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Credibility of Florida’s Accountability System Near Collapse

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2012 //
12

The roiling controversy about the legitimacy of Florida’s testing regime is growing by the day.

Many school boards have passed their version of the Texas anti-high-stakes testing resolution.

FAIRTest says that Florida may be the worst “misuser” of testing of any state in the nation. Students spend 38-40 days each year preparing to take tests and taking tests. That is a bit more than 20 percent of the school year. What reasonable person would want their child to spend 20 percent of his or her school life on testing? That time should be reallocated to instruction, to physical education, to art and singing and play, to activities that stimulate the mind and body, not to the arcane skill of bubble guessing.

When the Florida School Boards Association passed their own resolution and voiced their disapproval of the state’s obsession with testing, State Commissioner Gerard Robinson accused them of giving up “hope.” Somehow, he suggested, they were giving up on the children.

This is such errant nonsense that one hardly knows where to begin or when to stop sputtering. The children of Florida don’t get “hope” by taking more tests and spending more time preparing to take tests. The FCAT mania is solely for the benefit of the adults, who parade around the country boasting of the test scores that “they” increased by turning up the pressure on children and teachers.

Commissioner Robinson should take the Florida high school tests and publish his scores.

You gotta wonder if these people even care about children.

The good news, as blogger Coach Sikes predicts, is that public confidence in the accountability system is rapidly declining. He says it is near collapse. I hope he is right.

The idea of giving letter grades to schools is absurd. Schools are complex institutions. They do some things well, some things poorly. A letter grade cannot capture their quality or their challenges. And the whole testing enterprise is highly political. The passing score is set by the State Department of Education, which works for the governor. The standards are politically derived, not based on some objective scientific measure.

The sooner the public realizes this, the sooner this whole child-abusing structure should collapse. And good riddance!

Once the debris is cleared away, Florida can begin to improve its public education system and aim to make it good for all children.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, Testing

New Study Shows Irrelevance of Gains on State Tests. UPDATE!

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
20

I am reposting this because I forgot to include a link to the study, its title and the names and affiliations of the authors in the first posting. Pretty awful oversight. Actually inexcusable on my part. I apologize to my readers and to the authors of the study.

We have known for some years that the scoring of state tests is easily gamed. In fact, proficiency rates don’t tell us much, because state officials may raise or lower the passing score for political reasons. It happened in New York for years, when the proportion of students passing the state tests went up and up until it collapsed in 2010 as a result of an independent investigation. The state officials enjoyed their annual press conferences where they announced annual too-good-to-be-true gains. And they were too good to be true. They were fake. When the fraud was revealed, there was no accountability. No one admitted having done the dirty deeds. No heads rolled. Accountability is for “the little people,” as real estate queen Leona Helmsley once said about paying taxes. In education, the little people are teachers and principals. At the top–at state departments of education–heads don’t roll. They crown themselves and use their exalted position to blame those who are far, far below them. Think “Yertle, the Turtle.”

An important new study  by Professors Adam Maltese of Indiana University and Craig Hochbein of the University of Louisville sheds new light on the validity of state scores. This study found that rising scores on the state tests did not correlate with improved performance on the ACT. In fact, students at “declining” schools did just as well and sometimes better than students where the scores were going up. The study was published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Its title is “”The Consequences of ‘School Improvement’: Examining the Association Between Two Standardized Assessments Measuring School Improvement and Student Science Achievement.”

Consider the ACT an audit exam.

Consider the state tests an invalid way of measuring student achievement and an invalid way of judging students, teachers, and schools. Consider them an invalid way of closing schools and awarding bonuses and firing people.

When students are prepped and prepped and prepped to pass the state tests, they aren’t necessarily better educated, just prepared to take a specific test. Too much prepping distorts the value of the test.

When your measure is invalid, don’t use it for rewards and punishments.

Perhaps if we used these exams appropriately, just for information, they might begin to have some value. As high-stakes, their validity is corrupted, as Campbell’s Law predicts.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Indiana, Testing

Pearson Wields Undue Power in Britain Too

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
6

A recent article in the Guardian explores how the publishing giant Pearson commands the education world in Britain.

