Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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Teachers: Time for Civil Disobedience

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
37

Never have the stakes attached to testing been higher. If a student doesn’t reach proficient on a Common Core test where most students will not reach proficient (a passing mark set artificially high), the student is a failure, her teacher is ineffective, and the school is stigmatized. How to counter this madness?

Consider the following comments by teachers, posted on this blog:

“I would encourage all of my students to post pics of the questions or tweet the questions as they remember them. I did this several years ago when Indiana had just one graduation qualifying exam. I got reprimanded and transferred to a terrible inner city school, but the action did have some impact because the state had to admit that a great deal of the exam questions were wrong or too poorly worded to make sense. I realize that in today’s testing-mania culture I would probably have been fired, lost my license or maybe even jailed, but this stuff is so terrible we need to start some civil disobedience.”

And another:

“Two years ago, a teen in NJ committed suicide after learning that he failed to get a passing grade on the standardized test that would allow him to graduate. He tweeted his despair over the test. I wonder if his Twitter account was monitored by the NJ DOE.”

I wonder if the test had absurd questions and wrong answers. Who was accountable?

Categories Resistance, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers

An Outstanding Account of Long Island Rally

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
7

There was an enthusiastic and energetic audience of about 1,500 parents and educators at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts on Long Island, Néw York, on March 9. Long Island is the epicenter of the Opt Out movement, which is supported by many of its superintendents.

This is the best, most factual account I have seen of that great evening. It was written by Jaime Franchi, the best education writer on Long Island and one of the best in the state.

It begins:

“Critics of the controversial education reform Common Core rallied at Long Island University Post Campus Monday in the first such organized protest on Long Island this year against the Obama administration initiative and the latest in what has been a consistent and relentless campaign among opponents to halt the contentious standardized testing examinations.

Titled “Standing Together to Save Public Education: A Call to Action,” the gathering drew more than 1,000 parents, teachers, school administrators and anti-Common Core activists, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s former gubernatorial primary challenger Zephyr Teachout, and was keynoted by renowned education policy analyst, historian and New York University professor Diane Ravitch.

Joining her onstage was a panel of distinguished educators including: South Side High School in Rockville Centre Principal Carol Burris, Comsewogue School District science teacher and Port Jefferson Station Teachers Association President Beth Dimino, Comsewogue Superintendent Dr. Joe Rella, New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) cofounder and Long Island Opt-Out Facebook administrator Jeanette Deutermann, and education advocacy group Lace to the Top cofounder Kevin Glynn, a teacher at Brookhaven Elementary School in South Country School District.

Each spoke about how the Common Core tests are damaging to children and echoed the need for attendees to “Refuse The Tests.” With more than 30,000 students across Long Island “opting out” and forgoing taking the exams last year—and with that number expected to increase significantly during the next scheduled round of exams this April—panelists found a welcoming and charged audience quick to respond with resounding applause and cheers. [Read About How Thousands Of Long Island Students Opted-Out Of Common Core Here]

“We are in the midst of a vast social experiment on the children of the nation and it is all tied to the standardized test,” Ravitch told the electrified crowd, many of whom held homemade posters and signs decrying the Common Core program.”

Categories New York, Resistance, Standardized Testing

John Merrow’s Terrific PBS Piece on the Opt Out Movement

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
23

We are accustomed to seeing the Opt Out movement misportrayed in the mainstream media as union-led, when in fact the unions have sat on the sidelines.

John Merrow produced a fair and honest presentation of the issues in this PBS segment.

The transcript is included in the link. Merrow interviewed parents, students, critics and advocates of the Common Core standards and tests. He reports from Néw Jersey.

Categories Opt Out, Resistance, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: What Do Economists Know About Teachers?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2015 //
49

Peter Greene recently read a blog debate in the “Néw York Times” on the topic of how to improve teaching. He reacted strongly to the contribution by Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution. Hanushek is well known for his belief that the best way to tell which teachers are best is to see which ones get the highest test score gains; that raising scores will eventually produce trillions of dollars in economic growth; and that teachers who can’t produce higher scores should be “deselected.” That is, fired.

