Archives for category: Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Will You Give Your Students to Pearson for an IPad?

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2012 //
20

Pearson has sent a solicitation to principals: If you allow us to use your students to field test items, we will give you an IPad or another electronic device of your choice. The principal who sent this to me put it somewhat more plainly: Should I turn my kids into guinea pigs in exchange for a free IPad?

Field Study November 2012

Program Information and Participation Form – Grades 3-7

Dear Principal,

ACT has engaged Pearson in a national effort to try out new test materials. ACT and Pearson have worked together since the earliest days of ACT’s history and share over 50 years of cooperation and experience developing and delivering the highest quality assessments.  We are seeking your participation in a field study that will help lay the foundation for the next generation assessments that address college readiness and the Common Core State Standards.

By nature, educators are future-focused believers in the potential of the next generation.  Their professional ethic is to help young people reach this potential and achieve their dreams.  And, at the highest levels, educators understand the need for systematic evaluation and guidance to pave the way from dreams to reality.  Will you be one of those who help ACT set the guideposts on the path to success for the next generation?

Pearson is requesting applications from districts/schools willing to assist in the development of these test materials while offering an opportunity for your school to generate benefits in return for your school’s participation.

Why Should You Participate?

Educational excellence is the core of a nation’s economic prosperity, and just as data drives the decisions of those who manage corporations, measures of educational achievement inform the decisions of those, like you, who manage our educational institutions. But these measures must reflect such achievement accurately, so, partnership between educators and testing professionals is critical. You are the key.

In return, we will give you a choice of an iPad, iPod Touch, Nook Tablet, or Kindle Fire. For grades 6 and 7, you can select an online administration of ACT’s new ENGAGE™ 6-7.

Incentive Packages

 

For every 80 assessments completed:

Grades 3, 4 & 5

2 iPod Touches

OR

3 Nook Tablets

OR

1 iPad

OR

2 Kindle Fires

Grades 6 & 7

80 ENGAGE™registrations

How does ENGAGE™ benefit your school?

For every completed assessment in grades 6 and 7, one of your students can be assessed, at no charge to your school.  ENGAGE™ is a low-stakes, self-report assessment that measures students’ behaviors and psychosocial attributes–critical but often overlooked components of their success.  It can assist in the identification of students who may be at risk of academic difficulties or dropout. ENGAGE™ is anextremely powerful way for educators to improve their graduation rates and directly reach students whose personal challenges go unreported in standardized academic tests.

What Will Your School be Required to do for the Field Study?

  • Fill out the online application:

https://www.surveymk.com/s/EnrollNovemberPilot

  • Submit your classroom rosters which include students’ demographic information.
  • If testing online, complete system setup and have teachers participate in an online training session.
  • If testing on paper, receive and distribute materials to your participating teachers.
  • Teachers will administer one to four 30-40 minute tests, with mainly multiple choice items. Tests will also include a few constructed response items.
  • Submit and return materials by designated deadline.

Our intent is to gather data for analyzing our testing program while offering your students an opportunity to practice their test-taking skills at no cost to your school.

Project Details

  • ·         Public, private and charter schools are eligible to participate.
  • ·         The field study is available to grades 3 through 7.
  • ·         The project is to be group administered any time between November 1 and 30, 2012.
  • ·         Each test will cover one of four subjects: English, mathematics, reading, or science.
  • ·         We request schools register to test all of the four subjects. However, if circumstances prevent your school from testing all four subjects please indicate the number of subtests your school may administer.  Please note, if you register for less than four subjects, Pearson will assign the subject tests to you and notify you as to what tests you will be administering.
  • ·         The testing does not necessarily have to occur in a class of the same subject.
  • ·         You may choose to administer the computer-based or paper-based assessment. Minimum system requirements are necessary for the online assessment.
  • ·         No score reports will be available as this assessment is in the developmental phase.

What to Do Next?

1)    Apply online: https://www.surveymk.com/s/EnrollNovemberPilot

2)    Share this opportunity with colleagues who may also be interested.

We appreciate your interest and look forward to working with you.

Categories Education Reform, Pearson, Testing

This Teacher Loved Working in NYC Consortium School

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2012 //
0

An earlier post described the excellent results obtained by the schools in the NYC Performance Standards Consortium, where standardized tests were replaced by performance assessments.