Pearson not only sells textbooks and testing, but also owns Britain’s biggest national examination system, which is operated for profit.

But that’s not all.

Pearson is now promoting itself as a policy studies outfit and think tank, studying the problems of British education and offering solutions. In whose interest, one wonders.

And of course it is developing a model school with a computer-based curriculum called the “Always Learning Gateway,” covering 11 subject areas. It is being tried out for free but will eventually be offered for profit.

Pearson is preparing a report on which the English examination system is promoting high standards and positioning Britain to be a global leader.

“Alasdair Smith, national secretary of the Anti Academies Alliance, which is critical of corporate influence in education, says: “This stuff frightens the life out of me. My concern is that business dictates the nature of education, and especially the aims of education, when it should be one voice among others.”

“Ball says private influence does not stop at Pearson. He mentions McKinsey, the management consultant that has published two widely cited international reports on successful education systems, as evidence of companies’ incursion into policymaking. Sir Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former education standards guru, was an author of both McKinsey reports. He now works for Pearson.

“Last month, it was reported that ministers want to “outsource” some policymaking to companies, consultants and thinktanks in a bid to scale down the civil service.”

The British government, it seems, is outsourcing education policy to the nation’s largest vendor of education products and services.

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, International, On-Line Education, Pearson, Testing

Is This Any Way to Improve the Teaching Profession?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
55

This is President Obama’s vision for reshaping the teaching profession. I certainly agree with the idea that entry into teacher education programs should be selective and rigorous, but almost everything else about the program is odious.

The administration proposes a competitive grant program that would do the following [my comments are in brackets]:

The proposed grant program calls for states and districts to undertake a comprehensive set of five reforms including:

  • Reforming colleges of education and making these schools more selective  [good idea, but today the biggest producers of teaching degrees are online “universities” that have no standards at all so it is hard to know how these  diploma mills might be affected, if at all]
  • Creating new career ladders for teachers to become more effective and ensure their earnings are tied more closely to performance [this is merit pay, the same policy that has failed over and over, tying teachers’ earning to the test scores of students and calling it “performance”]
  • Establishing more leadership roles and responsibilities for teachers, improving professional development, and providing autonomy to teachers in exchange for greater responsibility [no problem here, though I bet many teachers would like to have the autonomy to be freed of the high-stakes testing that NCLB and Race to the Top and Obama’s waivers from NCLB require]
  • Creating evaluation systems based on multiple measures rather than just on test scores [what a joke, just like the “multiple measures” now adopted in state after state where test scores are “only” 40-50% of the teacher’s evaluation but outweigh all the other measures]
  • Reshaping tenure to protect good teachers and promote accountability [in other words, no tenure at all, unless your students get higher test scores every year]
This is the same old test-based accountability of NCLB, with a new wrapper. Will the Obama administration ever look at the research? Might they look at the persistent failure of merit pay? Might they look at the National Research Council’s report on the meager results of test-based accountability? Must they continue to shove testing down everyone’s throat for the next four years?
Hey, I know Romney will be worse. But can’t Obama give us something positive to hope for in another term, some possibility of reforming his ruinous Race to the Top?
Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

GERM in India

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
1

The Global Education Reform Movement (Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg’s apt term) is advancing privatization, competition, choice, testing, accountability, data-driven decision-making tied to test scores. It’s wreaking havoc in this country and in other parts of the world.

Here is a comment from a reader in India:

Come to India and see what’s happening. The governments have abdicated their responsibility of educating the masses, and privatization of education is the current rhetoric. Nobody has a clue as to how public education should be organized, leaving the door wide open for fly-by-night operators. Thr future is bleak, but we Indians have elevated living in denial to a fine art.
Categories International, Privatization, Testing

Governor Scott: Is Florida Testing Too Much?

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
13

Good grief! I knew that the anti-high-stakes testing movement was making headway, but this is unbelievable.

Governor Rick Scott of Florida now wonders if the state is testing too much.

Parents in Florida have been complaining for years that their children are over-tested, that too much instructional time is wasted on test prep, that too many millions are thrown away on testing instead of teaching.

And now the governor is wondering too.

Will wonders never cease?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, Testing

A Sign of Educational Madness?

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2012 //
36

I just read that ACT is developing a test of college-and career-readiness for children in kindergarten.

When I read something like this, my first reaction is to think it is a joke, a parody, a satire.

Surely, no adult can take this nonsense seriously.

But it is not a joke.

Someone is laying out millions of dollars to find out whether 5-year-olds are ready for college or career.

ACT expects that entire states will use the tests they develop.

This is madness.

There are differences among five-year-olds, but so what?

Children of this age grow and develop over time.

They learn new interests. They develop new skills. They discover things they never dreamed of when they were five.

Once again, I ask, knowing no one will answer: Have we lost our minds?

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Testing

Take a Stand for Better Education

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
4

More than 10,000 individuals and more than 350 organizations have signed the National Resolution to Oppose High-Stakes Testing.

More than half the school districts in Texas have signed the original anti-high-stakes testing resolution, which inspired the national resolution.

Many districts in Florida have endorsed it, including Broward County.

Let’s reclaim as schools as places for learning, not just places to test, measure, assess, rate, rank, and evaluate one another.

Please sign the resolution and send it on to others.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Testing

The Most Idiotic Reform of the Day

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
16

Thanks to the reader who sent me this article about the advent of standardized testing in the public schools of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Many of the worst tendencies of corporate reform are exemplified right here in this article.

First, the assumption that standardized tests will tell us what we need to know about individual children (are they meeting the norm that someone at Pearson or McGraw Hill selected?).

Second, the assumption that teachers’ professional judgment is inadequate and must be replaced by an off-the-shelf test.

Third, the assumption that what is measured matters most.

Fourth, the assumption that children at the age of 5 should be assessed with standardized tests rather than by experienced teachers.

Fifth, the assumption that the data derived from these these tests can be entered into a database that will shape the judgment about this child for the rest of his school days.

Please add your suggestion for points I have not thought of at this moment.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Testing

More Shame for the College Board

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
14

Readers may recall that I posted a blog criticizing the College Board for its shameful campaign attacking American education. The ad says that the education system is “crumbling” and calls on the presidential candidates to talk more about education.

The College Board asserts that American education is bad and getting worse.

I received two great responses. One came from the brilliant scholar Yong Zhao, now at the University of Oregon. He makes reference to a valuable comment by Brian, which follows Yong Zhao:

I was going to provide some data to debunk the College Board’s claim that “our schools are performing at a level far below almost every other major industrialized nation. And the statistics continue to get worse every year” with some historical data, but Brian beat me to it with a list of great sources.Here I add some information from the College Board (http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/public/pdf/ap/rtn/AP-Report-to-the-Nation.pdf ) that seems to contradict its own claim:7.3 point increase since 2001 in the percentage of U.S. public high school graduates earning AP scores of 3 or higher…More graduates are succeeding on AP Exams today than took AP Exams in 2001Since the College Board has been pushing the AP courses as a rigorous academic experience and the AP exam an academically demanding test of students preparedness for college, this shows the U.S. education is not getting worse every year, right?

The AP story may reveal the motivation behind the Ad and the Don’tForgetEd.org campaign—more customers for College Board products paid by tax dollars.

According to the College Board 2011 AP report, the number of students who took the AP exam more than doubled in a decade: 431,573 in 2001 to 903,630 in 2011. And an Associate Press storyhttp://www.deseretnews.com/article/765574199/AP-for-everyone-AP-classes-growing-in-popularity-as-schools-look-to-raise-standards.html?pg=allin May 2012 says “2 million students will take 3.7 million end-of-year AP exams.” The fee for each AP Exam in 2012 is $87 and that is $321.9 million total.

