A reader with knowledge of testing says:
“If the opt-out movement wants to stop the testing they should focus on getting people to boycott the field tests. If the field tests don’t get enough student responses then there will be no questions for the operational tests.”
What we have learned after thirty years or more of standardized testing, is that the tests mirror family income education: they measure gaps but do nothing to close them; our kids spend (waste) too much time preparing to take the tests; the test results are massively misused for rewards and punishments instead of for diagnostic purposes; the testing industry is rich and powerful and hires lobbyists to protect its hegemony.
Make 2014 the year we opt out. Do not let your child take the state tests: do not let your child take field tests; do not let your child take practice tests.
Seek out information about your state’s laws by writing Peg Robertson of United Opt Out.
Here is a recent post by education activist Angela Engel of Colorado:
In the sixteen years since I first administered the CSAP test to my fourth grade students at Rock Ridge Elementary School, here’s what we’ve learned:
Wealth and poverty are the greatest indicators of test performance
High-stakes testing correlates to segregation
High-stakes testing increases inequities in opportunities and resources and further harms low-income children and youth
Test scores are not an accurate indicator of a student’s knowledge or potential
Emphasis on standardized testing kills creativity, imagination, and innovation
Commercial tests are more expensive and are far less informative than classroom assessments collected over time and evaluated by professional teachers
High-stakes testing does not improve schools, teachers or students
High-stakes testing has cost billions of dollars with no return on those investments
Standardized tests and the stakes and labels associated with these tests are destructive to children and youth and fail to honor their unique ways of thinking and learning
Over these many years, I have worked to challenge high-stakes standardized testing. I have published a book and articles, written legislation, lobbied on behalf of kids, spoken to audiences, organized and educated. I’ve come to understand that the public’s collective will and their intolerance for injustice is the greatest agent of change. We can still try and change the laws, we can continue to inform the people, and we can also refuse to conform. We can live by a different set of rules; standards that respect our children; choices that are responsible to our spending; and decisions that heal the opportunity divide and lead to cooperation.
The Coalition for Better Education is beginning their annual Colorado campaign to educate parents and students about their rights to refuse the test and OPT OUT. All money goes directly to billboards. In the words of Don Perl, “no amount is too small.”
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Dear Colleagues:
I have randomly gone through the names of those who have been strong activists in the past for our billboard campaign to inform parents of their rights to exempt their children from the fraud of high stakes standardized testing. As most of you know, we have advertised on Colorado highways since 2005 to raise awareness of the boondoggle of CSAP (now TCAP) and each year more and more parents have opted their children out of the tests.
This is a critical year for voices raised against the corporate takeover. They are more forceful than ever. Consider the latest publications – Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, Jim Horn’s The Mismeasure of Education. The Progressive has a new website exposing the corporatization of public education, http://www.publicschoolshakedown.org. The strike of the Chicago Teachers’ Union a year ago had much to do with raising awareness of the privatization of what is a public trust – public education. Our mission has also been included in the wonderful collection of stories in Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education by Professors Nancy Schniedewind and Mara Sapon-Shevin.
I have just signed a contract with Mile High Outdoor Advertising to put two billboards up on the Eastern Slope. We will have these boards from January through March and I am attaching two photos of last year’s boards. Those two boards will cost us $2,200. We have a bank account in the Weld Schools Credit Union which now has about $500 in it. So, we need to raise something like $1,700 to cover the cost of the boards. We have no administrative costs whatsoever. So, however you could spread the word, however you could contribute to this campaign will be very much appreciated. Any contribution at all will help move us toward our goal.
Checks go to:
The Coalition for Better Education, Inc.
2424 22nd Avenue
Greeley, Colorado 80631
In appreciation and solidarity,
Don Perl
The Coalition for Better Education, Inc.
http://www.thecbe.org
Please forward this newsletter to your friends and ask them to visit http://www.AngelaEngel.com.