Here is the beginning of Greene’s critique of the economists’ contribution to education policy;

“When you want a bunch of legit-sounding baloney about education, call up an economist. I can’t think of a single card-carrying economist who has produced useful insights about education, schools and teaching, but from Brookings to the Hoover Institute, economists can be counted on to provide a regular stream of fecund fertilizer about schools.

“So here comes Eric Hanushek in the New York Times (staging one of their op-ed debates, which tend to resemble a soccer game played on the side of a mountain) to offer yet another rehash of his ideas about teaching. The Room for Debate pieces are always brief, but Hansuhek impressively gets a whole ton of wrong squeezed into a tiny space. Here’s his opening paragaph:

“Despite decades of study and enormous effort, we know little about how to train or select high quality teachers. We do know, however, that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of classroom teachers and that these differences can be observed.”

“This is a research puzzler of epic proportions. Hansuhek is saying, “We do not know how to tell the difference between a green apple and a red apple, but we have conclusive proof that a red apple tastes better.” Exactly what would that experimental design look like? Exactly how do you compare the red and green apples if you can’t tell them apart?

“The research gets around this issue by using a circular design. We first define high quality teachers as those whose students get high test scores. Then we study these high quality teachers and discover that they get students to score well on tests. It’s amazing!

“Economists have been at the front of the parade declaring that teachers cannot be judged on qualifications or anything else except results. Here’s a typical quote, this time from a Rand economist: “The best way to assess teachers’ effectiveness is to look at their on-the-job performance, including what they do in the classroom and how much progress their students make on achievement tests.”

“It’s economists who have given us the widely debunked shell game that is Valued Added Measuring of teachers, and they’ve been peddling that snake oil for a while (here’s a research summary from 2005). It captures all the wrong thinking of economists in one destructive ball– all that matters about teachers is the test scores they produce, and every other factor that affects a student’s test score can be worked out in a fancy equation.”

A few years ago, I engaged in an Internet debate with Rick Hanushek on the Eduwonk website. Here is the exchange:
Hanushek
My Response
Hanushek
My response

I agree with Peter Greene that economists have had far too much influence on educational policy. The attempt to quantify teaching and learning is ruinous to education and buries any consideration of the purpose of education. Children are not widgets. Learning is far too complex to be measured by standardized multiple-choice tests. Education includes many goals other than test scores. Teachers are professionals and should not be treated as interchangeable low-wage workers.

Categories Economy, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Gene V. Glass: Management by Pinheads

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2015 //
4

Gene V. Glass is one of our most distinguished education researchers. Fortunately for the rest of us, he blogs from time to time about the lunacy of our era of education “reform.”

 

 

In this post, he explains what he calls “management by pinheads.” Quite simply, it is the effort to improve education by setting numerical goals. Such a strategy invites data manipulation, gaming the system, and cheating. He notes that Beverly Hall recently died of breast cancer. She had an illustrious career, but it all came crashing down because of a massive cheating scandal in Atlanta, where she was superintendent. She prided herself on being a “Dara driven decision-maker,” but it was this approach that created a climate where subordinates–administrators and teachers–cheated to produce the data she wanted.

 

 

Now Glass notes that the Scottsdale, Arizona, school board has set a menu of numerical targets for its superintendent. It is an invitation to game the system, he says. Campbell’s Law rules.

Categories Arizona, Atlanta, Campbell's Law, Standardized Testing

Outrage: High-Stakes Testing in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
52

High-stakes testing has reached down into kindergarten, where it is developmentally inappropriate. Kindergarten is supposed to be the children’s garden. It is supposed to be a time for learning to socialize with others, to work and play with others, to engage in imaginative activities, to plan with building blocks and games. It is a time when little children learn letters and numbers as part of their activities. They listen as the teacher reads stories, and they want to learn to read.

 

But in the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, kindergarten has changed. Little children must be tested. The great data monster needs data. How can their teachers be evaluated if there are no standardized tests and no data?

 

This frightening article in Slate by Alexandria Neason describes how high-stakes testing now permeates kindergarten.

 

The author describes the kindergarten classroom of Molly Mansel in Néw Orleans.

