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Fred Smith Explains That AOC was Right, and I Was Wrong, About the Test She Took

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2019 //
33

 

At the meeting of Jackson Heights Parents for Public Schools on March 16, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes said that she took a high-stakes standardized test, and her teacher told her she was in the 99th percentile. I thought she must have taken an  Iowa Test of Basic Skills since NCLB test scores are not reported as percentiles but as 1-4 or “below basic, basic, proficient, advanced.”

That sent the far-right blogosphere into a frenzy of self-righteousness, claiming (falsely) that she was lying about her scores.

But testing expert Fred Smith explained to me that AOC was right, and I was wrong. She was tested before NCLB.

Take that, trolls!

Fred, who worked as a testing expert at the NYC Board of Education for many years, wrote:

“Dear Diane,
“I was at that thrilling meeting in Jackson Heights too.  AOC was tremendous and you spoke so persuasively about the legitimacy of opting out.
“Full disclosure:  I’m guilty of asking someone in the crowd to take a picture of AOC and me on my cell phone.  I tell the people (I can’t wait to share it with) that the shot was taken at her insistence.
“But to your point about the veracity of AOC’s percentile score.  New York State tested children in grades 4 and 8 in the years prior to 2006 when the SED under NCLB required English Language Arts and math testing to be done in grades 3 through 8.  McGraw-Hill was the publisher.
“On the state’s website you’ll find archived technical reports going back to 1999, pertaining to the New York State Grade 4 ELA Assessment.  See:
 “AOC is 29 years old. She would have been in the 4th grade when she was nine–and likely took the statewide ELA in 2000.
“Table 1 in both reports presents frequency distributions that allow raw scores to be converted to cumulative percentiles–otherwise known as percentiles.  Thus, her teacher or a guidance counselor easily could have seen how well AOC did on the ELA and informed her that she achieved better than 99 percent of her peers.  In fact, to reach that peak she had to answer almost all questions correctly.
“Here is an example where the test did some good, although AOL’s brightness should have been obvious.  Why do those who want to build walls up also want to tear people down?
“Fred”

 

 

Categories Testing

Shawgi Tell: The Issue Is Not Standardized Test Scores But the Theft of Public Property

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2019 //
36

Shawgi Tell is a professor of education at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York.

In this post, Shawgi Tell describes the massive misuse of standardized tests created by mega-corporations.

He writes:

Charter school supporters and promoters have long been severely obsessed with comparing charter school and public school students’ scores on expensive curriculum-narrowing high-stakes standardized tests produced by big corporations. They fetishize test scores and believe such scores are useful and meaningful in some way, despite what extensive evidence has shown for decades.

One reason charter school supporters and promoters dogmatically fixate on pedagogically meaningless test scores is because they do not want to draw anyattention to the real underlying problem with charter schools, which is that they are privatized, marketized, corporatized, deregulated, deunionized, non-transparent, pro-competition, political-economic arrangements that siphon billions of public dollars from public schools every year and make rich people even richer while drowning in fraud, corruption, waste, arrests, scandal, and racketeering.

Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are contract schools that operate outside the public sphere and benefit mainly major owners of capital, even though they are portrayed as a way to “empower parents.” Test scores do not change this. Whether students’ scores on unsound tests produced by for-profit companies are high or low, it does not make the looting of billions of dollars in public funds by charter schools from public schools acceptable. Test scores cannot cover up this large-scale theft and destruction. Scores on tests not produced by educators and lacking a human-centered perspective necessarily serve retrogression….

Charter school supporters’ obsession with test scores is a ruse. It is designed to fool the gullible. People should recognize that public schools, funds, facilities, resources, assets, and authority belong only to the public and that wealthy private interests behind charter schools have no legitimate claim to them no matter how well or poorly charter school students—usually chosen by the school, not the other way around—score on widely-rejected corporate tests.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Testing

Mercedes Schneider: The College Admissions Scam Used a Nonprofit

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2019 //
6

 

Mercedes Schneider tracked down the tax filings of the “charity” at the heart of the college admissions scam.

You will be interested to learn that the cover for the heist was a nonprofit dedicated to helping the “underpriviled.”

Well, you can’t open a charity for the “privileged,” now, can you?

