One more view of the report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on the “next generation assessments,” this one from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider.

Mercedes, as you would expect, questions the independence of TBF. She reprints a statement from ACT, which did not agree that their tests were less valuable that the Common Core tests funded by the federal government.

And she includes a statement by Louise Law, director of elementary education for a middle-income district in western Massachusetts, who believes that the test complexity of PARCC makes it an inappropriate and flawed instrument.

In her commentary, Law writes:

The reading passages found in PARCC are far beyond grade levels of the students being tested, and it is difficult to believe that the evaluators were unaware of that fact. The reading difficulty level of any text depends on such qualitative variables as sequencing, language complexity, topic and theme and quantitative factors such as word and sentence length. Teachers know this principle — and so do the writers and editors who choose the reading passages and compose the questions for all these tests. A variety of well established research-based formulas readily available online can be used to determine the readability level of a given text. By any number of such formulas, several reading passages in the 2015 PARCC test are beyond the grade level being tested, some by several years.

She analyzes both the reading and math portion of the PARCC and concludes:

Passages that students cannot read are not a useful educational tool. Tests designed this way create anxiety for children as young as eight years old and frustrate teachers. Meanwhile, as students, teachers and schools are insidiously and incorrectly identified as “failing,” publishers will reap tremendous profits selling remedial and test prep materials to school districts eager to help their students score satisfactorily. At the same time, as the public is convinced of the false narrative that our public schools are failing, the proliferation of for-profit businesses that manage charter schools will continue, and the march to privatization of our schools will accelerate.

Assessments based on PARCC should be suspended until the questions have been more carefully vetted and the tests have been validated by education professionals who are not even remotely affiliated with organizations funded by those promoting a particular agenda. Until that time, we are serving the interests of corporate profit rather than of students’ academic and emotional growth, and we are wasting our time with an exercise that undermines teaching and learning.

These days, no debate can move forward without hearing what Peter Greene thinks. A teacher in Pennsylvania, he has established himself as one of the most astute observers of education issues in the nation today through his writings.

Peter Greene here expresses his profound frustration with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s review of “next generation assessments.”

He begins by noting that none of those associated with the study are neutral participants. TBF has received millions of dollars to promote and advocate for the Common Core. Greene questions whether the researchers are objective, given their past connection to reform projects. [I, on the other hand, do not question the researchers’ independence, but I agree with Peter that they are enmeshed in reform assumptions that should be subjects of debate.]

Greene quotes Polikoff:

“A key hope of these new tests is that they will overcome the weaknesses of the previous generation of state tests. Among these weaknesses were poor alignment with the standards they were designed to represent and low overall levels of cognitive demand (i.e., most items requiring simple recall or procedures, rather than deeper skills such as demonstrating understanding). There was widespread belief that these features of NCLB-era state tests sent teachers conflicting messages about what to teach, undermining the standards and leading to undesired instructional responses.”

“Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments examines previously unreleased items from three multi-state tests (ACT Aspire, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced) and one best-in-class state assessment, Massachusetts’ state exam (MCAS), to answer policymakers’ most pressing questions: Do these tests reflect strong content? Are they rigorous? What are their strengths and areas for improvement? No one has ever gotten under the hood of these tests and published an objective third-party review of their content, quality, and rigor. Until now.”

Peter questions the assumptions on which the study is built:

So, two main questions– are the new tests well-aligned to the Core, and do they serve as a clear “unambiguous” driver of curriculum and instruction?

We start from the very beginning with a host of unexamined assumptions. The notion that Polikoff and Doorey or the Fordham Institute are in any way an objective third parties seems absurd, but it’s not possible to objectively consider the questions because that would require us to unobjectively accept the premise that national or higher standards have anything to do with educational achievement, that the Core standards are in any way connected to college and career success, that a standardized test can measure any of the important parts of an education, and that having a Big Standardized Test drive instruction and curriculum is a good idea for any reason at all. These assumptions are at best highly debatable topics and at worst unsupportable baloney, but they are all accepted as givens before this study even begins.

Again, I am willing to grant that Polikoff and Doorey are objective, and that Fordham is not paying respects to its principal outside funder, the Gates Foundation. But note that the researchers and Fordham are enmeshed in the assumption that higher standards and more rigorous tests improve test scores and education. Since I don’t think that is accurate, I question the foundations of the report, not its findings. In my view, tests should not drive instruction, and tests don’t improve educational achievement. Curriculum and instruction should drive tests. Instruction drives education. The quality of one’s living conditions has more to do with test scores than the tests.

But back to Peter Greene:

The study was built around three questions:

Well, the methodology involves using the CCSSO “Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High-Quality Assessments.” So, here’s what we’re doing. We’ve got a new ruler from the emperor, and we want to make sure that it really measures twelve inches, a foot. We need something to check it against, some reference. So the emperor says, “Here, check it against this.” And he hands us a ruler.

So who was selected for this objective study of the tests, and how were they selected.

That’s right. They asked for reviewer recommendations from the test manufacturers. They picked up the phone and said, “Hey, do you anybody who would be good to use on a study of whether or not your product is any good?”

I nominate Peter Greene to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Imagine that: classroom experience and a built-in junk-science detector.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned and published an evaluation of the “content and quality of the next generation assessments,” specifically, the Common Core assessments (PARCC and SBAC), as well as ACT Aspire, and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). The report’s introduction was written by Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern of the Institute; the report itself was written by researchers Nancy Doorey and Morgan Polikoff. The introduction and link to the report appear in this post; the following posts will debate the study and its findings.

This link takes you to the introduction.

This link takes you to the full report.

The authors of the report concluded that the Common Core assessments (PARCC and SBAC) were superior to the ACT Aspire and the MCAS.

This is the central finding:

Here’s just a sampling of what we found:

Still, panelists found that ACT Aspire and MCAS did not adequately assess—or may not assess at all—some of the priority content reflected in the Common Core standards in both ELA/Literacy and mathematics.

The report is long, but the meat of the report can be easily accessed. It is important that you wrap your mind around the report because the next post will challenge its findings.

Since many of you are teachers and have administered some of these tests, feel free to add your voice to the debate.