Add White Plains and Rye Neck to the list of districts that are refusing to administer the Pearson field test in New York.
Boycotting districts:
Babylon
Bellmore/Merrick CHSD
Comsewogue
Fairport
HFL
Glen Cove
Great Neck
Happauge
Jericho
Manhasset
Merrick
Mount Sinai
North Bellmore
Ossining
Pittsford
Plainview Old-Bethpage
Rye Neck
Rocky Point
Syosset
West Irondequoit
Webster
White Plains
Things are not working out so well for the corporate reformers in Néw York. They expected that the abysmal scores on the Pearson tests would cause parents to turn against their public schools; they expected parent demands for vouchers and charters.
Instead, parents are furious at the Néw York State Education Department for testing their kids for seven hours, and they are furious at Pearson for making bad tests and hiding their contents from teachers and parents. How can teachers or students benefit if the test contents are hidden?
Here are the districts that are boycotting the Pearson field tests (more may join them):
Babylon
Bellmore/Merrick CHSD
Comsewogue
Fairport
HFL
Glen Cove
Great Neck
Happauge
Jericho
Manhasset
Merrick
Mount Sinaii
North Bellmore
Ossining
Pittsford
Plainview Old-Bethpage
Rocky Point
Syosset
West Irondequoit
Webster
NOTE: this is not the Tea Party. This is school boards and parents who are fed up with too much testing.
I honor the Ossining School District in Néw York for having the good sense and courage to say “no” to field testing. The school superintendent Raymond Sanchez says in the letter below that he must protect instructional time for the students, who recently lost seven hours to testing. Enough is enough!
The people of Ossining have confidence in their public schools. The school budget recently passed with the highest approval rate in its history (72%).
From: Superintendent’s Office [mailto:oufsd@ossiningufsd.ccsend.com] On Behalf Of Superintendent’s Office
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 12:03 PM
Subject: New York State Field Tests
May 21, 2014
Dear Parents/Guardians:
Annually, the New York State Education Department randomly selects school districts to administer the New York State Field Tests. This year the Ossining School District was selected to administer the exams in 4th, 5th and 8th grades. These exams are intended to “provide data necessary to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing program.” The field tests are a series of standardized exams developed by the independent testing company Pearson. The company uses the field tests as trial for questions it may use on future exams.
After a discussion with the building administrators and the Board of Education, I am recommending that the Ossining School District not administer the field tests. My reasons are as follows:
1. Protect Instructional Time: Due to inclement weather, we have lost a significant amount of instructional time. In addition, students were recently administered 7 hours of exams. Administering the field exams will lead to additional lost time. Instead, our goal is to use the time to continue to provide our students with appropriate direct instruction.
2. Lack of Transparency: These exams do not provide parents, teachers or administrators with information regarding each child’s progress.
I want to reemphasize that I feel that this decision is in the best interest of the students we serve in our school district. It is critical that we protect the instructional time we have with our students.
If you should have any questions after reading this notice, please feel free to contact your building principal – Ms. Regina M. Cellio, Ms. Kate Mathews, or Dr. Corey W. Reynolds.
Sincerely yours,
Raymond Sanchez
Ossining Union Free School District
190 Croton Avenue Ossining, NY 10562
(914) 941-7700 | jforsberg@ossining.k12.ny.us
Mercedes Schneider here reviews the transcript of a board meeting of Pearson in April 2014. Anyone can read the transcript but is allowed to quote only 400 words. That was Mercedes’ challenge.
What struck her was that Pearson’s business plan is heavily tied to adoption of CCSS. In this case, contrary to the assurances of Bill Gates, national standardization promotes monopolization, not competition.
What struck me was that the leaders of this behemoth, now taking control of large sectors of American education, had nothing to say about education. The discussion, not surprisingly, was all about profits and business strategy. Who decided to outsource American education?
A letter written by State University of Albany’s Heinz Dieter Meyer and educator Katie Zahedi protested the negative effects of PISA on education goals because of its emphasis on standardized tests and international competition. The letter has been translated into many languages and collected hundreds of signatures from scholars and educators around the world.
The letter was addressed to Andreas Schleicher of OECD, who is director of PISA.
If you wish to sign the letter, it is here.
Dr. Schleicher responded promptly to the letter, saying it was based on “false claims,” and that it has not caused “short term fixes,” as a way for nations to raise their national rankings. Of course, some Americans would say that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top was driven by the goal of international competition. On this ground, both programs were failures, leading to more testing, more measures to rank and rate students, teachers, and schools.