This teacher taught in one of these schools:

In fall 2008, I student taught at one of those schools, after a prior student teaching gig in one of the ‘small-school’, test-is-king high schools elsewhere in Manhattan. The difference is overwhelming. I am a history teacher, and we had the ability to teach thematically, and to assess based on performance on creative, innovative projects also deeply rooted in critical thinking skills. The kids responded in incredibly positive ways, and were producing some amazing work. If I could have gotten hired there, I would have in a heartbeat … But then Bloomburg instituted his hiring freeze (I landed at another fantastic school in Massachusetts, so no regrets). I have no doubt that schools like these are better serving the students of NYC, and I’m thrilled to hear that this might be expanding. I was raised on the Regents exam, and as a student I never worried about them or had problems excelling on them. But when I started teaching in NYC, I saw how much of a toll those tests took on more disadvantaged students, without any real measure of their intelligence or development in their study of history. To have more schools follow the model of performance assessments is a small step in the right direction for once.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, NYC, Testing

Idiotic Pre-K Performance Assessments

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2012 //
8

A reader tells us what is expected of Pre-K teachers in New York CitY, where teachers must administer laborious tasks which are filed away and forgotten.

too late..pre-k is already being assessed with performance tasks.


In NYC we can choose one ELA and one Math bundle.

that’s what the DOE calls units–bundles. I’m not quite sure why.


In my district we were encouraged to use the five senses for the ELA and Math
Each bundle provides performance tasks for both.


We had to do a 6 week unit on the five senses. Do you know how much wasted time that was teaching the 5 senses over 30 days?
The performance tasks in ELA required children to draw a picture of themselves using one or more of the 5 senses. The math required telling a story using manipulatives and asking children addition and subtraction question.


If one is really interested you may find the bundles on the DOE website in the office of early childhood section.

Back to the assessment. After the children drew their pictures, each child had to conference with the teacher and tell the teacher what he/she had drawn and what sense had been used.


With the math we were supposed to have 4 children at a time but that really didn’t work out because some of them called out the answers. So one child at a time and the child was to give the response and articulate how she/he came to that answer.


Aside from many students getting very, very stressed, I am sure by now those of you who are teachers can calculate the number of hours it took to administer these tasks and then score them using a DOE created rubric for each.


This all had to copied for our files and originals sent to some suits somewhere in the universe.


I never heard back from anyone. Somewhere there are hundreds of sets of performance tasks bundles sitting in a room. I’m not sure what use they were to the suits. If you calculate the number of pre-k classes in the NYC DOE and multiply the performance tasks x2 (we had to do 2 in the fall and 2 in the spring..2 each of ELA and 2 each of Math) you can imagine that the DOE either has a lot of empty space or they took a storage unit somewhere in Manhattan to house all these useless papers.


In pre-k we have 18 children in all day and some schools have 18 and 18 in half day programs.


The administration of these tasks took hours over several weeks. Think of all the instructional time that was lost. When I started the assessment process I made private notes on how each child was going to do. I didn’t miss one.


I won’t even tell you how bored my kids were by the end of this bundle.

And they didn’t really learn anymore than when I taught the 5 senses in one week.
Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

A First-Person Account of Chinese Schools

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2012 //
6

This is a phenomenal article that explains why the writer decided to leave China, which he loved.

This was one important reason:

Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.

The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them. In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take “business studies.” Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.

There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)

And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.” Moral guidance is provided by mythical heroes from communist China’s recent past, such as Lei Feng, the selfless soldier who achieved more in his short lifetime than humanly possible, and managed to write it all down in a diary that was miraculously “discovered” on his death.

The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays. In the holidays they attend special schools for extra tuition, and must do their own school’s homework for at least a couple of hours every day to complete it before term starts again. Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.

Categories Education Reform, International, Testing

Does New York State Welcome Performance Assessments?

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2012 //
4

Jennifer Borgioli, whom I met via Twitter and know as DataDiva, has sent me a post about performance assessments in New York. She is responding to an earlier post about the New York Performance Standards Consortium, which has thus far not gotten permission form the state to add 19 schools to its group. The Consortium many years ago won an exemption from all state standardized testing (except for the Regents ELA exam) and relies instead of performance assessments judged by teachers and others. The article cited in the earlier post indicated that the state was reluctant to allow other schools to escape the state testing regime, which Jennifer does not contest. She believes that the state is open to performance assessment within its testing regime.

