state teachers’ union applauds these retrograde decisions. (Postscript: I hear the state teachers’ union is discussing their position, so the quote in this article may not be the last word.P

“ALBANY — Sweeping new objectives for school districts and students, with potential effects on controversial state tests and academic standards, are on the state Board of Regents agenda at its first meeting since classes resumed for the 2017-18 academic year.

“The 17-member educational policy board on Monday will tackle the issue of regulating districts as it works toward agreement on enforcement of the revamped federal law called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. New York, like many other states, must submit its enforcement plan to the U.S. Department of Education by Sept. 18 for final approval.

“A 200-page draft plan, under review since May, would regulate schools on a range of objectives important to Long Island.

“Those include steps to discourage students from boycotting state tests — a movement that last spring swept up about 19 percent of more than 1 million students statewide in grades three through eight eligible to take the exams. That included about 90,000 students in Nassau and Suffolk counties, more than 50 percent of the region’s test-takers in those grades.

“Later on Monday, the Regents are scheduled to approve new academic standards, formerly known as Common Core and recently renamed as Next Generation Learning standards. The detailed guidelines — 1,048 standards in English and 450 in math — encompass classroom lessons from preschool through 12th grade statewide.

“The actions, while distinct from one another, are largely intended to settle controversies over student testing and school accountability that began rocking the state more than seven years ago. Though disagreements continue, policy experts said the Regents’ upcoming actions could set the state’s educational course for years to come.

“They’re kind of like cornerstone initiatives,” said Robert Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents and a veteran observer of Albany politics. “The standards define what students are supposed to learn, and ESSA defines how schools will be held accountable for teaching students.”

“Highlights of proposals the Regents are expected to consider include:

“School districts that don’t meet federal requirements for student participation in testing — and that includes all but a handful of districts on the Island — would have to draft plans for improvement. Systems that don’t improve would face potential intervention by a regional BOCES district or the state.

“The goal for high school graduation rates would eventually rise to 95 percent statewide, from a current level of slightly more than 80 percent. State education officials have not decided how diploma requirements might be revised to make that reachable.

“In rating school districts’ academic performance, greater recognition would be given to students who score well on college-level exams sponsored by the Advanced Placement program and by International Baccalaureate.

“For some districts, that could help balance out low performance by other students on the state’s own grade-level tests.

“Greater weight also would be given for student improvement, or “growth,” on state tests, as opposed to recognizing only the percentage of students who reach proficiency level. This reflects the intent of the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law in 2015 by President Barack Obama, which was to provide states with greater flexibility in regulating schools than was possible under the former federal law known as No Child Left Behind.

“Questions linger over whether the proposals will have an effect on stemming the test-refusal movement, especially on the Island.

“Jeanette Deutermann of North Bellmore, chief organizer of the Long Island Opt Out network, predicted that test boycotts in the region will continue unabated as long as the state sticks with academic standards that she and many other parents believe place too much stress on students.

“Deutermann pointed especially to standards in the earliest grades.

“Pre-kindergarten standards say all students should write their numerals to five,” she said. “Some kids are just learning how to hold a pencil.”

“At the state level, education leaders credit the Regents’ leadership and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia for listening to their concerns and quieting debate over tests and related issues. Statewide, the percentage of those opting out of the spring English and math exams was down 2 percentage points from 2016.

“New York State United Teachers, a statewide union umbrella group that once fiercely opposed federal and state efforts to tie test results to teacher performance evaluations, recently expressed support for much of the state’s plan to enforce ESSA.

“Overall, it’s reasonable and rational,” said Andy Pallotta, president of the 600,000-member NYSUT organization, during an interview on WCNY-FM, an upstate public radio station. “I think we’re on the way.”

Categories Early Childhood Education, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Graduation rates, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing

Who Benefits from Expanded Access to AP Courses? Students or the College Board?

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
31

This is a really good piece of investigative writing by Alina Tugend on the value of Advanced Placement courses. It doesn’t answer the question posed in the headline of this post but it supplies valuable information and poses the right questions.

I was interviewed and what really bothers me about the demand for “AP for All” is the implicit assumption that taking a rigorous course and failing the exam will improve educational opportunity. As I say in the article, if this is the goal of the College Board, why not offer the test for free? It is easy to forget that the College Board is a business, not a charity.

There are other ways to reduce the achievement gaps instead of putting kids in a class where the reading level is far beyond their reach and they are near certain to fail.

Although AP was originally designed for elite high schools, some of them have dropped it because their own classes are equally demanding. And some elite college don’t give credit for AP courses.

So the strongest claim of the College Board these days is that their tests supply equity. No standardized test has ever increased equity. They are designed not to. If your primary interest is civil rights, fight for funding and desegregation, not a better standardized test.

