Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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Quote of the Day

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2015 //
31

A comment from Florida:

 

 

Making public education unbearable is all part of the privatizers’ plan to destabilize public education. I hear parents discussing alternative placements for their children other than public schools here in Florida because the public schools are “mostly about testing.” This is Jeb Bush’s legacy. Recently Jeb Bush met with Governor Scott in what the media termed an “education summit.” It was probably like a couple of hyenas trying to decide which end of a fallen zebra to strip first.

Categories Florida, Privatization, Standardized Testing

Teacher Andy Goldstein Denounces Florida’s Devotion to High-Stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2015 //
13

Teacher Andy Goldstein greets the new superintendent of Palm Beach County with a brief lecture about the evils of high-stakes testing.

 

In Palm Beach County and in Florida, he says, the basic ideology is “Testing is teaching.”

 

Watch the video, where he explains that the purpose of all this testing is to label schools as failures so they can be privatized and turned into profit centers.

 

He predicts:

 

“At this rate, I can imagine the day in the not-too-distant future when my daughter comes home and tells my wife and I, ‘I want to be a standardized test-taker when I grow up.’ And my wife and I would beam at her and say ‘Oh, we’re so proud of our little data point. You’re gonna make some rich plutocrat so happy.’”

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Standardized Testing

New Teacher Tests Have Disparate Impact on Minority Teachers

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2015 //
54

It is indisputable that standardized tests have a disparate impact on members of minority groups. Asian students perform exceptionally well on math tests. White and Asian students have higher scores than black and Hispanic students.

The same disparate impact is found on teacher tests as on student tests. Occasionally, an African-American teacher will sue, claiming test bias. They usually win. New York State’s teacher licensing exam attempted to be “more rigorous,” but making them harder to pass cemented the gap between the pass rates of different racial groups.

“On a common licensing exam called Praxis Core, a new test given in 31 states or jurisdictions that was created to be more rigorous than its predecessor, 55 percent of white candidates taking the test since October 2013 passed the math portion on their first try, according to the preliminary data from the Educational Testing Service, which designed the exam. The passing rate for first-time African-American test takers was 21.5 percent, and for Hispanic test takers, 35 percent. A similar gap was seen on the reading and writing portions.

“In New York, which now has four separate licensing tests that candidates must pass, an analysis last year of the most difficult exam found that during a six-month period, only 41 percent of black and 46 percent of Hispanic candidates passed the test their first time, compared with 64 percent of their white counterparts.”

This is a paradox, as two policy goals conflict: to diversify the teaching force and to make teacher certification exams more difficult to pass. It seems likely that aligning teacher exams with the Common Core will worsen the problem.

Read Alan Singer here on the uselessness of standized tests for teacher certification. He writes that such tests are notoriously unable to predict who will be a good teacher and who will be a bad teacher.

He recommends remedies, beginning with FIRE PEARSON.

He concludes:

“There is no foolproof way to evaluate prospective teachers or anybody else for that matter. People have bad hair days and perform below expectation. Life also interferes with work and sometimes people do not develop as expected. Just look at some of the high draft choices in professional sports. There needs to be support and evaluations along the way and alternative career paths. There is no inoculation or test that can be administered at the start of someone’s career that will ensure people will be great teachers down the road.”

Categories Equity, Race, Standardized Testing, Teachers

If You Live in New York State, Here is the Name of Your Regent

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2015 //
17

This is a list of the Regents of the State of New York. The majority want to maintain high-stakes testing to evaluate teachers.

 

Six of the 17 Regents voted to oppose high-stakes testing and to change the state’s way of evaluating teachers. These six want more attention to student performance, not defined as bubble tests, but student work in the school.

If your Regent voted to support high-stakes testing, please contact him or her to express your views.

 

The Regents who opposed Governor Cuomo’s high-stakes testing are:

 

Kathleen Cashin

 

Betty Rosa

 

Judith Chin

 

Judith Johnson

 

Catherine Collins

 

Beverly L. Ouderkirk

 

These Regents are profiles in courage. They based their decision on research and on their own experience as educators.

 

If you live in the district of one of the other Regents, you should contact them and let them know that their vote for high-stakes testing hurts students and teachers by placing too much emphasis on standardized tests. Urge them to pay attention to pedagogically sound practices, as the other six Regents did.

Categories Accountability, New York, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers

A Teacher Thanks the NY Opt Out Movement

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2015 //
5

This reader, named Megan, is a teacher. She does not teach in Néw York. She is grateful to the Néw York Opt Out movement, who keep alive her hope for a return to sane education policies:

 

 

 

“We just finished SBAC 2 weeks ago followed by MAPs the very next week. I am, I guess fortunate to work in a district where test scores are not yet tied to my evaluation but the legislature is working on this very thing at present.