In your blog, your last paragraph seemed to suggest that NYS wants to discourage the use of performance-based tasks when in fact, I don’t think that’s the case. I cannot speak to the reasons why there is hesitation to approve more schools for performance-based alternatives to Regents but I do know there is room for performance-based tasks for all schools in New York.  In effect, there are two types of performance tasks. The large-scale, long-term tasks as you described (portfolio assessments, etc.) that are used for exit criteria and reflect a deep understanding of the content and skills in a given domain or topic and then there are small-scale, shorter on-demand performance tasks that require students to follow a series of steps or tasks in order to generate a product or engage in a performance.

The NYS APPR guidance documents reference performance-tasks at least twice:

F5. We want to use locally‐developed performance tasks for a variety of grades and subjects that would be assessed using a rubric. Is that allowable?

Subject to local negotiation, locally‐developed performance tasks scored by a rubric could be used as a district, regional, or BOCES developed assessment wherever locally developed assessments are allowed as either a comparable growth measure or a locally selected measure provided that such assessments are rigorous and comparable as described above.

G4. Does vested interest rule apply to pre‐tests given to establish a baseline for a SLO?

To the extent practicable, districts or BOCES should ensure that any assessments or measures, including those used for performance‐based or performance task assessments that are used to establish a baseline for student growth are not disseminated to students before administration and that teachers and principals do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the assessments they score

In a number of regions across the state, teachers are working together to design performance-tasks that get to the most critical learning of their content area or course as determined by the New York State Learning Standards in a way that is authentic as possible. These are not large scale tasks full of student choice and authentic assessment but neither are they traditional, multiple choice tests. Their use reflects a commitment by the participating schools to minimize the impact of APPR regulations on students. These assessments are designed by classroom teachers and will be scored by them using rubrics they create. Though we do not have evidence of reliability yet, that will come after the administration of the pre-assessments and inter-rater reliability analysis this fall, there is every reason to believe that these assessments will generate results as consistent as those generated by a machine-scored, publisher-created multiple choice test.  

It’s a small move but it’s a start.

Categories Education Reform, New York, Testing

Whose Side Are You On?

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2012 //
7

We know about the people who are using “reform” as their stepping stone to fame and fortune.

We know about those who demand more testing, more standardization, more dehumanization.

We know about the policymakers and pundits who think that test scores are the object of education.

Nothing else matters to them.

What do we know about the administrators and teachers who look on their students as if they were their own?

When history judges what you did now, how will you answer?

In the end, ask yourself, whose side are you on?

This reader did:

Everything in my being is telling me this is all so wrong. I keep thinking of my own two grown children. They are bright and hard working and successful. They were lucky enough to have been educated before NCLB morphed our education system into something unrecognizable to those of us who understand what really great teaching looks like.

As an administrator I am required to observe and evaluate teachers at my school. I see great teaching on a regular basis. But I also see teachers who are scared because their jobs are tied to test results. So they fall back on teaching test taking skills and constantly focus on the test. Louisiana law now requires a teacher whose state student scores give her an ineffective rating to be fired, even if I rate her as an effective teacher through my observations and evaluations. How can teachers function with this hanging over their heads all year.

I try to tell them to relax and do what they know works. But how can they relax? Their classrooms are filled with students who are terrified of that same test. Some refuse to participate because they have had enough of the pressure. Our 4th and 8 th grade tests are high stakes, meaning if they don’t pass the test, they don’t pass the grade.

As I said, this all feels so wrong. But by law we are required to submit and subject teachers and students to this torture year after year. How do I reconcile all of this? It doesn’t really matter what I say or do because their value added (VAM) score comes from the state and student test scores, and it will determine if they have a job next year or not. My goal this year is to be their support system, their cheerleader, whatever they need. I will do my best to be in the classrooms, walk the halls, remove disruptive students, give recognition, anything, and everything.

Whenever I am not sure how to handle a situation with a teacher, student, or parent, I stop and ask myself it the situation were reversed, how would I want to be treated? Then I proceed. As I am struggling with all of this I ask myself, what would I want for my own children? Then I know what I need to do for these children. It feels like an uphill battle, but I can’t give up. I want to be on the right side when history judges our actions. I answer to the children.