Categories Cheating, Higher Education, Testing

Texas: Mayor Bans STAAR Test from His Town

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
10

 

The mayor of Devers, Texas, happens to be a fifth-grade teacher. Steve Horelica knows how phony the state test (STAAR) is. He has proclaimed that it won’t be allowed in his town. Very likely, the Texas Education Agency won’t let him get away with it. But what can they do? Send in the Texas Rangers and force kids to takethe Tests?

Imagine: what If he announced that no student in Devers would take the test? What if he declared that Devers was opting out?

He would be on my list of heroes if he did.

As a teacher, he knows that the test reveals nothing that teachers don’t know already. It distorts education.

Kudos to Mayor Horelica!

“Steve Horelica is not only the mayor, he teaches 5th grade at Devers ISD, where he says he has witnessed first-hand how ineffective the STAAR test is in educating his students.

“At the end of the year, the only thing that schools and TEA looks at is ‘What was your STAAR score?'” Horelica said. “They don’t look at how much children have grown, they don’t look at ‘Okay, this kid has a learning disability, so he is at a disadvantage.’ They don’t care. They just look at one thing. Did they pass or did they fail?”

“Horelica said because the STAAR test has done very little to actually educate his students, he decided it was time to do something.

“And I just threw it out there as a joke and said, ‘Boy, I wish I could make the STAAR test go away as mayor,'” Horelica said. “And some folks chimed in and said, ‘Why don’t you do it?'”

Hint: Tests don’t educate students. Making tests harder doesn’t make students smarter.

Categories Testing

Texas: More Than 100,000 Students Affected by Computer Glitches on State Tests

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
22

 

The Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath (non-educator) revealed that more than 100,000 students were affected by computer glitches on state tests.

“More than 100,000 Texas students were affected by computer glitches on standardized tests this year, tens of thousands more than previously estimated, Education Commissioner Mike Morath told the State Board of Education during a briefing on Wednesday morning.

“In May, Morath threw out 71,000 students’ results for the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness and fined Educational Testing Service, the New Jersey company that administered and graded the test, $100,000 for the computer glitches. Morath also has waived promotion requirements tied to STAAR scores for fifth and eighth graders affected by the glitches.

“At the Wednesday meeting, Morath said 41,702 students were affected by slow connectivity during testing in April, while another 58,743 experienced slowdowns or had trouble logging into computerized tests in May. The total of 100,445 affected students marks a roughly 30,000-student increase from Morath’s previous estimate of the number who encountered computer problems.”

Morath has taken no action to investigate studies that show the tests are invalid. 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Oakland, CA: Billionaires Will Convene to Discuss New Plans for Privatizing Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2019 //
20

 

What exquisite timing! The teachers in Oakland went out on strike to demand a decent living wage and to protest the destruction of their schools by privatizers, and guess who is planning to come to town?

On May 8-9, the NewSchools Venture Fund will hold its annual summit in Oakland, California, to review its plans for additional privatization of public schools.

The summit is sponsored by the usual suspects: The Walton Family Foundation (anti-union, anti-public schools, pro-privatization), The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (ditto), The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (selling computers and depersonalized learning), and The Carnegie Foundation of New York (once a friend to public schools, but no longer).

Make plans to be in Oakland to send your greetings to the Robber Barons of our day.

Who knows? Maybe Betsy DeVos will be their keynote speaker.

They are planning to disrupt your public schools, destroy your unions, and continue marauding where they are uninvited and unwelcome.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing, Walton Foundation

Mercedes Schneider: The College Board and the Big Salaries It Pays

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2019 //
13

Please remember that the College Board is a nonprofit.

But Mercedes Schneider reminds us that the people who work at this nonprofit make a lot of money.

If you scan the list of executive salaries, you might begin to understand why the SAT is so expensive to consumers.

And you might cheer on the FairTest list of more than 1,000 colleges and universities that have become “test-optional,” because they recognize that a student’s score on the SAT or the ACT is less valuable as a predictor of college success than the same student’s four-year grade point average.

Schneider reviewed the College Board’s most recent tax filings.

She calls it a “lucrative racket.”