Angela Engel, 8131 S. Marion Ct., Centennial, CO 80122
Remember all the times that “reformers” like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Wendy Kopp, and Joel Klein have said that the answer to poverty is to “fix” schools first? Remember their claims that school reform (more testing, more charters, more inexperienced teachers, larger classes, more technology) would vanquish poverty? For the past decade, our society has followed their advice, pouring billions into the pockets of the testing industry, consultants, and technology companies, as well as Teach for America, the over-hyped charter industry, and the multi-billion search for a surefire metric to evaluate teachers.
But what if they are wrong? What if all those billions were wasted on their pet projects, ambitions, and hunches, while child poverty kept growing?
The latest study, reported by Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post, shows a staggering increase in child poverty across the nation. The majority of public school students in the South and the West now qualify for free or reduced price lunch. By federal standards, that means they are poor.
The United States has a greater proportion of children living in poverty than any other advanced nation in the world. We are #1 in child poverty. This is shameful.
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked on the phenomenon of “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.” In this case, the horses are the educational industrial complex. They are gobbling up federal, state, and local funding while children and families go hungry, lacking the medical care, economic security, and essential services they need. Instead of helping their families to become self-sufficient, we are fattening the testing industry. Instead of assuring that their schools have the guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, and librarians the children need, our states are stripping their schools to the bare walls. Instead of supplying the arts and physical education that children need to nourish body and soul, we let them eat tests.
Every dollar that fattens the educational industrial complex–not only the testing industry and the inexperienced, ill-trained Teach for America but the corporations now collecting hundreds of millions of dollars to tell schools what to do–is a dollar diverted from what should be done now to address directly the pressing needs of our nation’s most vulnerable children, whose numbers continue to escalate, demonstrating the utter futility and self-serving nature of what is currently and deceptively called “reform.”
Once these futile programs have collapsed, once they have been exposed as hollow (though lucrative) gestures, we will look back with sorrow at the lives wasted, the billions squandered, the incalculable damage to our children and our society.
Someday we will say, as we should be saying now, that we cannot tolerate the loss of so many young lives. We cannot continue to blame teachers, principals, and schools for our collective abandonment of so many children. We cannot allow, and should no longer permit, the income inequality that protects the billionaires while neglecting the growth of a massive underclass. The age of the Robber Barons has returned. Good for them, but bad, very bad, for America.
Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University is a highly respected figure in American education. She was Barack Obama’s spokesperson during the 2008 campaign, and many educators expected and hoped that she would be selected as Secretary of Education. How different the scene would be if that had happened!
I have been trying to persuade Linda to learn how to tweet (I say, there is nothing to it, if I can do it, anyone can do it), but she doesn’t have time. I want her to blog, but she is engaged in major multi-year studies. When I think of the people with the knowledge, the presence, and the stature to lead the battle against the bad policies that are now stifling our nation’s children, her name comes to mind.
She did write a blog and gave me permission to post. It was in response to a question about her views on the Common Core. Linda has played a role in developing the Smarter Balanced assessment, which is supposed to be more attuned to student thinking and performance than the other one (PARCC).
This was her answer:
My view about what we should be doing re: curriculum and assessments can be found in the last chapter of my book, The Flat World and Education, where I describe how many other countries create thoughtful curriculum guidance as part of an integrated teaching and learning system. In short, what I would prefer and what other more deliberative countries do is a careful process by which educators are regularly convened over several years to revise the national or state curriculum expectations (typically national in smaller countries like Finland and Singapore, and state or provincial in large ones like Canada and China). Then there is an equally careful process of developing curriculum materials and assessments (managed by the Ministry or Department of Education with the participation of educators) and organizing intensive professional development. The development process takes at least 3 years and the initial implementation process takes about the same amount of time and deeply involves educators all along the way. Unfortunately, this was not the process that was used to develop and roll out the CCSS.