 A teacher responded to the administrator in the same thread:

Bless you for your compassion.  We wish there were more of you, not in the schools, but in the legislature so that this nonsense could be stopped.  Thank you anyway.  We shall continue to do our best to remember these are human beings.  I have already planned on what my wife and I must do should I be fired.  When I started I was an excellent teacher because I could use my knowledge gained in 40 years of work in other fields and several advanced degrees.  I knew as things stood then I would have a job as long as I did my job.  This created an atmosphere where I could teach, innovate, and seek excellence in my students and myself.  Because my job was secure, it paid enough to meet my needs, I could give more of myself and joyously teach.  I was blessed with administrators like you.  Now I am reminded every day that if test scores don’t rise we older “suddenly less effective” teachers will be gone.  The evil tenure no longer protects us.  I remember the kids that I am now inspiring to explore science and read about great inventions may be the generation that overthrows this mess.  I may lose my career sooner than I had hoped, but I will not offend the dignity of my students. I teach Kindergarten through 5th graders, 160 kids a day, I regard them as my much younger siblings, I can’t turn them into a number.

Categories Principals, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Alfred North Whitehead Speaks to Us Today

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2012 //
6

A colleague in Korea wrote to exchange ideas about civic education. In the course of our exchange, my friend offered these astonishingly relevant quotes from the esteemed philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Let me be frank and say that I did not resonate to his ideas when I first read them half a century ago. I do now. These thoughts apply with equal force not only to our typical standardized approach to public schools but also to the charter chain approach:

“And I may say in passing that no educational system is possible unless every question directly asked of a pupil at any examination is
either framed or modified by the actual teacher of that pupil in that subject.
The external assessor may report on the curriculum or on the performance of the pupils,
but never should be allowed to ask the pupil a question which has not been strictly supervised by the actual teacher,
or at least inspired by a long conference with him.” 
Alfred N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (London: William and Norgate Limited, 1950), pp. 7-8.
 
“But the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff.
If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert idea into another. …
It will be equally fatal to education if we fall into the hands of a supervising department which is under impression that
it can divide all schools into two or three rigid categories, each type being forced to adopt a rigid curriculum.
When I say that the school is the educational unit, I mean exactly what I say, no larger, no smaller unit.
The classifying of schools for some purposes is necessary.
But no absolutely rigid curriculum, not modified by its own staff, should be permissible. …
When once considers in its length and in its breadth the importance of this question of the education of a nation’s young, the broken lives,
the defeated hopes, the national failures, which resulted from the frivolous inertia with which it is treated,
it is difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage.
In conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.” Ibid. pp. 21-22.
 
“This survey shows that the management of a university faculty has no analogy to that of a business organizations….
The modern university system in the great democratic countries will only be successful if the ultimate authorities exercise singular restraint,
so as to remember that universities cannot be dealt with according to the rules and policies which apply to the familiar business corporations.”  Ibid., pp. 149-150.
Categories Education Reform, International, Testing

Who Are the “No-Excuses” Teachers?

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2012 //
12

This study of the “scalability” of no-excuses charter schools was written by Steven Wilson, who is a supporter of this approach.

The no-excuses teachers agree that test scores are the most important outcome of schooling and the best preparation for college readiness.

He examined the education backgrounds of the teachers in several very successful charter schools in Boston.

83% were graduates of very selective colleges.

These teachers typically work 9-10 hours daily and are on call at any time to assist with homework.

They burn out and leave with frequency, because of the demands of the job and because they have other career ambitions.

This made him wonder about the scalability of the model.

To scale up to have a significant effect, he found, would require that half the graduates of elite universities enter teaching for at least two years, which doesn’t seem realistic.

He assumes that anyone who graduates from a selective college or university will make a better teacher.

Given the limited supply of elite graduates, he concludes that what is needed is tight and specific instructional systems, like the one he is involved in.

Categories Charter Schools, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Does Connecticut Law Permit Opting Out?

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2012 //
11

A parent objects to Connecticut’s plan to test children in kindergarten, first and second grades and asks for your help:

Does anyone have any info on “opt out” procedures in CT? My daughter will not be subjected to this destructive nonsense during these crucial, early years.

 

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Connecticut, Education Reform, Malloy, Dannel, Testing

Connecticut Adds New Tests for Kindergarten, 1 and 2 Grades

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2012 //
18

Education reform is definitely found a home in Connecticut!

There, Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy wants to prove he is the biggest and baddest of education reformers.

Through his efforts, the Legislature passed a “reform” bill that mandates new standardized tests for kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.

No child in Connecticut will be left untested!

No, sirree!

Remember if  you will, that the three highest performing states in the nation on the no-stakes NAEP are: Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Malloy is very very worried about the state’s terrible performance. He will fix it with more tests.

His core belief is that teachers should “teach to the tests.”

Educators used to believe that teaching to the test was reprehensible, almost like cheating.

No more.

Governor Malloy will get his wish.

Categories Accountability, Connecticut, Malloy, Dannel, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »