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Jason Stanford: “I Took the Fourth Grade Common Core ELA Test,” and It Stinks

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2015 //
21

Jason Stanford, an investigative journalist in Texas, writes that he took the fourth grade ELA test, composed of sample questions from the Smarter Balanced Assessment. He decided to do this after learning that a sixth grader challenged legislators to take the test.

 

A 6th grader in East Texas recently challenged state lawmakers to do what she and every other public-school kid have to do during testing season: “Sit in a room for up to four hours, without talking, writing, drawing, reading, or using your cell phone.” Because millions of children are taking Common Core standardized tests this time of year, I did her one better. I took a 4th-grade English Language Arts practice test. The good news is I passed.

 

The bad news is that the test is basically worthless, highlighting the folly of using standardized tests to measure a child’s ability to read and write. And to the Texas 6th grader’s point, in no way whatsoever was I able to quietly sit still for that long. Of course, it didn’t take me four hours to complete the sample test. I don’t want to brag, but I’m very advanced for a 4th grader.

 

There were questions that he found confusing. There were questions that made him want to strangle whoever wrote them. There was no real literature. There were questions with no right answers or possibly two right answers. The big problem, he concludes, is the assumption that standardized tests can assess what children understand or know or can do.

 

The writing portion of the test was ludicrous. Students were given a business card-shaped rectangle in which to record their analysis. You could replace this entire test with a book report and come out ahead. Actually, you could probably buy every child in America first editions and come out ahead. The price tag on SBAC tests in California alone is $1 billion.

 

We’re so focused on measuring children that we’ve stopped developing them. These tests don’t measure what we want our children to learn and are a waste of money. That Texas 6th grader has a point. I can’t sit quietly. This test is failing our children.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Testing

Texas Parents Act Out Against High-Stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2015 //
9

A group of activist parents have turned the tide against high-stakes testing in Texas. They organized, informed themselves, informed others, and button-holed their state legislators about the overuse and misuse of testing in Texas’s public schools. Because of their activities and their persistence, they persuaded the legislators to reduce the number of tests needed to graduate. They are continuing their campaign by exposing the cost and continued overuse of standardized testing.

 

The group is called TAMSA, or Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, but admirers often call them “Moms Against Drunk Testing.”

 

They created a powerpoint to explain their concerns.

 

The powerpoint can be seen here. Watch it and consider doing the same thing in your state. If we organize and mobilize like TAMSA, we can turn around legislatures across the nation.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Pearson, Testing, Texas

NY: Assembly Invents New “Matrix” for Teacher Evaluations—No Educators Participate

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2015 //
34

Can you imagine the legislators of  your state inventing a new way to evaluate their profession, without inviting any members of the profession to have a say?

 

Can you imagine the legislators telling the medical profession how to evaluate doctors, but not asking the advice of any doctors?

 

Let’s not talk about lawyers, because most of them are lawyers, and they wouldn’t dream of evaluating themselves.

 

Here it is: a new plan to evaluate teachers, but no one knows what it means. Of course, the writer of the article assumes that the teachers’ union is the main opposition to legislated evaluation. They forget that parents don’t want test scores to be the most important way to judge the quality of their child, their school and their teachers. They don’t want the school to give up the arts so there is more time for test prep. They don’t want Albany telling their principal how to decide which teachers are best. Legislators don’t credit them with caring about their children.

 

Newsflash to Albany: Parents love their children more than you do.

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Has the Media Been Fair to Common Core Testing? Russo Vs. Merrow

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2015 //
31

Blogger Alexander Russo informed a number of other writers that he was preparing an article about the coverage of the Opt Out movement for the Columbia Journalism Review, and Russo invited them to comment. Apparently the only one who did was John Merrow of PBS.

 

Russo wrote an article that was critical of Merrow’s television coverage, which he apparently considered too sympathetic to the Opt Out people and insufficiently willing to acknowledge how many students compliantly took the tests.

