Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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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

Letter to the U.S. Senate Opposing High-Stakes Testing: Your Organization Should Sign Too

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2015 //
16

From: The Network for Public Education

To: Members of the United States Senate

Re: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

To the Senate:

We, the below undersigned organizations oppose high-stakes testing, because we believe these tests are causing harm to students, to public schools, and to the cause of educational equity. High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish Black and Latino students, and recent immigrants to this country.

We oppose high-stakes tests because:

  • There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, have led to improved educational equity in funding or programs, or have helped close the “achievement gap”.
  • High-stakes testing has become intrusive in our schools, consuming huge amounts of time and resources, and narrowing instruction to focus on test preparation.
  • Many of these tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable and/or free from racial and ethnic bias.
  • High-stakes tests are being used as a political weapon to claim large numbers of students are failing, to close neighborhood public schools, and to fire teachers, all in the effort to disrupt and privatize the public education system.
  • The alleged benefit of annual testing as mandated by No Child Left Behind was to unveil the achievement gaps, and by doing so, close them. Yet after more than a decade of high-stakes testing this has not happened. Instead, thousands of predominantly poor and minority neighborhood schools —the anchors of communities— have been closed.

As the Seattle NAACP recently stated, “Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants as lesser—while systematically underfunding their schools—has a long and ugly history. It is true we need accountability measures, but that should start with politicians being accountable to fully funding education and ending the opportunity gap. …The use of high-stakes tests has become part of the problem, rather than a solution.”

We agree.

Yours sincerely,

Network for Public Education

50th No More (Florida)

Action Now

Alaska NAACP

Alliance for Quality Education

Badass Teachers Association

Better Georgia

Chicago Teachers Union

Class Size Matters

Community Voices for Education

Defending the Early Years

Delaware PTA

EmpowerEd Georgia

FairTest

HispanEduca

Indiana PTA

Indiana Coalition for Public Education

Indiana State Teachers Association

Journey for Justice

More Than A Score

Newark Parents Union

Newark Students Union

NJ Teacher Activist Group

NY State Allies for Public Ed

Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education

Opt Out Orlando

Oregon NAACP

Parents Across America

Providence Students Union

Rethinking Schools

Save Our Schools March

Save Our Schools NJ

Seattle King County NAACP

Students United for Public Ed

Texas Kids Can’t Wait

The Coalition for Better Education

The Opt Out Florida Network

United Opt Out

Voices For Education (Arizona)

Washington State NAACP

We Are Camden

Young Teachers Collective

[Readers: If your organization wishes to add its name to this statement, please contact NPE executive director Robin Hiller at rhiller@voicesforeducation.org

Categories Education Reform, Equity, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Network for Public Education, Standardized Testing

Free E-Book about Teacher Who Refuses Test

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2015 //
14

You can download this e-book today. It is free today only. It was written by a Florida teacher using a pseudonym.

“This book is a way for me to come to some sense of understanding with the testing culture. I think parents, teachers, and students will relate to the experience of the characters in the book. It fully depicts the scenario of an opt out student and I wrote it geared to young adults (6th to 12th grade).

“Synopsis: In the story, a favorite teacher, Ms. Sandy, gets fed up during a state test and walks out of her classroom and career forever. The readers follow along with the students and fellow teachers as they try to make sense of Ms. Sandy’s actions, and as they discover her secret: she is a badass teacher with a ton of important information about testing. In the end, the community comes together to stand up against testing.”

Categories Resistance, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers

New York Regents Battle Over Teacher Evaluation

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2015 //
23

At a heated meeting yesterday, the Néw York Board of Regents voted to approve changes to the teacher evaluation rules. The source of the contention was a harsh plan created by Governor Cuomo and jammed hastily into the state budget bill. Cuomo wants 50% of teachers’ evaluation to be based on state tests. It is payback for the failure of teachers to support his re-election last fall.

Recently a group of seven dissident Regents issued their own statement, proposing a year-long delay in implementation and increased focus on performance assessments.

At the meeting yesterday, the dissidents won some compromises–the main one being a four-month delay , which effectively pushes implementation off for a year.

But the seven dissidents who heroically defended students, teachers, and education, dropped to six as Regent Josephine Finn, a noneducator, joined the majority.

As I understand the details better, I will post them. From what I hear, the six dissident Regents are trying to craft a wise policy that will improve education, and they won significant compromises in the formula.

The majority clings to the vain hope that more testing equals better education. Call them the NCLB majority. Time is running out for their failed ideas.

Some 200,000 students–nearly 400,000 parents–refused the tests this past spring. Expect that number to grow as the Regents majority ignores the popular rejection of their failed policies.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), New York, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Forget the SAT, Says the U. Of Puget Sound

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2015 //
24

The University of Puget Sound has joined some 800 other colleges and universities by dropping the SAT

“Put away your study guides, college applicants — the University of Puget Sound doesn’t care how you do on the SAT or ACT.

“The Tacoma university has joined a small number of Washington colleges, and a growing list of colleges nationally, that don’t require undergraduate applicants to submit standardized test scores when submitting an application for admission.

“The reason? UPS has found that grade-point averages are much more predictive of how a student will do in college than a score on a test.”

Categories Higher Education, Standardized Testing

A Reason Not to Take the SAT

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2015 //
44

The College Board, which sponsors the SAT, is data mining students and selling their data.

This is unbelievable. Students think they are taking a college admissions test, nothing more. Are they asked to grant permission to sell their data?

Categories Data and Data Mining, Standardized Testing

Laura Chapman: How to Get Very High SAT Scores

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2015 //
31

Our frequent commenter Laura Chapman reveals the secrets about how to get very high test scores:

 

She writes:

 

“For decades, arts educators have pointed with misplaced pride at the relatively high SAT scores of students who have taken at least three or four years of art in high school. This relationship of SAT scores to course taking has served as a tool for advocacy of more arts education.

 

“Of course the proportion of high schools where consecutive years of study in all of the arts is not huge, and advocates rarely identify the particular art forms and studies associated with high SAT scores. And I have never seen comparisons of the SAT performance of students who have taken arts courses compared with other patterns of course-taking.

 

“I just downloaded the College Board Total Group Profile Report for 2014, the most recent available. If you are hankering for high SAT scores here are some things you can do to get yourself there.

 

“First, get yourself some parents who are “White,” or Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander. Make sure they have a graduate degree and an income of more than $200,000.

 

“Then go to an independent school where you can study Latin and/or Chinese, British Literature, European History, Physics, Calculus, Computer Programing, Theater and Music theory/appreciation (not performance). You can study other things, but these are the “best in class” for getting a high SAT score.

 

“Study all of these subjects for multiple years and take advanced placement courses galore.

 

“As a final touch, aspire to a doctoral degree and choose a major based on how you score on the SAT. That means math and statistics if you get the highest SAT score in math. It you score at the highest levels in critical reading and writing, get yourself a major in “Multi-Interdisciplinary Studies.”

 

“Among the intended college majors for this cohort of tests takers, 19% wanted to major in Health Professions and related Clinical Services; 12% wanted to major in Business Management, Marketing, and related Support Services; 10% selected an Engineering major; 7% intended to major in Biological an Biomedical Sciences, 7% intended to major in the Visual or Performing Arts; 5% intended to major in Psychology. Only 4% expected to major in Education.

 

“About 2% of the SAT test takers are planning to enroll in a Certificate or Associate degree program a trade or personal services occupation.

 

“The College Board CEO is the same person who takes credit as the architect of the Common Core State Standards, with two subjects proposed as if sufficient for college and career readiness. To that we can say, the SAT scores tell a different and well-established story about priviledge and opportunity to learn.”

Categories Standardized Testing

Teacher: The Toxic Reach of Common Core into Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2015 //
16

A post yesterday described the intrusion of Common Core into a Headstart program for babies.

This teacher tried but could not escape the dead hand of test-driven Common Core:

“I am just completing my 10th consecutive year teaching Kindergarten. I began the first year of the NCLB standardized testing. I previously taught grades 3-5, 10 years prior and strongly objected to the tests at that time. My principal who always praised the way I taught reading told me that I would have to restructure my program to include more workbooks and test prep.

“Luckily a position in K opened up and i was able to get away from the testing and enjoy teaching in a creative way again with thematic units and high interest books. But slowly, ever slowly that began to change. For the past 4 years I have been forced to use a “CC aligned” curriculum that I hate and must use the assessments from the program that is extremely developmentally inappropriate. And there are A LOT of benchmark tests, at least one every 2 weeks that have as many as 65 multiple choice questions like on the final ELA benchmark I gave just this week….. So now of course they would come for the babies next, not surprised, this is the trickle down effect of the poison of back mapping.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Standardized Testing
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