But the CCSS is what we have now, so what do we do about it? I think there are some elements of the CCSS documents that are potentially useful in setting our sights on higher order thinking and performance skills, and those are important. However, I am fearful that they will be badly implemented in many states. What we should do is take time – at least the next 3 years – to develop curriculum resources that teachers can select, adapt, try out, and refine together in collegial professional development settings within and across their schools. We should use the standards as guideposts and not straitjackets. And we should develop robust performance-based assessments of the kind I describe in my book that provide exciting opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning and for teachers to be engaged in development and scoring – used for information and improvement, not for sanctions and punishments.
I continue to try to work on this agenda with one of the two assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced) and with the Innovation Lab Network states, because I want to try to make what is happening as productive as it can be, and perhaps more instructionally helpful than it might otherwise be. There are some states that are working hard to bring such a vision into practice, but the current federal insistence on implementing sanctions for teachers and schools associated with tests (through requirements in Race to the Top and ESEA waivers) could create incentives that will both narrow the tests and distort their use.
Diane anticipates these problems in her blog, and she could well be right about many of them.
This comment was posted yesterday:
I am a former, part time item writer for a private testing company; I wrote for many different state standards under NCLB. I must say that poorly constructed, confusing, or developmentally inappropriate items undermine the validity of standardized scores and subsequent use in teacher evaluation. When standardized tests are properly constructed, such items which might make it to a field test will almost certainly be vetted during what is typically a two year process. Many items on the Pearson math and ELA administered last April here in NY were written, in my opinion, in an intentionally confusing style using obtuse or arcane vocabulary. The ELA test in particular included confusing item stems and distractors that were not clearly wrong. There were far too many items that turned subjective opinions (most likely; best; author’s intent; etc.) into a “one right, three wrong” format. Many teachers were unsure of the correct answers on a number of vague and fuzzy items.
The math test included many items that were ridiculously convoluted. Although there may be other compelling arguments against VAM teacher evaluations, corrupt test writing, norm referencing (instead of criterion referenced scoring), and manipulating cut scores add up to a rather important set of reasons to invalidate the entire process.
Jeff Bryant of the Education Opportunity Network surveys the wreckage of “test-and-punish” methods of reform. Such methods lead not to “reform,” but to bullied teachers, who are demoralized by their situation. Some leave, some hang on, but the results have been unimpressive.
Bryant sees a slow-motion collapse of the coercive “reform” movement, as its bold promises turn out to be empty. The reformers’ day on the hill is coming to an end.
As Bryant writes:
With the advent of No Child Left Behind, the accountability had its mechanism for targeting individual schools, but with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the accountability arsenal aimed at individual classroom teachers too.
With Michelle Rhee as its celebrity cheerleader, the school accountability movement became the perfect PR campaign promising a way forward to ever increasing education “effectiveness.”
But all those years of promises for this: Studies can prove that teachers are capable of being manipulated by coercive management systems, but the wealth of improvement stemming from expensive new assessment systems has yet to fill the account left barren by the nation’s reluctance to invest in our children’s education.
Michelle Rhee-like accountability systems that have been in place a substantial amount of time have done no better than the one in D.C. A long-standing system in Tennessee, for instance, has done nothing to improve academic achievement and has revealed “almost nothing about teacher effectiveness.”
The most ardent reform enthusiasts now admit to “overselling, and underthinking [sic]” their cause, even as they try to dispel whatever is being proposed as a positive alternative.
Parents and public officials in places as diverse as rural Virginia and uptown New York Cityare more boisterously questioning the whole premise of ramping up more tests on students to determine the value of their teachers.
As the education reform movement’s empty harvest leads us into a winter of discontent, what’s needed are more proposals from multiple sources for a more positive way forward.
Far beyond the media spotlights focused on reform celebrities like Rhee, other credible voices are calling for a different course for accountability and an agenda based on opportunity and support for learning. No wonder more people are listening.
I received a copy of this statement by Regent Cashin, which was released to the media this morning. Unlike most members of New York’s Board of Regents, Dr. Cashin is an experienced educator, who was a teacher, principal, and supervisor over a long career:
Dr. Cashin wrote:
“Statement by Regent Cashin
Monday, October 21, 2013
“I did not want this moment to pass us by without referring to what has been going on throughout the state. The Common Core has not had a successful implementation. The teachers have been telling us for years that parts of the Common Core are not developmentally appropriate. We did not listen to them. The Common Core is not a papal encyclical nor is it infallible. The best curriculum and the best standards are always pliable, more like a living document, rather than something that is static and fixed. We need to listen to our teachers and develop a committee of practitioners who can make appropriate changes in these standards.
“The second issue of grave concern to me is setting the cut scores for the upcoming Regents exams. We do not want to repeat what we did on the 3-8 exams that demoralized our students, teachers and parents by setting the cut scores too high. I suggest we take an average of the last three years of the Regents exams and set the cut score near that average. We have not listened to parents, teachers and our children. We need to start listening to them and acting on their input. Only then will we win them back.”
New York principal Carol Burris here explains that Commissioner John King is obsessed by test scores and that he has no clue about the meaning or purpose of education. Districts across the state are expected to purchase a book that will indoctrinate them into King’s particular obsession. He truly can’t understand why parents and educators do not share his love of test scores. Of course, he draws the line where his own children are concerned. They attend a Montessori school that is not driven by data.
Data are for Other People’s Children.
Carole Marshall is a retired teacher in Rhode Island who explains how State Commissioner Deborah Gist’s insistence on standardized testing has discouraged educators and students across the state. The most pernicious effect of this policy, Marshall shows, has hurt poor and minority youngsters the most.
In an article in the Providence Journal, Marshall writes:
The Oct. 15 Commentary piece (“R.I.’s diploma system brings out the best”) by Deborah Gist, Rhode Island’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, is yet another demonstration of her ability to say what she wants to be true, as if the saying of it makes it true.
Among the many half-truths and untruths in her screed is the insinuation that students who score badly on the New England Common Assessment Program tests, i.e. urban students, have been subject to “years of poor, inadequate education,” while students who do well have teachers who, by contrast, “provide great instruction that engages students on many levels and teaches key academic skills.”
This malicious slur on urban teachers is the ultimate in hubris from a young woman who spent a handful of years teaching in an elementary school and since then has glided up the professional ladder on the shoulders of right-wing politicians and millionaires like Jeb Bush and Eli Broad. If there are any urban teachers who didn’t know what the commissioner thought of them before, they know now.
I left urban teaching before I had planned to for one reason only: I could not be a participant in what top-down, standardized testing does to destroy education in urban schools and, by extension, the lives of students who are already hanging on by a slender thread to the dream of a successful middle-class life.
Before the systematic destruction began, I would have held my school, Hope, up against any other school in the state in terms of who was providing great instruction. Hope’s faculty included a significant number of advanced degrees, Ivy League graduates, and national-board-certified teachers. With the support of then-Commissioner Peter McWalters, we taught literacy across the curriculum, shared rubrics for scoring work, and created a system for student portfolios. We were doing the slow, careful job of building a climate characterized by rigorous, accountable learning.
Then high-stakes testing arrived on the scene and to nobody’s surprise, urban schools’ scores were worse than the scores of suburban schools; the same pattern repeats itself year after year in every corner of this country.
Why? There are a host of extremely well-documented reasons for this. To name just a few: Urban schools have a hugely disproportionate number of students who are new to the language; a hugely disproportionate number of students with learning disabilities; and large numbers of students with serious behavioral problems, including those sent from their suburban districts to group homes in the cities.
That is in addition to the reality that students from impoverished environments are often handicapped by circumstances beyond their control, such as vocabulary deficits, health problems, unstable homes, hunger, and the list goes on. We can all wish these conditions didn’t exist, but we can’t, as Commissioner Gist likes to do, simply ignore them away. Throwing tests at urban students does nothing to solve their problems. The disparities will only grow wider as mandatory test preparation steals more and more time from real education in urban schools.