For low-income students, the Feds provide $53 per exam, meaning we, the taxpayers are paying for students to take the AP exam. 612,282 out of the 903,630 in 2011 were taken by low-income graduates paid by the taxpayers. Not a problem for me, if it truly helps the students. But it is not. It is just one more way to demoralize the struggling poor students. From the Associated Press story:

Nationally, 56 percent of AP exams taken by the high school class of 2011 earned a 3 or higher, but there are wide disparities. The mean score is 3.01 for white students and 1.94 for blacks. In New Hampshire, almost three-quarters of exams earn a 3 or higher; in Mississippi, it’s under a third. In the District of Columbia, more than half of exams score a 1.

More importantly, plenty of evidence showing that the AP does not really benefit. “AP courses provide little or no additional post-secondary benefit,” writes economist Kristin Klopfenstein and her colleagues http://www.aeaweb.org/assa/2005/0108_1015_0302.pdf and “Even a score of 5 on an A.P. test is no guarantee of a college grade of A in the same subject,” said Harvard’s Philip M. Sadler, who directs the science education department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics.http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/the-advanced-placement-juggernaut/

So might we hypothesize the following chain of reasoning behind the College Board campaign? (I know it sounds quite cynical):

American education is crumbling
Government should invest in improving education
Improving education means increasing college going and completion rates
To increase college readiness and success, you need “rigorous curriculum” and standards
And who provides that?

Readers who want to see the historical performance of US students can read my blog post at: http://zhaolearning.com/2011/01/30/%E2%80%9Cit-makes-no-sense%E2%80%9D-puzzling-over-obama%E2%80%99s-state-of-the-union-speech/

And here is Brian’s comment in response to Peter Kaufmann of the College Board:

Brian

Mr. Kauffmann, I can’t believe you rely on disproven talking points to make your points. I expect better from an employee of The College Board.

Here are some references for you to check out so you can update your talking points with actual, provable facts. It’s an academic tradition, you know:

1. “. . .American universities graduate three times as many qualified science and engineering students each year as can be absorbed in these fields. (Source: Science and Engineering Indicators, 2008)”

2. From GoodEducation:
“Back in 1964, American 13-year-olds took the First International Math Study and ended up ranking in 11th place. Considering that only 12 nations participated, including Australia, Finland, and Japan, our next-to-last performance was pretty abysmal. Other international tests American students have taken over the years have also never showed that we were in the top spot. It’s a myth that we’ve fallen from our glory days.”

3.The 2010 Brown Center Report on Education:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2011/02/07-education-loveless

4. From the OECD Report from which your talking point comes from:
“The number of Americans earning college degrees has been steadily rising, from 11% of the population in 1970 to 30% in 2010. Younger Americans, however, are not keeping pace with their peers in other developed countries, so among 34 countries in the OECD report, we have fallen to 15th place in the percentage of 25 to 34 year olds with college degrees.”

You seem to have left out the part about it being the 23-34 year-old cohort that is slipping behind. Analysis of the report also states that one of the probably causes of the lag is that the price of a college education in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world and is subsidized to a far lesser degree probably due to the low to median tax rate in the US compared to the rest of the world.

Also, you neglect to mention the good news from the same report:

From SV[e]F:
“The 500-page OECD report is a treasure trove (overused term, but true in this case) of amazing statistics and many of them place the U.S. in good standing.

– 99% of our K-12 teachers meet state qualifications.
– Even though classroom instruction time has taken a hit, we still exceed the OECD average at 1,068 hours for high school.
– Ditto for class size; it’s increasing but remains lower that most other nations.
– Despite the high price tag for a college degree, graduates more than make up for it in future earnings and lower unemployment rates.
– The unemployment rate for high school drop outs is 15.8%, but for college graduates it drops to 4.9%.
– College graduates earn about 87% more over their lifetime than high school graduates who don’t go on to college.

The facts seem to negate the panic your advertisement and your quote of talking points invites.

The problem, as it always has been, is poverty, lack of governmental support through tax dollars, austerity budgets, and lack of political will . I wonder if The College Board plans on addressing these issues through your PR campaign?
Categories Education Reform, Testing, US Education
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