Since it is impossible to get a unified response from the many who have signed it, Dr. Meyer has invited signatories to submit their own responses, which he will make available on a website.
For now, the best available response to Dr. Schleicher is an article (part of a series) about how PISA has harmed education reform in the nations of East Asia, the putative “winners” of the PISA contest. Zhao calls his series “”How does PISA Put the World at Risk?”
Zhao says if he were a conspiracy theorist, he would think that PISA is a western plot to keep China trapped in an antiquated system, and unable to try the education reforms that would usher in a new era of creativity and entrepreneurship.
“He writes:
“Such a citizenry is urgently needed for China’s successful transition from a labor-intensive economy to one that relies on innovation, a transition China must make for its future development. The Chinese exam-oriented education has long been recognized as the culprit for limiting China’s capacity for producing creative and diverse talents. Just as China’s education reforms began to touch the core of its traditional education—the gaokao or College Entrance Exam and the wide use of testing at all levels of education, PISA announced that the Chinese education is the best in the world. And the exam system, including the gaokao, is glorified as a major contributor to China’s success, making it difficult for the Chinese to continue the battle against testing.”
He writes further:
“If I expanded the conspiracy theory, I could say that PISA is a plot to disrupt all Eastern Asian countries’ serious efforts to develop an education system that cultivates confident, creative, diverse, and happy students. For example, PISA “played a role in the decision to reverse, at least in part, the yutori reform launched at the beginning of the decade,” writes a 2011 OECD document[2]. Yutori kyoiku (roughly translated “relaxed education” or education with some freedom) was a major education reform movement started in the 1980s in Japan. “The yutori reform was based on an emerging consensus that the school system was too rigid and that a new approach was needed to encourage creativity,” observes the OECD document[3]. The major changes included reduction in school days and a 30% cut in the school curriculum. “In addition, the government relaxed grading practices and introduced “integrated learning classes” without textbooks in an effort to help students think independently and reduce the importance of rote learning” [4]. The changes were announced in 1998 and implemented in 2002. “The ultimate desire was to instill in students ‘a zest for learning.’”[5]
“In 2003, Japan’s PISA rankings fell, resulting in a public panic over Japan’s decline in international academic standing. Opponents of the yutori reform seized the moment and blamed the reform for the decline. In response, Japan decided to water down the previous reforms with increase in required topics in standard academic subjects, increase time devoted to these subjects, and introducing national standardized testing in math and Japanese for the first time in 2007.
“Putting someone on a pedestal is an effective way to ensure he does not veer far from his previous behaviors because any deviation could tarnish the bestowed honor. The Chinese call such actions pengsha or “killing with flattery.” Pengsha derives from a story recorded almost 2,000 years ago: A nobleman rides on a beautiful horse and wins great praises from admiring onlookers. Enjoying the flattery, the nobleman keeps on riding till the horse dies from exhaustion.
“PISA has certainly successfully put a number of East Asian education systems on a pedestal and thus constrained their ability and desire to make drastic changes. But they need drastic changes if they wish to truly cultivate the kind of talents needed to become innovative societies that rival the West because the authoritarian East Asian education model leaves little room for creative and unorthodox individuals to pursue their passion, question the authority, and develop their strengths, although it is extremely effective in homogenizing individuals, enforcing compliance, and hence producing great test scores.
“PISA’s claims about progress East Asian education systems have made over the years can further convince them to keep riding their horses. It gives them the illusion that they are moving forward, in the right direction, because their PISA rankings keep going up. But in reality, East Asian education systems have never “risen,” as PISA often claims. They have always been great test takers. Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong scored extremely well on international tests succ as TIMSS prior to the birth of PISA. Shanghai did not participate in these studies but if it did, it would have scored well.
Ultimately, Yong Zhao abandons the conspiracy theory because PISA does even more harm to the western nations than to the east.
He concludes:
“By attracting poor, developing countries into a senseless academic race, PISA wastes precious resources of these countries. While the 182,000 euros (about US$250,000) participation fee[6] and millions of dollars implementation costs may not be much for developed nations, it can be a huge burden for developing countries. More important, the money can buy a lot more meaningful education resources—pencils, for example—than humiliating PISA rankings or policy advice that cannot be implemented.
“PISA is a good servant but a bad master,” wrote Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg, author of the Finnish Lesson: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland. Pasi is, as always, wise and generous, but in my mind, PISA is a servant that has turned into a bad master, perhaps by design. As it commands the world to race to fix the old paradigm and forgo opportunities to invent a new one, it puts the entire world at risk.”
My hope is that thousands and thousands of educators add their names to the letter of protest against the false values promoted by PISA.
Valerie Strauss notes the growing number of studies that debunk the value of judging teacher quality by the rise or fall of test scores, and naturally she wondered what Secretary Arne Duncan thought about them.
There was the report of the American Statistical Association, which said: l
“VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.”
Days ago, a new Gates-funded study found no correlation between “quality teaching and the appraisals teachers received.”
Another study by a team led by Marianne P. Bitler, an economist at the University of California, said that VAM ratings had about the same relationship to reading and math scores as to changes in a student’s height.
VAM is the centerpiece of Race to the Top..
Strauss called the u.S. Department of Education to ask whether Secretary Duncan was aware of the research and whether it had changed his views. The answers: yes, he was aware of the research; no, it had not changed his views.
Educator Katie Zahedi and Professor Heinz Dieter Meyer wrote a letter critical of PISA’s emphasis on high-stakes testing and global competition. The letter has been translated into several languages and has gathered more than 1,000 signatures.
If you wish to dign the letter, it is here.
Andreas Schleicher, director of PISA, disagreed with their letter and denied their critique. Since it is impossible to draft a response by more than 1,000 people in a timely manner, signers of the letter were invited to respond to Dr. Schleicher on their own.
This is Katie Zahedi’s response.
She writes:
“Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: PISA and the OECD Agenda”
Andreas Schleicher has responded to an open letter that critiques OECD’s PISA league tables:
http://www.oecdpisaletter.org. Defending the OECD’s grand role in education policy, his response denies the letter’s concern that PISA drives reform toward short term fixes by saying that performance has improved in Germany and Poland. Of course he equates progress with improvement on the PISA, which is precisely the short term fix we decry.
The Open Letter addresses widespread concerns with the PISA. Yong Zhao of the University of Oregon refers to the damaging effects of PISA as: “…an ironic tragedy of the 21st Century born out of ignorance.
While Dr. Schleicher hopefully takes a moment to do a closer read of the open letter, I would like to explain the intent of the critique and counter proposal signed by Heinz-Dieter Meyer and myself.
We were in the audience at Schleicher’s presentation at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Philadelphia April, 2014. After Schleicher’s presentation of colorful graphics, tracking the purported educational status of nations (based on one test) fellow panel member Martin Carnoy of Stanford explained why the PISA scores may not matter! Heinz-Dieter Meyer drew attention to a profound shift from nation-state level leadership to a global educational governance structure. I lamented his cavalier construction of variables, i.e., in which he provided correlations to a tag he referred to as “similar social background” in discussing counties as different as Luxembourg, Ghana and the U.S. One can assume he was referring to a rudimentary conception of students’ local economic status by deciles.
The meeting ended with an incredulous group of scholars and professionals congregated at the back of the hall discussing the lack of substantive insight, while alone at the front of the room on his laptop, was a “Great and Powerful Oz” …the curtain parted, sitting in the gray hue of a conference screen gone blank of its colorful graphs and reductionist explanations. A scholar from Shanghai (whose question was brushed aside by Schleicher) restated his unresolved concern: “what if by focusing on what we can measure, we end up marginalizing things that cannot be measured?”
The motivation of the letter was that I felt sorry for a man, who unfortunate destiny had placed at the helm of an ill-informed, grand design. The open letter is an extended helping hand, reaching out to improve understanding of where we are headed with education policy. In inviting my colleagues to write, and/or attempt to meet with Schleicher, Meyer initially chuckled, but thankfully took it on. The letter was reviewed by peers Diane Ravitch (NYU) and Stephen Mucher (Bard College) and signed by over a thousand others whose educational homes have been spinning in PISA’s cyclone… and who are clicking their heels in hopes of leaving the strange land of testing Oz.
Katie Zahedi
The marvelous film, created by educators, “Rise Above the Mark,” will be shown at Mary Gage Peterson Elementary School, 5510 N. Christiana Ave, Chicago on Thursday May 29th at 4:30 pm and 7:00 pm.
Following each viewing there will be a panel discussion about the challenges raised and any action steps we can take. Please help us spread the word. Thank you!
“Rise Above the Mark” was made by public school educators in West Lafayette, Indiana. It includes interviews with experts from across the nation and shows the damage done by the corporate reform movement.
Gerri Songer compares ACT and PARCC and finds them both wanting , both developmentally inappropriate.