Total revenue in 2016 was $916M, just shy of one billion dollars, $3.3M of which derived from government grants. The greatest revenue generator was “AP and instruction,” at $446M, followed by “assessments,” at $338M.

piggy bank cash

As for 2016 lobbying expenses: The College Board spent $2.3M (a drop in the billion-dollar bucket of its total revenue), with the following explanation:

The College Board contacts legislators and their staff to provide data and statistics on K-12 education and college admissions and to encourage them to support appropriations for education.

If your nonprofit breaks a billion in revenue, then $2M spent on lobbying becomes relatively nothing. In addition, “providing data and statistics” is probably far enough removed to be considered as not actively lobbying.

But let’s move on to the few who profit the most from nonprofit College Board.

The highest paid independent contractor by far was another testing entity, Educational Testing Services (ETS), at $359M.

Former Common Core “architect” and College Board president, David Coleman, drew $1.7M in total compensation in 2016, $512K of which is “bonus and incentive compensation.” Note that as of 2019, Coleman is no longer president and is “just CEO.” The person replacing Coleman in 2019 as president, Jeremy Singer, made $871K in total compensation in 2016 as chief operating officer.

fanning-cash-2

Former Gates Foundation policy director, Stefanie Sanford, who left Gates in December 2012 for chief of policy at College Board, pulled $597K in total compensation in 2016.

Then she has a fairly long list of other well-paid executives who do the significant work of the College Board.

See, if you teach students, you don’t earn much, but if you test them, you can drive a Porsche.

 

Categories Accountability, Coleman, David, Education Industry, Testing

Texas: Calling All Parents Whose Children Have Been Subjected to Rigged Tests

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2019 //
16

Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment (TAMSA) [aka Moms Against Drunk Testing] needs your help to fight abusive testing. We learned recently that the state tests (STAAR) is set two grade levels above where children are. Third-graders are tested on fifth-grade material and vocabulary, fifth-graders on seventh-grade material and vocabulary, etc. The tests are rigged to fail the kids. This is madness with no purpose other than to make kids and schools look bad so that the state has a rationale for closing public schools and opening charter schools.

 

URGENT: TAMSA needs your voice!

The Texas Monthly article got the attention of the House Public Education Committee. The committee is meeting Tuesday, March 5, 2019 on issues related to STAAR. Several assessment bills are on the agenda.

If you have a child that has been adversely affected by the STAAR test and are willing to testify in Austin, please email boardmember@tamsatx.org.

Categories Parents, Students, Testing, Texas

Linda Darling-Hammond at AASA: Testing Is Not Reform

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2019 //
30

 

The newly appointed chair of the California State Board of Education Linda Darling-Hammond spoke to the national conference of the American Association of School Administrators (the School Superintendents Association) and denounced the American reliance on high-stakes testing as a reform strategy.

If America wants to be the world leader in education, then it should look to other countries as a model for success, says Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading educational researcher, in her Thought Leader session Thursday at the AASA national conference.

Countries such as Finland and Singapore have been among the highest-scoring countries in international comparisons. Unlike the United States, these countries provide broad support for children’s welfare, said Darling-Hammond, president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute in Palo Alto, Calif.

“They take care of children. Health care is usually universal. There is income security and (state-paid) preschool,” she told a room full of superintendents, education advocates and business leaders at the AASA conference. In effect, those countries educate “the whole child,” she said.

Darling-Hammond was the keynote speaker for the AASA Sobol Lecture, named for the late New York education leader Thomas Sobol, a vehement supporter of equity in education and for involving parents and teachers in policymaking decisions affecting classrooms. Sobol passed away in 2015.

With more than 25 books and research articles on education, Darling-Hammond is influential in policymaking circles. Once rumored to be a potential candidate to lead the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration, Darling-Hammond this week was named by Gov. Gavin Newsom to lead the California State Board of Education. The board’s responsibilities range from school financing to testing requirements and teaching standards. She is the first African-American woman to take the helm.

Darling-Hammond noted that economic conditions for many families and schools nationwide worsened in the post-No Child Left Behind policy era, particularly in the wake of the 2007 Great Recession. Wages stagnated. Poverty is on the rise and more families are homeless now, she said. Such factors contribute to poor educational outcomes.

The Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy, passed by Congress in 2002, increased testing requirements for schools nationwide and set penalties for schools that failed to demonstrate improvements in student achievement, she contended. Proponents then said the policy would hold teachers, schools and school districts accountable for closing gaps in student achievement, or they would risk federal funding cuts or even closure of failing schools.

The fallout is apparent. Schools began testing children more frequently. They music, art and even recess — despite neuroscientific research demonstrating that they are critical for a child’s emotional and social development, Darling-Hammond said.

“If all of that testing had been improving us, we would have been the highest achieving nation in the world,” she said.

Now, that’s the Linda Darling-Hammond we all know and love!

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Poverty, Students, Testing

D.C.: A Rating System Designed to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2019 //
17

 

This is not a well-known secret: every distribution will always have a bottom 5%.

In D.C., under the control of the Mayor, the school system had adopted a rating system that is guaranteed to produce winners and losers. The losers are set up for privatization.

Parent activist and blogger Valerie Jablow thinks this stinks. She’s right.

 

She writes:

It’s not merely that the relativity of the STAR rating means that we will always have 1-star schools–which is unbearably cruel, given what’s at stake. It’s also that it purports to be neutral. After all, who can argue with test scores? They’re numbers–and everyone knows numbers don’t lie! Numbers are neutral!

But the reality is that the STAR rating and others like it are most definitely notneutral. Rather, these ratings were created out of deeply political motivations to determine school winners and losers. And without infusions of real resources tied to those 1- and 2-star ratings (and not merely listening sessions mediated by private advocacy group PAVE), DC schools with low ratings stand to lose a lot.

Moreover, if the STAR rating were about ensuring quality in our schools, we would know exactly how far those Anacostia high school teachers moved their students every single year. And we would also know what resources they got–and the resources they needed–in doing so.

But these ratings not only don’t tell us any of that, but teachers at Anacostia will be penalized to the extent that their students do not score well on PARCC. Not to mention that those teachers get only a few years to move that bar. (See p. 35 of our ESSA plan to see what happens when a school doesn’t move that bar fast enough: privatizing.)

We thus find ourselves in a very interesting place–wherein we have a school ratings system that cannot really tell us about school quality, all the while it purports to do just that.

Soooo: why do we have this rating system?

It would appear to be about choice–but even then, in a very limited context.

While all our charter schools are about choice, and now educate about half our students, most families attending DCPS also engage in choice of some sort, whether through the out of boundary process or through selective high schools. In fact, according to school analyst Mary Levy, about 25% of our high school students currently attend selective high schools–which makes DCPS’s choice to invest in a new one (Bard) and expand another (Banneker) on trend.

Except that the trend is a little concerning…

So, let me ask again: why do we have this rating system?

We have just spent a considerable amount of civic money and effort not only making it easier for families to reject schools with low test scores (the star rating appears on our lottery website), but also investing in tests that make it easier for schools with some of the city’s highest test scores to select out an already limited pool of high-scoring students.

All the while we learn nothing from the resulting ratings about the resources provided (or needed) at our schools or, for high schools, growth that teachers have been able to effect for their students–who more likely than not start out at or below grade level everywhere except for a relatively small number at only a small subset of our high schools.

Perhaps the worst part is how these ratings enable a grotesque educational bait and switch.

That is, the underlying assumption appears to be that the ratings enable parents to choose and thus helps students and makes schools better, presumably through competition. But the only competition herein is pitting public against the public, such that the public loses every time it wins, since our public schools are a system of, for, and by the public. Not to mention that “winning” in this context is very strange indeed: is it a slot at a selective high school for your child? Or your school not being closed down or privatized? All the while this so-called competition neither informs us about what is really going on inside our schools nor helps schools support the students they have.

So, gotta ask again:

Why do we have this rating system if it’s not really about quality or helping schools or truly informing parents or ensuring we have adequate resources for the majority of our schools that do not now (and may never) have many students getting a 4+ on PARCC?

Maybe this rating system, which appears so ill-suited for what it purports to do, is really about something else entirely–say, resources?

That is, because 1-star schools will always be with us (how convenient!), our city will thus ensure a steady flow of resources from closed or privatized 1-star schools (buildings, students, personnel, furniture, supplies) for, well, whoever would like to have them.

Now who’s winning?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Testing
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