Archives for category: Testing

New York’s Teacher of the Year testified to the State Senate Education Committee that the education evaluation system made it impossible for her to be rated “highly effective” because of the “dysfunctional implementation” of the Common Core standards.

Kathleen Ferguson, the New York State Teacher of the year, was also the teacher of the year in her school district, and has won several awards for excellence in teaching.

Yet, she told a Senate Education Committee hearing on the state’s new Common Core standards, under the new rules, even she could not score a rating of highly effective in the new teacher evaluations.

The reason, she said, is that her marks were based in part on student test scores. She teaches second graders with special needs, who are often behind the level of other children in their grade. But the new standards permit no exemptions for her students.

“This system does not make sense,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson said her students were required to take pretests for almost the entire first month of school. The pre-tests are used to measure what students don’t know. They are used as a comparison for their performance on tests given at the end of the school year, after they have actually been taught the material. The test scores are then used as part of the new process of teacher evaluations required under terms of federal grants worth millions of dollars that the state has received.

At some point in the future, historians will look back on this era and remember it as a time of child abuse and teacher abuse by government diktat.

Categories Common Core, New York, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

John King Opposes K/2 Testing

By dianeravitch

November 15, 2013 //

Amid massive parent protests against Common Core testing in grades 3-8, NY Commissioner John King announced the state’s opposition to K-2 testing, which was never mandated.

He said, “”We support the drive to prohibit standardized testing of pre K through 2nd grade students.”

That’s a step forward. Now let’s hope that he takes the next logical step and eliminates the dysfunctional educator evaluation program and throws out the state’s disastrous Common Core tests for grades 3-8. Any testing program that declares 70% of the children of the state to be failures is on its face absurd. If educators are declared “ineffective” when their students fail, then Commissioner King must be held accountable for this massive failure.

But let’s be glad for the end of the indefensible K-2 bubble tests.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, New York, Testing

Is Common Core Illegal? Did Duncan Break the Law?

By dianeravitch

November 15, 2013 //

When I worked in the U.S. Department of Education in the early 1990s, I was frequently reminded by colleagues and counsel that the Department was forbidden by law from interfering into what was taught in the schools. When the Department made grants to professional groups of teachers and scholars to create “voluntary national standards,” I made a point of never interfering in their work. I extolled the value of having standards that states, districts, and schools might find useful but made clear that the decision to use or not to use the standards was strictly voluntary. There was no thought that the Department could advocate for the standards or use money to bribe states to adopt them. That would have been illegal.

This is what the law says:

Public Law 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, sec 432,reads as follows:

“No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration…of any educational institution…or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials…”

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But consider this: in 2009, the federal Department of Education used billions of dollars as part of its “Race to the Top” to lure states to adopt the Common Core standards. That is the reason that 45 or 46 states adopted them. According to Robert Scott, former commissioner of education in Texas, his state was asked to adopt the CCSS before they were finished. Since the Department of Education could not pay for the creation of the standards, the Gates Foundation stepped in and provided the necessary millions. In order to win a waiver from the absurd demands of NCLB, states had to agree to adopt the Common Core standards.

The role of the federal government in offering money to states to adopt the standards may well have been illegal. Secretary Duncan’s fervent advocacy for the standards at every opportunity may well be illegal. His denunciation and ridiculing of critics of the standards as Tea Party extremists belies his insistence that the federal government had nothing to do with the Common Core standards. If he had nothing to do with them, why is he their number one salesman? Why does he so stridently belittle their critics and mischaracterize their motives?

This is dangerous territory. These are questions that should be carefully considered by Congressional committees, not brushed aside as unimportant. No matter how frequently the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major corporations publish ads to support the CCSS, there remains the question of whether the federal government acted legally and properly.

And we might ask those major corporations why they care so much about the Common Core and so little about the scandalous growth of child poverty in the United States. And we might ask whether they will pledge to stop outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries so that our high school graduates and college graduates are not only “career-ready” but have careers that exist for them once they graduate.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Fred Smith: The Errors of State Testing in New York

By dianeravitch

November 14, 2013 //

Fred Smith is an experienced testing expert who now advises a group called “Change the Stakes,” in opposing high-stakes testing. He was invited to testify before a committee of the New York State Senate about the woeful recent history of state testing. The scores went up, up, up until 2010, when the state admitted that the previous dramatic gains were illusory, a consequence of artful adjustments of the “cut score” (passing rate). Then the scores began to rise again, until this past year’s Common Core tests, when the state scores fell deep into the basement, and three quarters of the state’s children were marked as failures.