Categories Civil Rights, Equity, Higher Education, Standardized Testing

Leonie Haimson: Test Scores in New York State Are Meaningless, Again

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2017 //
28

Leonie Haimson assesses the latest test scores from New York. New York is still using the Common Core, but with a new name, so of course the majority of students in the state “failed,” which was the purpose of the Common Core standards, to make public schools look bad so that privatization would be easier to sell to the public.

Leonie has something that no one in the New York State Education Department has: a historical memory, clear knowledge of the frequent changes in cut scores, constant manipulation of the data.

Leonie writes:

“The NY state and city test scores were released this week. Proficiency rates statewide increased again though by a smaller amount than last year. In English Language Arts, the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored at proficient levels increased by an average of 1.9 percentage points; from 37.9% in 2016 to 39.8%. In math, the students who scored at proficiency rose to 40.2%, up 1.1 points from 29.1% last year.

“In NYC the increases were a little larger: a gain of more than two points in ELA proficiency to 40.6% and 1.4 points to 37.8% proficiency in math.

“Commissioner Elia, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina claimed that the increase in proficiency since 2013 was strong evidence that our students and schools are making progress.

“Yet the reality is that the trends over the last 15 years have not matched any of the trends on the more reliable national test called the NAEPs, for either NYC or the state as a whole.

“In fact, the NY State Education Department has appeared unable since 2002 to produce a reliable test and score it consistently enough to allow one to assess if there’s been any sort of improvement in our schools. Instead, Commissioners and their staff have repeatedly changed cut scores and set proficiency rates to make political points.

“There are many ways to show increases in proficiency — a metric notoriously easy to manipulate — including making the tests easier, shorter, giving them untimed, and/or changing the scoring by lowering the raw scores to scale scores or the cut scores need for proficiency. The state has used all these tricks over time.”

Read it all. She nails the fraud perpetrated by the state and ignored by journalists.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Fraud, New York, Standardized Testing

William Mathis: What Standardized Tests Tell Us (Not Much)

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2017 //
48

William Mathis is managing director of the National Education Policy Center and vice-chair of the Vermont Board of Education.

Mathis writes here about the inherent flaws of today’s standardized tests.

“They claim to measure “college and career readiness.” Yet, it takes no particular insight to know that being ready for the forestry program at the community college is not the same as astrophysics at MIT. Likewise, “career ready” means many different things depending upon whether you are a health care provider, a convenience store clerk, or a road foreman.

“The fundamental flaw is pretending that we can measure an educated person with one narrow set of tests. There is no one universal knowledge base for all colleges and careers. This mistake is fatal to the test-based reform theory.

“When the two test batteries (PARCC and SBAC) are put to the test, they don’t score very well. Princeton based Mathematica Policy Research compared PARCC test scores with freshman grade point average and found only 16 percent could be predicted (in the best case) by the math test and less than 1 percent by the English Language Arts score. The SBAC doesn’t have such a validity study but they say it “appears in their crystal ball.” (p.72 1). Since the future of schools and children are in the balance, this is no place for murky crystal balls…

“In the current latent traits fad, here’s how the tail has to wag:

“Knowledge can only have one line from easiest to hardest, children within a grade are equally distributed within and across all classrooms, and that all children learn the same things in the same way, in the same order and at the same time. As any parent of two or more children can tell you, that is not reality.

“Another fatal tail wagging is that no matter how important the item, if it doesn’t fit the latest test fad, it is tossed out. The result is that the test drifts off in space. This problem is made worse when politicians dangle money in front of test experts to do things with tests that cannot and should not be done, says Shavelson.

“If we redesigned our measures to address what our state constitutions and citizens tell us is important, we would concentrate on the skills that define success as a citizen, worker and human being. These which include clear and effective communication, creative and practical problem-solving, informed and integrative thinking, responsible and involved citizenship, and self-direction.

“This is not to say that standardized testing should be eliminated. It is the single uniform measure across schools. But the very standardized attributes that make them valuable cause harm to those things that are truly important for our children, and our communities.

“Since the “recommended” SBAC tests’ standards are currently set to fail about two-thirds of students, the data will wrongly and dishonestly provide fodder for school critics. In high scoring states, a mere half of students will be declared failures even though they would rank in the top 10 percent of the world. The test scores measure neither college nor careers nor success in life. They simply float free in monolithic space radiating glossy ignorance but as far as informing us about our schools, they are a cold, silent and misleading void.”

I have only one disagreement with Mathis’ keen analysis.

Given the pervasive misuse of standardized tests, our nation would benefit by having a moratorium on standardized testing of three to five years, during which time we might figure out how and when to use them, how to educate without them, and why test scores not the purpose of going to school.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Creativity, Democracy, Education Industry, Real Education, Standardized Testing
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