Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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Cynthia DeMone: What Are the Rights of Children?

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2015 //
4

This statement was posted as a comment on the blog:

 

 

The Rights of the Children

 

An education is the right for us, the children

And even now here in the USA

More than half of us don’t have enough clothes or food

Please don’t test our educational rights away

Don’t fire those teachers who are on our side

Please don’t make them go away

Just because we couldn’t get those very high scores

Testing us doesn’t help us learn more

Testing us more doesn’t increase our scores

An education is our ticket to our future lives

So our kids won’t come home to what we do now

An empty home, an empty house

No one to help us study or do homework

Because our parents have to work hard and long

They do not care about tests, but they care what we learn

Please don’t test our educational rights away

Don’t fire those teachers who are on our side

Please don’t make them go away

Just because we couldn’t get those very high scores

Testing us doesn’t help us learn more

Testing us more doesn’t increase our scores

An education is our ticket to our future lives

Cynthia DeMone

Categories Childhood, Education Reform, Standardized Testing, Students

Reader to #Pearson, #PARCC, and #SBAC: Please Monitor Me Too!

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
64

A suggestion from a very creative and imaginative reader:

 

Someone suggested attaching hashtags #PARCC and #Pearson, or just using those words, in all tweets. Sharing your Aunt Celia’s mac and cheese recipe? #Pearson. Tweeting about the next big storm coming? #PARCC Congratulating your cousin on his promotion? “Great job, Cousin Joe! You worked hard for this. PARCC!”

 

Their monitoring system would be overloaded with hits.

 

Why not add #SBAC and other hashtags that will draw attention from the overseers??

Categories Education Reform, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing, Students

Frank Breslin: Police States Spy on Children

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
71

Reacting to the news that testing corporations are “monitoring” the social media accounts of children during and after testing, and forbidding even verbal discussions of the tests, retired educator Frank Breslin is outraged. He wrote to me:

“Pearson is encouraging educators to spy on their students’ privacy, thereby trying to undermine the integrity of the relationship that students have with their teachers. This is vitiating the entire tradition of student/teacher trust that has been a sacred tradition between them for thousands of years. They’re making educators complicit in this illegal and immoral spying on children, so that teachers are becoming adjuncts of a Police State.

“This is what the Nazis did to teachers during the Reich — having teachers spying on parents by having children report back to them what parents were saying against the Reich. This is diabolical! ”

I know that some readers object to any analogy that references Nazis, but Breslin might just as well have referred to the Stasi in East Germany or any other police state in which teachers are expected to inform the Authorities about the private communications of their students, and family members are expected to inform on each other.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing

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
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