On the subject of test prep and teaching to the test, Commissioner Gist is correct about one thing: “schools with students who perform well on state assessments do not focus on test preparation.” Pretty tautologically obvious in my opinion; the schools with students who perform well have no reason to focus on test preparation.
On the other hand, in the schools that are being threatened with closure solely on the basis of test scores, you can be sure administrators are not just sitting around, waiting to lose their jobs. The specter of low scores powerfully encourages test preparation and teaching to the test.
This year, the turn-around company hired for $5 million to raise scores in Providence schools hired tutors who spent every school day during the month of September prepping 11th graders for the NECAP assessments.
The students were missing their regular classes every day, even in subjects like physics and foreign languages, so that the schools could show improvement. Suburban parents would never have allowed this; urban parents were not informed.
Students are disingenuously told that this is all happening for their own good. Any reader of this newspaper who truly believes that the testing juggernaut is about benefiting the students is sorely uninformed.
The textbook publishers who sell the test and test-prep materials will make their billions, the so-called turn-around companies will make their millions, and carpetbaggers like Ms. Gist will continue blithely along their career paths, leaving behind wrecked schools and crushed dreams in the cities.
Carole Marshall taught at Hope High School for 18 years, retiring in 2012. Before that she was a business correspondent for the Observer of London and taught journalism at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the University of Rhode Island.
FAIRtest released the following statement, endorsed by some of the nation’s leading writers;
Public Letter about Standardized Testing by 120+ Children’s Authors & Illustrators
Submitted by fairtest on October 21, 2013 –
Dr. Monty Neill (617) 477-9792
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
for immediate release — Tuesday, October 22, 2013
120+ CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHORS AND ILLUSTRATORS TELL PRES. OBAMA,
“WE ARE ALARMED AT NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF EXCESSIVE SCHOOL TESTING”
SIGNERS INCLUDE MAYA ANGELOU, JUDY BLUME, JULES FEIFFER, DONALD CREWS
SAY POLICIES UNDERMINE “CHILDREN’S LOVE OF READING AND LITERATURE”
More than 120 leading authors and illustrators of books for children, including several national award winners, are calling on President Obama to “change the way we assess learning so that schools nurture creativity, exploration, and a love of literature.”
Their letter delivered to the White House today stated, “Our public schools spend far too much time preparing for reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their imaginations.”
“All children must have the freedom to grow, to evolve, to develop,” explained acclaimed poet Maya Angelou, who spoke at President Obama’s inauguration. “We parents, authors, illustrators are standing up for our children. We desperately need you and your administration to stand with us.”
The authors’ and illustrators’ letter continued, “We are alarmed at the negative impact of excessive school testing mandates, including your administration’s own initiatives, on children’s love of reading and literature. Recent policy changes by your Administration have not lowered the stakes. On the contrary, requirements to evaluate teachers on student test scores impose more standardized exams and crowd out exploration.”
Signers of a “Public Letter on Standardized Testing from Authors and Illustrators of Books for Children and Youth” include such other notables as Alma Flor Ada, Judy Blume, Jules Feiffer, and Donald Crews, as well as National Book Award winners Kathryn Erskine and Phillip Hoose.
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) coordinated signature gathering for the letter. The assessment reform organization’s executive director, Dr. Monty Neill, explained, “The authors and illustrators recognize the damage done to young children by testing overkill. The new Common Core assessments will not reverse the damage. In fact, they will mandate more standardized exams in more grades. It is time for an indefinite moratorium on high-stakes exams.”
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– The letter to President Obama with a complete signers’ list of children’s authors and illustrators is online at: http://www.fairtest.org/public-letter-on-standardized-testing-by-childrens-authors
– A fact sheet on Common Core assessments is at: http://fairtest.org/common-core-assessments-factsheet