As Smith quite clearly describes, testing has become a political game that hurts children.

Please read through his testimony, linked at the bottom of the page.

He wrote this to me:

This is my statement to the NYS Senate Education Hearing on October 29th –an umbrella for testimony concerning common core, its assessment and how to protect data privacy from data piracy. It includes data and findings that I have developed since 2006 pertinent to the New York State Testing Program that expose the 2013 core-aligned ELA and math tests analytically, as failed unreliable instruments incapable of serving as a baseline or foundation. It raises issues about the efficacy and ethics of stand-alone field testing procedures which SED and Pearson will continue to follow until they are stopped.

It appeared on Senator John Flanagan’s web page: hhtp://www.nysenate.gov/event/2013/oct/29/regents-reform-agenda-assessing-our-progress which gave links to the testimony of other invited speakers and provided a video of the hearing. Here’s mine:

http://www.nysenate.gov/files/pdfs/Fred%20Smith.NYSSEN.pdf

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York, Pearson, Testing

What the Tests Don’t Measure

By dianeravitch

November 13, 2013 //

Just received from a friend, Joan Baratz Snowden:

My daughter’s new elementary school principal sent this to all the students as they received their state standardized testing scores this week:

“We are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you– the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do. They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play or participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school. They do not know that you have traveled to a really neat place or that you know how to tell a great story or that you really love spending time with special family members and friends. They do not know that you can be trustworthy, kind or thoughtful, and that you try, every day, to be your very best… the scores you get will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart.”

My friend reported her daughter who did well on the test shrugged about her scores, but read the letter over and over and held it close to her heart announcing, “I really love this.”

Categories Testing

Is This How a Revolution Begins?

By dianeravitch

November 13, 2013 //

In this short video taken last night at the public forum on Long Island, a “highly effective” teacher demands that Commissioner John King be rated “ineffective” and fired based on the failure rate across the state on the tests he authorized. The crowd went wild. She said what the state is doing to children today is “child abuse.”

Folks, this is the local community in East Setauket, Long Island, New York. This is not the Tea Party.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Chicago Parents to CPS: We Prefer Teacher Grades to Standardized Tests

By dianeravitch

November 12, 2013 //

The Chicago parent organization PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education) called on Chicago school officials to de-emphasize standardized testing and pay greater attention to teachers’ judgment.

PURE issued this press release today:
Parents give district a “D” for its test-focused policy

Chicago, IL: Today, tens of thousands of Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
parents will flock to their children’s schools to pick up student report
cards and meet with teachers. They look forward to these meetings as an
important step in strengthening the home-school connection. Report card
pick-up day is the best opportunity most parents have to learn how to
help their children succeed in school from the people that know the most
about how to do that – their children’s teachers.

Parents take the report cards home and study them. They discuss them
with their children – sometimes those are happy discussions, sometimes
not so happy! Parents sign the back of the report card and slide the
cards into their children’s backpacks, often taking that moment to
resolve to do more to help their children learn and improve in the weeks
ahead.

This process has been meaningful to parents for decades, but it’s been
increasingly pushed aside as school districts like CPS give standardized
test scores more and more power over students, teachers and schools.

Parents from the Chicago group More Than a Score disagree with this
trend, and have presented CPS with an alternative promotion policy

http://chicagotestingresistance.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/promotionproposal10-13.pdf

that relies primarily on report card grades and uses standardized test
scores in the way they were intended to be used, as diagnostic tools and
not high-stakes “gotcha” measures.

More Than a Score parents give CPS a “D” grade for a promotion policy
that continues to focus too much on test scores and ignores the value of
report cards.

“Report cards are the only evaluations that look at the students’ work
over time and across all areas of learning. They are the only
evaluations done by experienced, qualified adults who personally observe
and assess each student’s progress,” said CPS parent Julie Fain.“That’s
the kind of information that makes sense to parents and actually helps
children. When we get our children’s standardized test scores at the end
of the year, we don’t get to see the questions or their answers. We have
no idea whether they missed a certain concept or were just distracted
for part of the test. In any case, our children are so over-tested that
these results have become less and less useful to parents.”

“The CPS promotion policy begins and ends with the state test score,”
said Julie Woestehoff, head of Parents United for Responsible Education
(PURE). “Most of the information from report cards is ignored by CPS
when end-of-the-year promotion decisions are made.”

“I believe standardize testing is a harsh way to keep a child from
thinking outside the box. All our children have different needs, speeds,
and challenges. I have witnessed up close and personal the emotional
stress testing causes – creating a lack of self-esteem while labeling my
children as dumb only because they did not meet your standardized laws.
I support my children by opting them out of testing,” said Rousemary
Vega, a CPS parent.

Parents who have opted their children out of standardized tests are also
confused and concerned because the new promotion policy just swapped one
high-stakes test (the SAT-10), for another (NWEA), making opting out
more difficult.

Since the promotion policy was first implemented in 1996 by Paul Vallas,
it has focused on test scores on the Iowa test, then the IGAP, ISAT, and
SAT 10. The new proposal substitutes the NWEA, which CPS officials say
is just temporary until they replace it with the PARCC Common Core
tests.

“How are we supposed to keep track of this alphabet soup of tests?” asks
Linda Schmidt, a CPS parent who notified her child’s school at the
beginning of this school year that she does not want her student to take
the NWEA. “Will my child be held back next August because I made a
decision last September?”

Policymakers often cite the subjective nature of teacher grades as a
reason for giving them less weight than standardized tests scores.
However, test questions are written by subjective human beings, too, and
test makers consistently state that their tests should not be used to
make high-stakes decisions about children. The manual for the SAT-10,
which CPS used last year to retain students, states that test scores
“should be just one of the many factors considered and probably should
receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day
classroom performance, maturity level, and attitude” – just the kind of
information in report cards.

“What’s wrong with report cards?” asked Wanda Hopkins, the parent of a
CPS high school student. “If CPS does not trust teacher grades, they
need to explain why and what they are doing to fix it. I trust my
child’s teacher more than I trust for-profit test companies.”

Parents with More Than a Score believe that our proposed promotion
policy

http://chicagotestingresistance.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/promotionproposal10-13.pdf

offers an alternative to the CPS test-based promotion policy that
respects input from teachers, avoids the pitfalls of standardized test
misuse and retention, makes sense to parents, and – most importantly –
provides a higher quality evaluation of each student’s progress and
needs.

Notes to the proposed alternative promotion policy here

http://pureparents.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/PromotionPolNotes10-13.pdf

Link to this post on MTAS web site here:

http://morethanascorechicago.org/2013/11/12/chicago-parents-to-cps-use-report-card-grades-not-test-scores-for-promotion/

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Education Reform, Parents, Testing

Correction: Full Testimony on Test-Related Stress in New York

By dianeravitch

November 11, 2013 //

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from testimony to a state senate hearing in New York. I had seen it on another blog. I had the wrong name of the person testifying. Here is her name and her full testimony.

Mary Calamia
Statement for New York State Assembly Education Forum
October 7, 2013 at 10:14pm
Statement for New York State Assembly Education Forum
Brentwood, New York
October 10, 2013

I am a licensed clinical social worker in New York State and have been providing psychotherapy services since 1995. I work with parents, teachers, and students from all socioeconomic backgrounds representing more than 20 different school districts in Suffolk County. Almost half of my caseload consists of teachers.

In the summer of 2012, my elementary school teachers began to report increased anxiety over having to learn two entirely new curricula for Math and ELA. I soon learned that school districts across the board were completely dismantling the current curricula and replacing them with something more scripted, emphasizing “one size fits all” and taking any imagination and innovation out of the hands of the teachers.

In the fall of 2012, I started to receive an inordinate number of student referrals from several different school districts. I was being referred a large number of honors students—mostly 8th graders.The kids were self-mutilating—cutting themselves with sharp objects and burning themselves with cigarettes. My phone never stopped ringing.

What was prompting this increase in self-mutilating behavior? Why now?

The answer I received from every single teenager was the same. “I can’t handle the pressure. It’s too much work.”

I also started to receive more calls referring elementary school students who were refusing to go to school. They said they felt “stupid” and school was “too hard.” They were throwing tantrums, begging to stay home, and upset even to the point of vomiting.

I was also hearing from parents about kids bringing home homework that the parents didn’t understand and they couldn’t help their children to complete. I was alarmed to hear that in some cases there were no textbooks for the parents to peruse and they had no idea what their children were learning.

My teachers were reporting a startling level of anxiety and depression. For the first time, I heard the term “Common Core” and I became awakened to a new set of standards that all schools were to adhere to—standards that we now say “set the bar so high, anyone can walk right under them.”

Everyone was talking about “The Tests.” As the school year progressed and “The Tests” loomed, my patients began to report increased self-mutilating behaviors, insomnia, panic attacks, loss of appetite, depressed mood, and in one case, suicidal thoughts that resulted in a 2-week hospital stay for an adolescent.