 

 

“We were told this year that it would be a ” no fault” year due to the fact that our district could not correlate last year’s CBM to the new test. This after initially saying they had a “special formula ” to do just that.

 

 

“Then, in the first days of the test, the whole system shut down and the largest district in our state received permission to forego the test this year. So, the rest of us took the test over two weeks. I did some online test prep in January but refused to overwhelm my students with weeks of test prep. I taught all the subjects in the curriculum normally. I will not subject my students to the stress that assemblies, daily test prep., and rigmarole I have seen in other schools, it’s just not right.

 

 

“I’m pleased to see other states such as New York sounding the alarms to what these tests do to students, their parents and schools. I am hopeful that this current movement to opt out will spread across the rest of the country.”

Categories Opt Out, Parent Groups, Resistance, Standardized Testing

Oregon: “Stand for Children” Opposes Parents’ Right to Opt Children Out of Testing

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2015 //
15

“Stand for Children” was once a civil rights group; it once advocated for more funding and for programs to help children. Then it was taken over by the corporate reform movement and became outspoken against unions and teachers. The budget surged into the millions, due to its new-found friends (the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and friends from Bain Capital). In Illinois, it bought up all the top lobbyists to push through a bill to limit teachers’  rights and prevent teachers in Chicago from striking. Stand’s founder, Jonah Edelman, boasted about his success in beating the unions and was videotaped doing so at the Aspen Institute  (here is the videotape). (He later apologized for what he said but not for what he did.) In Massachusetts, Stand threatened an expensive referendum to eliminate teachers’ job rights and won.

 

Many of its original friends left the organization because they did not like its alignment with the forces seeking privatization of public education and demonization of teachers. Some now call the group “Stand ON Children.”

 

In Oregon, parents and teachers fought hard for a bill to establish the right of parents to opt their children out of state testing. The bill was passed by the Legislature and is now heading for the Governor’s desk for her signature.

 

Stand for Children has been lobbying and campaigning to persuade Oregon Governor Kate Brown to veto the bill. They wrap themselves in the mantle of “it’s all about the kids” and “it’s all about disadvantaged kids,” to attack the right of parents to say no to abusive high-stakes testing.

 

If you are a parent or educator or student in Oregon, let Governor Brown hear from you.

Categories Opt Out, Oregon, Stand for Children, Standardized Testing

Sue Altman: The Critics of Opt Out Are Wrong

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2015 //
15

Mother Crusader opened her blog to this post by Sue Altman, who received a dual degree at the University of Oxford in International and Comparative Education and an MBA. In this post, she explains why critics of Opt Out are wrong, and what mechanisms are needed for Opt Out to succeed. She points out that the very mechanisms needed for success have been stripped away in many districts that serve predominantly African American and Hispanic students.

 

Privatizers (aka reformers) have scoffed at the Opt Out movement as a phenomenon of privileged white suburban moms, presumably pampering their children.

 

She writes:

 

For an opt-out movement to catch on, certain criteria must be in place— things like democratically elected school boards, open-minded and respectful superintendents, and teachers with job security. But, by design, these things have been removed, systematically, from urban communities, so that policies can be put in place that community members (mostly African-American or Hispanic) have no say in.

 

 

She has studied the successful Opt Out movement in New York, and the post explains how each one of these elements is crucial for the parents to participate in opting out. Where participation is low, it is usually because these ingredients (a democratically elected school board, a respectful superintendent, and teachers with job security) either don’t exist or have been systematically removed. The goal of the privatizers for the past decade has been to replace democratically elected school boards with mayoral or state control and to remove any job security from teachers. This stifles democratic dissent and reduces protests, which is why the students in Newark turned to the streets and to sit-ins to be heard since no one in power was listening. As Altman points out, black and Hispanic communities have been the targets of policies meant to silence their voices. This also discourages such bold actions as opting out.

 

Categories New Jersey, Opt Out, Parents, Resistance, Standardized Testing

Paul Thomas: The Hoax of Common Core Rebranding

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2015 //
20

Paul Thomas decribes the futility of rebranding the Common Core.

He writes: “Careful examination of both adopting Common Core and then the backlash resulting in dropping Common Core reveals that states remain firmly entrenched in the same exact accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing that has overburdened education since the 1980s. “The names and letters change, but not much else—except for throwing more money at a game of wasteful politics labeled “reform.” “Political posturing and public responses to all this Common Core puffery suggest that the next time a hurricane is plowing toward U.S. soil, the Weather Channel can lessen public panic by simply announcing a kitten is off the coast of Florida. “New and different standards and tests—these are jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, rearranging chairs on the Titanic. “We need to abandon ship.” It is time to aim for equity, for equality of opportunity, not a race with winners and losers.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Standardized Testing

The Success of Schools in Massachusetts Cannot Be Explained by Testing

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2015 //
47

Andy Hargreaves is a professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He received the Grawemeyer Award in 2015. He and two of his graduate students–Mary Bridget Burns and Shanee Wangia–wrote the following response to an editorial in the Boston Globe defending high-stakes testing.