 

Russo believed that reporters were putting too much emphasis on the conflicts, giving too much attention to the protestors:

 

…so far, at least, much of the media’s coverage of this spring’s Common Core testing rollout has been guilty of over-emphasizing the extent of the conflict, speculating dire consequences based on little information, and over-relying on anecdotes and activists’ claims rather than digging for a broader sampling of verified numbers. The real story—that the rollout of these new, more challenging tests is proceeding surprisingly well—could be getting lost.

 

Merrow replied succinctly here, explaining how he shaped a story that had 8 minutes on national television.

 

Anthony Cody summarized the debate here, along with his own views. Cody says that Russo wants to appear to be above the fray, when in fact he is supporting and defending the Common Core testing and criticizing those who pay attention to the protesters. Russo would like to convince reporters that there is nothing worth reporting except the success of the tests. One might have said the same things about civil rights protesters and anti-war protesters in the 1960s and 1970s. Covering the protests didn’t change history; the protesters did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Opt Out, Testing

NY Daily News Writer: Cuomo’s Faith in Common Core Tests Is Baffling

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2015 //
22

Alyssa Katz is a member of the editorial board of the Néw York Daily News, which has been a reliable cheerleader for the Common Core, high-stakes testing, and all of Governor Cuomo’s bad ideas to punish public schools, teachers, and children.

 

But Alyssa Katz has a singular advantage over most editorial writers: she is a parent of a child in public school. She has seen what Common Core looks like and how confusing the sample questions on the tests are.

 

She understands why Cuomo’s popularity rating has plummeted and why it is rock bottom among public school parents. He has only a 50% approval rating. 28% approve of his education ideas, as do only 21% of public school parents.

 

Since Cuomo has asserted his education leadership in a state where he has no legal authority over education (he does not appoint the state board or the state commissioner), parents will blame him for incoherent Common Core assignments and for the failure of their child on Common Core tests. If favorite teachers are fired for low scores, it will be Cuomo’s fault.

 

Katz has had it.

 

She writes:

 

“With kids prepping for April tests, anxieties are again mounting. At least, that’s the view from my dining-room table, where my third-grader grapples with hair-tearing homework , and where her guiding inspiration for writing assignments is a laminated card drilling “RADD” — for Restate, Answer, Detail, Detail.

 

“If the questions on kids’ homework and, by extension, their standardized tests, are tough to understand, how does it make sense to base high-stakes teacher employment decisions on those tests?

 

“Take this math assignment: “Draw an array. Then write a fact family to describe your array.” The sound you hear is sweat trickling down my husband’s face.

 

“The question that follows asks whether it’s correct to surmise that a family whose members have 14 legs consists of 7 people. One kid answered — it became an internet meme — “Yes, because 14÷2 = 7, but not everyone has two legs. Go to http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org.”

 

“My breaking point came with a math problem asking kids to combine Grover Cleveland’s electoral votes won in 1884, 1888 and 1892, a sum that would mean nothing to even the most obsessive presidential historian.”

Categories Common Core, Cuomo, Andrew, Parents, Testing

Schneider Explains PARCC’s Security Policy

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2015 //
9

In response to the public outrage over Pearson monitoring of students’ social media, PARCC released a statement describing its fairness and security policy.

Mercedes Schneider discusses it here. Read her suggestion about the best way to protect test security.

Categories Common Core, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students, Testing

Long Island Superintendent Gamberg Tells Parents How to Opt Out

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2015 //
6

David Gamberg, superintendent of schools in Greenport and Southold, two neighboring towns on the North Fork of Long Island in Néw York, sent a letter home to parents, outlining the procedure they should follow if they don’t want their child to take the Common Core tests.

He assured parents that students will not be compelled to “sit and stare,” a punitive approach in some districts.

An enlightened educator, Gamberg is a strong supporter of the arts in schools. The elementary school in Southold has its own orchestra and a vegetable garden where children raise food for the cafeteria.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Students, Testing

Marie Corfield: The Worst PARCC Story She Ever Heard

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2015 //
13

Marie Corfield, teacher and education activist, tells here the worst PARCC story she ever heard. It is short and sad.

Can you top this?

Categories Common Core, New Jersey, Testing

Stephen Mucher: The Collapse of the Teaching Profession?

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2015 //
70

Stephen Mucher, director of the Bard Master of Arts Teaching program in Los Angeles, warns about the precipitous decline in enrollments in teacher preparation programs.

Teachers are demoralized by scripted curricula and overemphasis on testing. They feel their voice doesn’t count in their workplace. Given the tide of teacher-bashing and mandates, they are right to feel demoralized.

“Career-minded college students are not oblivious to these developments. Since 2008, enrollment in teacher education programs in California is down 53%, and other bellwether states report a similar trend. Nationally, U.S. Department of Education statistics that include both traditional and alternative preparatory programs show that there were nearly 90,000 fewer teachers in training in 2012 than in 2008. Teach for America, which once celebrated 15 consecutive years of expansion, peaked in 2013. It is witnessing as much as a 25% drop in applications this year…..

“Our most promising educators crave work that honors their creativity and intellect. They are suspicious of easy answers. They need to hear more than the cliche that a great teacher can make a difference in a student’s life. They want to know whether this profession will make a difference in their own life.”

The teacher-bashing that has dominated the mainstream media in recent years has undermined the prestige of teaching. The insistence by the Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and many governors that teachers should be judged by student test scores has undermined the profession. What other profession is told how to evaluate its members by state legislators and governors?

Frankly, it is tiresome to hear critics say that teachers are not our “best and brightest.” Neither are our critics. I doubt that most critics would know how to teach a classroom of 30 children of any age, but they feel emboldened to complain about those who do it every day.

As we see the pipeline for new teachers growing smaller, and many veterans taking early retirement, where will we find new teachers? Who will be held accountable for this crisis in the teaching profession?

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Stephanie Simon: Who Is Spying on Your Children?

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2015 //
11

Ever wonder who does the fun job of reading your children’s tweets, Facebook pages, and Instagrams? Stephanie Simon has done the investigative work, on behalf of politico.com, but really on behalf of parents and children across America.

In the new age of Common Core and online testing, student privacy is dead.

Simon visits companies that do the “monitoring.” She calls them “Common Core’s cyber-spies.”

She writes:

“Pearson is hardly the only company keeping a watchful eye on students.

“School districts and colleges across the nation are hiring private companies to monitor students’ online activity, down to individual keystrokes, to scan their emails for objectionable content and to scrutinize their public posts on Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram and other popular sites. The surveillance services will send principals text-message alerts if a student types a suspicious phrase or surfs to a web site that raises red flags.

“A dozen states have tried to limit cyber snooping by banning either colleges or K-12 schools, or both, from requesting student user names and passwords, which could be used to pry open social media accounts protected by privacy settings. Among those taking action: California, Illinois, Michigan and Utah.

“At least five other states, among them New York and Maryland, are considering similar laws this session, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“But such laws protect only accounts marked as private. Many kids post publicly to build up their online followings.

“And when they do, companies with names like Social Sentinel, Geo Listening, Varsity Monitor and UDiligence are there to read them.
The rise of online student monitoring comes at a time of rising parent protests against other forms of digital surveillance — namely, the vast quantities of data that technology companies collect on kids as they click through online textbooks, games and homework. Companies providing those online resources can collect millions of unique data points on a child in a single day. Much of that information is not protected by federal privacy law.”

Think of it: these companies “can collect millions of unique data points on a child in a single day.”

And that’s not all:

“Some of the monitoring software on the market can track and log every keystroke a student makes while using a school computer in any location, including at home…..

“Sometimes the monitoring is covert: One company advertises that its surveillance software, known as CompuGuardian, can run on “stealth mode.” At the other extreme, some high schools and colleges explicitly warn students that they are being watched and advise them not to cling to “a false sense of security about your rights to freedom of speech.”

Privacy is dead. Privacy is dead. Yes, your children are being watched. Companies you never heard of have collected vast amounts of information about them.

As the CEO of Sun Microsystems famously said in 1999, “you have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/cyber-snoops-track-students-116276.html#ixzz3V4nbs8Jj

Categories Common Core, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology, Computers, Testing
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