She begins that she used to think that ACT “is a dreadful attempt to assess student learning. Now that PARCC has hit the scene, ACT is beginning to look significantly better!”
Songer shows that both tests are beyond the cognitive levels of most high school students.
She then argues:
“Albert Einstein once said, ““Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Making things simple is true genius. Einstein’s first job was that of a patent clerk. He analyzed the ideas of others and simplified them, communicating them in a way most could understand. “Anyone can complicate things. But it takes patience, probing questions and creative thinking to simplify. Whatever problem you are facing it’s probably not as complicated as you think – but we often make it so. If you want to solve more problems, simplify them. The real genius is turning complexity into simplicity.”
“As much as our test makers seem to love using archaic language from primary sources written by our founding fathers at the birth of our American nation, somehow they must have overlooked Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense, “IN the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense: and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.”
“Let me break that down for our test makers, “I’m going to make this plain and simple, using the mental faculty of common sense: Keep an open mind and listen to what I have to say!”
“Perhaps Arne Duncan would benefit from taking a look at Henry David Thoreau‘s Civil Disobedience, “I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.“
“In case you didn’t get that, Arne, let me help you, “Keep your nose out of public education – you obviously know nothing about it, and educators clearly do.”
“Students are not developmentally able to complete the multi-step, finitely detailed, mental manipulation of text needed to process information at the level of sophistication used by PARCC. The frontal lobe of the human brain is not fully developed until after age 20. The frontal lobe is concerned with reasoning, planning, problem-solving, parts of speech, executive functions (organization), judgment, emotions, and behavioral control. It allows for abstract thinking, an understanding of humor (subtle witticisms and word plays), sarcasm, irony, deception, and the mental processes of others. Other functions include: memory, sequencing of events, flexibility in thinking processes, attentiveness of focus.
“High school students are at varying stages of their cognitive development, yet both ACT and PARCC require they perform intellectually at the graduate level (1395L), or at the level of an accountant (1400L) or scientist (1450L). This is an unfair, unrealistic, and inappropriate expectation that assessments such as ACT and PARCC has placed on students. Educators MUST stop bending to legislative controls and demands upon education. Studies show that standardized testing is not the best predictor of college success.
“Human intelligence is so multifaceted, so complex, so varied, that no standardized testing system can be expected to capture it,” says William Hiss. Hiss is the former dean of admissions at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine — one of the nation’s first test-optional schools. “My hope is that this study will be a first step in examining what happens when you admit tens of thousands of students without looking at their SAT scores,” Hiss says. “And the answer is, if they have good high school grades, they’re almost certainly going to be fine.”
“The nonsubmitters [of Standardized Testing Scores] are doing fine in terms of their graduation rates and GPAs, and significantly outperforming their standardized testing.” In other words, those students actually performed better in college than their SAT and ACT scores might lead an admissions officer to expect. For both those students who submitted their test results to their colleges and those who did not, high school grades were the best predictor of a student’s success in college. And kids who had low or modest test scores, but good high school grades, did better in college than those with good scores but modest grades.
“Educators MUST remember the original intent of standardized testing: “A big test, the theory went, would allow more ‘diamond in the rough’ students to be found and accepted to top schools, regardless of family connections or money.” Today, standardized testing is used to filter students and to attack teachers, school districts, and public education as a whole. It is used as a means for capitalists to exploit children, dedicated professionals, and democracy to gain control of what they perceive as a new, untapped, money-making entity, public education. If the American public has any difficulty figuring out what this will look like, read Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle. This novel portrays the impact American greed has on the weak, the innocent, and the underprivileged. The Jungle is the novel that brought about attention to our need for unions and federal protection over its American workforce.
“I urge educators to call for an indefinite moratorium on the implementation of Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to assess Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I also advocate eliminating standardized testing all together, and replacing it with the use of GPA and class placement as an indicator of college and career success.”
Just a couple of hours ago, I posted a story about the Rhode Island State Senate’s decision to impose a three-year moratorium on the use of a standardized test as a high school graduation test. The vote was 29-5. The test is called the. New England Comprehensive Assessment Program and bears the appropriate acronym (NECAP, pronounced “kneecap”). The test was not intended to be a graduation test; it is a cardinal rule of testing that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed.
But today, the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, Nicholas Mattiello, said he opposes any change in the policy. He has the support of State Commissioner Deborah Gist and the State Board of Education, who want to keep the test.
Here is a modest proposal:
How about if Speaker Mattiello, Commissioner Gist, and the state board take the NECAP and release their scores?
Then, the House can decide whether NECAP is a necessary and useful.