 

“Mansel’s students started taking tests just three weeks into the 2014–15 school year. They began with a state-required early childhood exam in August, which covered everything from basic math to letter identification. Mansel estimates that it took between four and five weeks for the teachers to test all 58 kindergarten students—and that was with the help of the prekindergarten team. The test requires an adult to sit individually with each student, reading questions and asking them to perform various tasks. The test is 11 pages long and “it’s very time-consuming,” according to Mansel, who is 24 and in her third year of teaching (her first in kindergarten).

 

The rest of the demanding testing schedule involves repeated administrations of two different school-mandated tests. The first, Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, is used to measure how students are doing compared with their peers nationally—and to evaluate teachers’ performance. The students take the test in both reading and math three times a year. They have about an hour to complete the test, and slower test takers are pulled from class to finish.

 

The second test, called Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress, or STEP, is a literacy assessment that measures and ranks children’s progress as they learn letters, words, sentences, and, eventually, how to read. Mansel gives the test individually to students four times throughout the year. It takes several days to administer as Mansel progresses through a series of tasks: asking the students to write their names, to point to uppercase and lowercase versions of letters, and to identify words that rhyme, for example.

 

Although more informal, the students also take about four quizzes per week in writing, English, math, science, and social studies. The school’s other kindergarten teacher designs most of the quizzes, which might ask students to draw a picture describing what they learned, or write about it in a journal.

 

“By the end of the school year, Mansel estimates that she’ll have lost about 95 hours of class time to test administration—a number inconceivable to her when she reflects on her own kindergarten experience. She doesn’t remember taking any tests at all until she was in at least second grade. And she’s probably right.”

 

Whoever made this happen should be arrested for child abuse and theft of childhood.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Sara Stevenson: Why Do Texas Politicians Hate Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
10

A few days ago, I posted about a proposal by powerful Republicans to “reform” public education with a grab-bag of failed policies that punish public schools and demoralize teachers while creating a flow of public dollars to the private sector.

 

In this article, the brilliant and persistent Sara Stevenson explains the details of the proposal. Stevenson, a member of the blog’s honor roll, is a librarian at O. Henry Middle School in Austin. She has had more letters published in the Wall Street Journal than anyone I know. She believes in setting the record straight, and she believes in public education. That’s why this destructive proposal made her blood boil.

 

The bill could well have been written in ALEC’s corporate offices. It has everything on the corporate free-market wish list.

 

Stevenson writes:

 

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Senate Education Committee Chairman Larry
Taylor, R-Friendswood, delivered the terrible news last week: The
Senate education plan contains no financial help for school districts,
600 of which are already suing the state for inadequate and
inequitable funding. It offers no testing relief for students in
grades 3 through 8 who must sit for up to four hours at a stretch
taking multiple standardized tests.

 

Furthermore, their proposals are
merely warmed up, stale leftovers written by the American Legislative
Exchange Council, a corporation-funded group that emphasizes free
markets and limited government. Here’s a sample serving:

 

Giving letter grades (A-F) to individual public schools.

A “parent trigger” law, which allows the majority of parents at
individual failing schools to petition for new management.

Removing limits on full-time virtual schools and online courses.

Tying teacher performance to compensation.

Creating a “college and career readiness” course for Texas middle
school students.

Creation of a statewide district to manage failing schools.

 

The most dispiriting part of this education plan is that it proposes
absolutely nothing that will help educators with the serious charge of
preparing our young citizens for their adult lives. Our schools are
terribly underfunded. After the Texas Legislature cut $5.4 billion in
education dollars in 2011, Texas ranked 49th among the fifty states in
per pupil spending. Today we are spending less money per student than
we did ten years ago. How can the Legislature’s continued starving of
school districts help us with the very real challenges we face?

 

Less state funding for schools translates into larger class sizes,
fewer teaching assistants and painful cuts to electives, arts, PE,
libraries and clinics. Texas educators are willing to work hard in
daunting circumstances, but the more our legislators insult us with
unoriginal, ineffective schemes as they deprive us of necessary
resources, the more those of us with choices will flee our beloved
profession. The best teachers will refuse to work in an environment in
which they cannot be successful. I give this lazy, irresponsible
education plan a big, fat zero.”