Hargreaves, Burns, and Wangia said:

Want to improve the quality of American high school graduates? Keep testing them! That’s the recommendation of last weekend’s Boston Globe Editorial: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2015/06/12/moratorium-school-tests-goes-overboard/zVVfrMRHbQO0a0GyK2mhLO/story.html. The editorial blasted a proposed state bill that would implement a three-year hiatus on testing, be it the state test or the PARCC assessment. Citing concerns that the Massachusetts Teachers Association had too much influence on the legislation, and calling it a “blunt instrument” rather than a “well-drafted public policy prescription,” the editorial recommended voting against the bill. The educational performance of Massachusetts is nationally renowned, it said, and its high-stakes tests had been a big contributor to the state’s success. So why abandon them?
 
Well, it is a bit of a stretch to say that high-stakes testing contributes to high educational performance in Massachusetts or anywhere else for that matter. Massachusetts is certainly a top performer in the US and receives many visitors from all over the world who come to learn from its success. But other New England states perform just as well or almost as well as Massachusetts, yet their approaches to assessment and testing are strikingly different. Let’s look at how two of these other states compare on the well regarded National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) which is not high-stakes (in that it doesn’t have rewards or punishments attached to it), it is applied only to samples of students rather than all of them, and it cannot be manipulated by teaching to the test.
 
Among all states on the 2013 NAEP, New Hampshire shares top ranking with Massachusetts in 4th Grade reading and math and is just one or two places behind Massachusetts in 8th grade reading and math with a barely perceptible difference of 5 points or less on a scale reaching the high 200s. The only place where such a tiny difference in number of points counts as part of a very large score is in the final minutes of a basketball game!
 
Essentially, the two states perform at an almost identical level, including on other state-by-state comparisons such as child well-being where they rank first and second respectively. Yet New Hampshire has had a very different and more flexible assessment strategy to that of Massachusetts – using a suite of assessment tools as part of common standards established across Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
 
Meanwhile, over the state line from “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire, the Green Mountain state of Vermont is an equally impressive educational performer. It ranks 2nd– 5th place on different aspects of the NAEP, diverging no more than 6 points from the other two states discussed here. It is also another high scorer on child well-being. Yet, Vermont’s approach to testing is much more cautious and skeptical than that of Massachusetts. Indeed, when the Commissioner of New Hampshire and the Secretaries of Education for Massachusetts and Vermont took the stage together at Boston College last December to debate the reasons for their respective “states of success,” Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe, a staunch opponent of standardized testing, criticized tests for becoming tools with harsh consequences attached, rather than ways to monitor teacher and student progress.

http://learninglab.wbur.org/2014/12/03/new-england-education-forum-highlights-concerns-about-high-stakes-testing/

So the Globe Editorial is just plain wrong when it claims that state tests explain high performance in Massachusetts. Neighboring states without this armory of high-stakes assessment have performed equally well. There is high performance with tests and also without them. If we can do well with or without the tests and the consequences that are attached to them, then perhaps we should decide whether we keep them or ditch them on other grounds.
 
Nearly a million students in Massachusetts take tests like the MCAS or PARCC assessments, at a cost of $29.50-$46 per student. By putting those tests aside, Massachusetts alone could save anywhere from $28-44 million dollars per year. The millions of dollars currently spent on testing could be reallocated instead to supporting teachers more effectively by providing more designated time for them to work together and give feedback on each others’ teaching within the school day, to improve their teaching.
 
Without the constant concentration on tested subjects, the state could also open up the curriculum beyond the relentless basics of literacy and math to include the artistic, scientific, project-based and out-of-school experiences that are an everyday experience for children of the privileged, but that should be the entitlement of everyone. We could support greater leadership stability in high poverty schools so that these schools can attract great leaders and then keep them. We could stop the revolving door of school leadership in under-performing schools, alleviating the pressure these schools feel to stave off receivership and closure before their work of their leaders has had time to have an impact. Like Canada, Finland, Singapore, and other high performing nations, we could achieve a lot more with far less testing. We can do more. We could do better.
 
Tests of all kinds can be tools for diagnosis and monitoring in the service of improvement. But they should not be the final say in a student’s academic future or a teacher’s professional career. We can test prudently rather than profligately and get equally strong or even stronger results. That’s not only what high performing countries have learned. It’s also what some of Massachusetts’ immediate neighbors have been doing for years.
 