I do not know of any formal studies that connect these symptoms directly to the Common Core, but I do not think we need to sacrifice an entire generation of children just so we can find a correlation.

The Common Core and high stakes testing create a hostile working environment for teachers, thus becoming a hostile learning environment for students. The level of anxiety I am seeing in teachers can only trickle down to the students. Everyone I see is describing a palpable level of tension in the schools.

The Common Core standards do not account for societal problems. When I first learned about APPR and high stakes testing, my first thought was, “Who is going to rate the parents?”

I see children and teenagers who are exhausted, running from activity to activity, living on fast food, then texting, using social media, and playing games well into the wee hours of the morning on school nights.

We also have children taking cell phones right into the classrooms, “tweeting” and texting each other throughout the day. We have parents—yes PARENTS—who are sending their children text messages during school hours.

Let’s add in the bullying and cyberbullying that torments and preoccupies millions of school children even to the point of suicide. Add to that an interminable drug problem.

These are only some of the variables affecting student performance that are outside of the teachers’ control. Yet the SED holds them accountable, substituting innovation and individualism with cookie-cutter standards, believing this will fix our schools.

We cannot regulate biology. Young children are simply not wired to engage in the type of critical thinking that the Common Core calls for. That would require a fully developed prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is not fully functional until early adulthood. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for critical thinking, rational decision-making, and abstract thinking—all things the Common Core demands prematurely.

We teach children to succeed then give them pre-assessments on material they have never seen and tell them it’s okay to fail. Children are not equipped to resolve the mixed message this presents.

Last spring, a 6-year-old who encountered a multiplication sign on the NWEA first grade math exam asked the teacher what it was. The teacher was not allowed to help him and told him to just do his best to answer.From that point on, the student’s test performance went downhill. Not only couldn’t the student shake off the unfamiliar symbol, he also couldn’t believe his teacher wouldn’t help him.

Common Core requires children to read informational texts that are owned by a handful of corporations. Lacking any filter to distinguish good information from bad, children will readily absorb whatever text is put in front of them as gospel. So, for example, when we give children a textbook that explains the second amendment in these terms: “The people have a right to keep and bear arms in a state militia,” they will look no further for clarification.

We are asking children to write critically, using emotionally charged language to “persuade” rather than inform. Lacking a functional prefrontal cortex, a child will tap into their limbic system, a set of primitive brain structures involved in basic human emotions, fear and anger being foremost. So when we are asking young children to use emotionally charged language, we are actually asking them to fuel their persuasiveness with fear and anger. They are not capable of the judgment required to temper this with reason and logic.

So we have abandoned innovative teaching and instead “teach to the tests,” the dreaded exams that had students, parents and teachers in a complete anxiety state last spring. These tests do not measure learning—what they really measure is endurance and resilience. Only a child who can sit and focus for 90 minutes can succeed. The child who can bounce back after one grueling day of testing and do it all over again the next day has an even better chance.

A recent Cornell University study revealed that students who were overly stressed while preparing for high stakes exams performed worse than students who experienced less stress during the test preparation period. Their prefrontal cortexes—the same parts of the brain that we are prematurely trying to engage in our youngsters—were under-performing.

We are dealing with real people’s lives here. Allow me introduce you to some of them:

…an entire third grade class that spent the rest of the day sobbing after just one testing session,

…a 2nd grader who witnessed this and is now refusing to attend the 3rd grade—this 7-year-old is now being evaluated for psychotropic medication just to go to school,

…two 8-year-olds who opted out of the ELA exam and were publicly denied cookies when the teacher gave them to the rest of her third grade class,

…the teacher who, under duress, felt compelled to do such a thing,

…a sixth grader who once aspired to be a writer but now hates it because they “do it all day long—even in math,”

…a mother who has to leave work because her child is hysterical over his math homework and his CPA grandfather doesn’t even understand it,

…and countless other children who dread going to school, feel “stupid” and “like failures,” and are now completely turned off to education.

I will conclude by adding this thought. Our country became a superpower on the backs of men and women who studied in one-room schoolhouses.I do not think it takes a great deal of technology or corporate and government involvement for kids to succeed. We need to rethink the Common Core and the associated high stakes testing and get back to the business of educating our children in a safe, healthy, and productive manner”

Categories Common Core, Students, Teachers, Testing

Test-related Stress on the Rise in New York: CORRECTION!

By dianeravitch

November 10, 2013 //