 

Never mind that not one of these proposals is new or that not one of them has been successful anywhere.

 

Ideologues don’t care about evidence. The goal is to dismantle public education, a fundamental, essential institution of our democracy. In doing so, they override local control and funnel taxpayers’ dollars to entrepreneurs and religious institutions. There is not a shred of evidence that any of their proposals will improve education.

 

These men are not conservatives. Conservatives conserve. Conservatives don’t blow up community institutions. These men are radicals and anarchists, destroying heedlessly, mindlessly, zealously, without regard for the damage they do to the lives of children, families, educators, and communities.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Funding, Parent trigger, Privatization, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, Texas, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Colorado Students Will Hold Protest Rally at Capitol on Saturday

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2015 //
10

Colorado students are rallying to demand testing reform. This is THEIR issue. They have been subjected to test after test after test. They lose instructional time. They lose time for the arts and history and foreign languages to make more time for testing. Their scores can get their teachers and their principal fired. They are genuine patriots. Despite 12 years of testing, they have not been turned into robots. They are standing up for their right to a real education. They refuse to be crushed by the standardization machine. These students can teach the nation what matters most.

 

On Saturday, March 7th, from 11 am to 12 pm, high school students from schools around the state will join on the West Steps of the Denver Capitol.

 

They aim to have their voices heard on the issue of standardized testing in Colorado. The Colorado Measure for Academic Success (CMAS) test proved to be the uniting factor that prompted these students to raise concerns regarding the corporate ownership of tests such as the CMAS, as well as the ways in which they feel these tests are misaligned with curriculum design.

 

Other grievances regarding these tests include the fact that teachers cannot see the tests their students take, and that depending upon the school district, they feel teachers and schools can be unfairly jeopardized based upon the students’ scores. After contemplating this myriad of complaints and concerns, a group of high school seniors in Fort Collins began an organization known as ‘The Anti-Test’, a group which seeks to peacefully protest certain aspects of standardized testing for the sake of testing reform. They have organized this rally in Denver so that the voices of civically engaged students may be heard in what they ultimately believe is a student issue.

 

I hope they bring a special message of dissent to State Senator Michael Johnston, who wrote Senate Bill 191, which made high-stakes testing the focus of “reform” in Colorado. Johnston is a former member of Teach for America. He insisted that 50% of educators’ evaluation should be based on test scores. Making testing so important, he claimed in 2010, would produce “great teachers” and “great schools.” How has that worked out?

Categories Colorado, Denver, Real Education, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Students

Peter Greene Distills Arne Duncan’s Vision of NCLB

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2015 //
11

Peter Greene read Arne Duncan’s speech carefully on the future of NCLB and boils down his vision of the federal role in education to one word: testing.

“First, Duncan positions assessment in the center of his education universe. He starts out by describing a large vision of education, one that is filled with innovation, meets the needs of every child, promotes equity, provides opportunity, values all subject areas, and provides every school with sufficient support and resources. And somehow considering all those aspects of a grand vision of education leads him to a Big Standardized Test. That’s it.

“It’s like someone who describes the awesome heights and sensations of a gourmet dinner, teasing you with visions of tastes and textures, savory combinations and a palate immersed in gustatorial ecstasy and then, after all that description and anticipation, at the moment of the Big Reveal, draws back the curtain on— a can opener.

“Testing is Chef Duncan’s can opener.”

Despite the universal failure of Duncan’s test-based teacher evaluation, despite its debunking by the Anerican Statistical Association, Duncan stubbornly clings to it. He is certain that parents want to know how their child compares to children in other states. I don’t understand that. I always had many questions about how my children were doing in school but I never wondered how they compared to children their age in other states. I wanted to know if they worked well with others, if they were respectful to their teachers, if they were good citizens, if they completed their school work in time. I counted on their teachers to bring any problems to my attention, and they did.

 

Greene writes:

 

“Parents are morons

 

“It wouldn’t be a Duncan speech about testing without the presumption that schools are liars and parents are dopes.

 

“Will we work together to ensure every parent’s right to know every year how much progress her child is making in school?

 

“Because only with the intervention and oversight of the federal government can parents have a clue about how their children are doing in school. And only a federally-mandated BS Test can give them a picture of their child’s education.

 

“Irony overload

 

“Later in the speech, Duncan suggests that “maybe our only hope is absolute honesty and transparency.” It is a great line, and one that I absolutely agree with.

 

“And yet, like most of Duncan’s prettiest rhetoric, it’s not reflected in any policy that he actually pursues. Doubling down on testing without considering its damaging effects and its utter failure to measure anything it claims to measure– this is not honest or transparent. The continued investing of BS Tests with powers they don’t have and effects they cannot achieve is neither honest nor transparent. The absolute refusal to hear opposing viewpoints is neither honest nor transparent.

 

“Duncan makes much noise about the need to supply quality education to the poor, to minorities, to students anywhere in the country who are not getting the full benefit of public education. He hears the cries for education and equity and justice and having heard them, he is sending… standardized tests (well, and charter schools, for some of those students, anyway).

 

“Regardless of your diagnosis of US educational ills, I don’t know how you arrive at the prescription, “We need more Big Standardized Tests driving all major decisions from the federal level.” Particularly after we’ve had a few years to see just how poorly how that actually works. Duncan’s speech includes an impassioned plea not to turn back the clock, not to return to a failed past. What he either can’t or won’t see is that his devotion to a failed test-based education policy is just such a retrograde response to education concerns.

 

“The Big Standardized Test can now takes its place in the gallery of failed educational policies of the past. If Duncan really wanted to move forward, he would leave BS Testing in the past where it belongs.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing, Testing

Georgia Teacher: I Want to Teach My Students

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2015 //
8

Susan Barber, chair of the English department at Northgate High School in Coweta County, Georgia, wrote a letterd to State Superintendent Richard Woods.

 

Her message: “Please protect my instructional time. I want to teach my students…..”

 

“I love students, and I love teaching. I want to be a teacher who is “part of the solution and not part of the problem,” which is harder and harder to do in education today. While I have little control over decisions on a large-scale, my mind is continually thinking on and dreaming of ways to make my classroom, and our system, better.

 

“I believe the greatest and most under tapped resource in Georgia’s education system today is Georgia teachers, but the good teachers are starting to leave….

 

“If I am going to be measured on how well my students read and write, I need more time to teach them to read and write. Some days I feel I spend more time getting my plans properly formatted, administering standardized tests, and going to professional development meetings on the state evaluation system or Georgia Milestone than I do teaching. These things are needed and necessary, but when they interfere with my ability and time to teach, there is a serious problem.

 

“Please protect my instructional time. I want to teach my students.

 

“My students need me to teach them. Please protect our administrators’ time by allowing them to be about the business of curriculum planning, strategic and long-term goal setting, and spending quality time with teachers and students.

 

“In addition to instructional time being used for testing, the amount of money devoted to testing is mind-boggling. Almost $108 million has been designated for the Georgia Milestone assessment. As department chair at my high school, every year I have to tell my team that we will once again not get new textbooks. We have been through three adoption cycles now without new books. I beg that state money will be funneled to where it is most needed – students.

 

“Students do not directly benefit from testing, yet that is where the money goes. I understand this is a complex issue with federal and state requirements to be fulfilled, but our students are suffering while political gains are being made. We must put a stop to this.

 

“Testing does offer some advantages. I am not a proponent of throwing out tests all together. Schools should be held accountable on student learning as well as teacher instruction, but we have swung so far to one side that there is no longer balance in the system.

 

“Testing does not measure a student’s growth in his or her love for learning or the development of grit. Testing does not measure a student’s thought process or style of writing. Testing does not measure the ability to apply knowledge or creative problem solving. I would like to think that these are some of the most important skills students learn in school today, yet they count for nothing in regard to my evaluation or my school’s performance.

 

“The system today is defined by terms such as CCSS, TKES, LKES, CCRPI, GHSGT, GAPS, SACS, CRCT, GMAS, SGAs, SLOs, yet all I want to do is teach SCHOOL. Give me and my colleagues the freedom to do what we are trained to do and what we love doing.”

Categories Georgia, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching
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