Andy Hargreaves, Mary Bridget Burns and Shanee Wangia

Lynch School of Education

Boston College
 
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): Interstate Comparison of 2013 Scores
 

NAEP Vermont (VT) Massachusetts (MA) New Hampshire (NH) Nation (Public)
4th Grade Reading 228 (5th place) 232 (1st place) 232 (1st place) 221
4th Grade Math 248 (4th place) 253 (1st place) 253 (1st place) 241
8th Grade Reading 274 (3rd place) 277 (1st place) 274 (3rd place) 266
8th Grade Math 295 (2nd place) 301 (1st place) 296 (2nd place) 284

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2013/pdf/2014465MA4.pdf

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2013/pdf/2014465MA8.pdf

Categories Education Reform, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Standardized Testing, Vermont

Teacher Asks: Who is Behind SBAC?

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2015 //
49

As you may recall, the U.S. Department of Education funded two testing groups to write tests aligned with the Common Core standards. One is the Partnership for Readiness for Colleges and Careers (PARCC), and the other is the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). Since the Department is legally prohibited from attempting to control or influence curriculum or instruction, this grant (for $360 million) may actually be illegal, but no one has gone to court to challenge it. Meanwhile, both PARCC and SBAC agreed to adopt the same cut scores (passing marks), aligned with the rigorous achievement levels of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This was a fateful and unwise decision. Catherine Gewertz pointed out in Education Week that most students were likely to fail, given the alignment with NAEP:

 

The two common-assessment consortia are taking early steps to align the “college readiness” achievement levels on their tests with the rigorous proficiency standard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a move that is expected to set many states up for a steep drop in scores.

 

After all,  fewer than four in 10 children reached the “proficient” level on the 2013 NAEP in reading and math.

 

Thus, it is reasonable to expect that most children will “fail” both PARCC and SBAC and will continue to “fail” them for many years into the future. If these scores count for graduation, most students will never graduate. What will we do with them?

 

This reader, a teacher, says that PARCC has received lots of scrutiny, but SBAC has not. Any reader want to chime in?

 

For months, I have been disheartened that there has been so much media attention devoted to PARCC but not to SBAC. Don’t get me wrong: I welcome the focus on the nefarious funding-sources and profiteers of PARCC and I love, love, love the large scale civil disobedience we have seen by kids, parents, teachers and even, in some brave cases, by principals and superintendents, in places like New Mexico, New Jersey and New York. But we are not seeing the same level of journalistic interest in and investigation of the Smarter Balanced tests being suffered here in Oregon and elsewhere. Why not?

 

My hunch is that it has to do with HOW BLOODY DIFFICULT IT IS TO FIND ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE SBAC FROM ANY SOURCE OTHER THAN SBAC ITSELF. Seriously, I recommend you do a google search and experience for yourself the Orwellian scrubbing of the Internet by the Consortium.

 

I am not a journalist and I can say tonight: I have never been more saddened by that fact. If I *were* professionally trained, I would have the expertise to spend the next month getting to the bottom of this clearly corrupt enterprise: any organization that spends this much energy obscuring every last detail about its origins, governance, finances and practices cannot be entirely above board.

 

But, using my admittedly amateurish journalistic skills, here is what I have found and, if I WERE a journalist (and not a full time teacher), here are some leads I would pursue:

 

1. Since SBAC’s Race to the Top grant ran out, it has been housed at UCLA’s education school. (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/news/states-move-forward-smarter-balanced/) This move also seems to coincide with the end of publicly available quarterly reports, which list SBAC’s subcontracts. The most recent report I could find was from June of 2013. There you will see contracts with Educational Testing Service, AIR, Amplify, McGraw-Hill, Pearson and many more. (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Quarterly-Report-June-2013.pdf)

 

2. In its new home at UCLA, SBAC is collaborating with something called the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) and guess what? It is funded by some of the very same organizations that are getting contracts with SBAC (ETS, for example), as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (http://www.cse.ucla.edu/about/agencies.php)

 

3. From what I can find, UCLA’s education school is also enmeshed in the charter school movement. In fact, UCLA offers a certificate on Charter School Finance Policy and Administration! (https://www.uclaextension.edu/pages/ProgramDetails.aspx?reg=CF586) If I were even remotely cynical, I might ask myself who stands to benefit the most from a new standardized test for which it is projected that 60-70% of kids will fail? Might it be charter schools that can swoop in and offer “alternatives” to “failing” schools, where “failing” is measured by standardized tests?

 

4. Who the heck wrote the SBAC? Looks to me like ETS and McGraw Hill, which received (at least) a combined $82.6 million from the Consortium (that’s us!) for “test-item development” and other services. (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/01/06contract.h34.html)

 

SOMEBODY has got to connect all these dots and show that the SBAC,  just like the PARCC, is a giveaway to profiteers, was NOT crafted by educators with the best interests of students in mind, and is another step toward taking the “public” out of public education.

Categories Common Core, Standardized Testing
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