Archives for category: Testing
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Four New Members Join “Chiefs for Change” to Promote Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2016 //
15

Four new members joined the “Chiefs for Change,” which was established by Jeb Bush to promote school choice, charters, vouchers, online charter schools, the Common Core, and high-stakes testing. School choice has been shown to promote segregation, but that probably will not be a topic of discussion at the next meeting or any future meeting. Nor is there likely to be much attention to the many reports about the poor results obtained by virtual charters. Perhaps they might discuss the continuing lack of any evidence for the success of vouchers. Or the many charters that are low-performing and how they should be held accountable.

 

The new members include Carey Wright, state superintendent of Mississippi; Malika Anderson, Superintendent of the Achievement School District in Tennessee; Steve Canavero, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Nevada; and Lewis D. Ferebee, Superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Segregation, Testing, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

San Antonio Express-News Calls for Halt to Use of Botched Tests for High Stakes

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2016 //
9

The San Antonio Express-News published a blistering editorial calling for a halt to state testing until all the errors and computer glitches were resolved. This may mean forever, given the track record of testing companies that produce online assessments.

 

Fifty superintendents from the Houston area wrote a letter to the new state superintendent Mike Morath outlining the problems their students and teachers had encountered.

 

As the editorial states:

 

There are inherent problems in any massive project, but this is no simple undertaking. The STAAR test — the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness — is high stakes. The scores impact schools, teachers and students. Failing grades can cause students in the fifth and eighth grades to be held back, and high school students who don’t pass three of the five end-of-course exams will not get a diploma. Teachers’ evaluations will be based in part on how well students perform on the STAAR test.

 

Until all the problems are resolved, school administrators are asking the Texas Education Agency to delay use of scores for the alternative test for students needing special accommodations due to a learning disability. They make a valid point.

 

It appears that the state’s new testing vendor, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Services, commonly referred to as ETS, was ill-equipped to take on the four-year $280-million contract. There is no excuse for the company to ask test takers not to answer a question because there was no correct answer or having to scramble at the last minute to certify personnel to grade the test.

 

School districts can ask that tests be re-evaluated, but that action comes at their own expense. Lewisville ISD appropriated $50,000 to have thousands of English tests retaken by their high school students after many high performers scored a zero on that portion of the test. School districts should not be forced to pay that expense because the state made a bad call when it awarded the testing contract.

 

There is something terribly amiss here, and it needs to be fully resolved before the test scores can be given much weight. Morath has said ETS will be held financially liable for the problems and could lose the state’s business if the issues are not adequately resolved. That is good news for Texas taxpayers but does not adequately resolve all the issues.

 

Too much is at stake to merely assure everyone it will be done better next time. The state should not go forward with a testing system few have confidence is working properly. There is no do-over for students who get held back, the high school seniors who won’t walk the graduation stage or teachers whose careers are damaged.

Categories Failure, Testing, Texas

Jonathan Lovell: Martin Luther to Walt Disney to Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2016 //
25

Jonathan Lovell is a professor at San Jose State University in San Jose, California, where he supervises students who plan to teach high school English. In this post, he explains the evolution of educational thinking about the teaching of reading over the centuries and does it with wit and style. He also examines the likely impact of the Common Core standards. He notes that the same groups that helped write the standards are now writing the tests. Instead of making millions, they will make billions. Will standards, testing, and a standardized curriculum close gaps between different groups of students? Read on.

 

The post is brilliantly illustrated. I predict you will enjoy it.

 

The article appears in Engaging Cultures and Voices: The Journal of Learning Through Media, edited by Roy Fox and Lynn Chang, University of Missouri.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, Poverty, Testing

Florida: Why Was a Highly Effective Music Teacher Non-Renewed?

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2016 //
28

We know that test scores are more important than anything else in education these days, certainly more important than music or the arts. Right? In Florida, an orchestra director named Kevin Strang gave up his fully tenured position in one district so he could build the music program in another. Although he was rated “highly effective,” Mr. Strang was told on the last day of Teacher Appreciation week that his contract would not be renewed. This, only days before the school’s orchestra was giving a concert.

 

This parent is outraged. Her daughter plays the violin and admires Mr. Strang.

 

Not long ago, Kevin Strang won a bonus for his exemplary teaching. He donated it to the Network for Public Education to fight the dominance of high-stakes testing. Kevin Strang brings joy and self-discipline into the lives of students. Parents should rise up to protest his non-renewal and should remember in November to vote for a candidate who will support their public schools.

Categories Arts Education, Florida, Testing

Denis Ian: The Revolt Against the “Know-It-All Class”

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2016 //
46

Denis Ian, a reader of the blog, has contributed several excellent comments which I have turned into post. Here is another that strikes a chord for its insight and thoughtfulness. American society has long been celebrated for individual freedom blended with civic responsibility. We take care of one another. We volunteer to help. We pitch in. But we don’t see why bureaucrats and legislators are forcing us to do things to our schools and our children that harm them. And we are responding.

 

 

Denis Ian writes:

 

 

Why should the parents of New York be out of step with what’s happening all across the nation?

 

Of course, this opt-out resistance is about education. But it’s also about what’s boiling folks from coast-to-coast … this never-ending, ever-intrusive, arrogant, and ruinous involvement of government to be front and center in the lives of every man, woman, and child.

 

This test-refusal effort is a scream at the federal and state governments to back off … retreat … and leave folks alone to craft the sort of society that will be … not the society envisioned by a few.

 

Parents want their schools back … among other things. This current effort … withholding kids from academic assessments … is way more complex than just a pile of lousy exams spawned by a wretched educational reform. That’s the surface stuff. The roots are much deeper. Only the daring will squint hard to see the links that are so obvious.

 

This society is set to explode … one way or another.

 

These tests are serious stuff for parents … and more serious stuff for children. This resistance has fired up lots of pretty ordinary folks into becoming very active managers of their own lives … and it will carry over into other issues soon enough. This election season is already the most bizarre of my long life … and it looks to get even more memorable in the months ahead.

 

Why? Because government … and a slender class of autocratic fops … has made it their business to be in everyone else’s business. We have these self-appointed wind-bags who have this neurotic, messiah complex that results in chaos for everything they touch.

 

They’ve ruined healthcare, border and homeland security, law enforcement, illegal immigration, the economy, education, and just about everything else they’ve knocked up against. Why are folks so surprised that people are fit to be tied?

 

The new Know-It-All class … the self-anointed oligarchs … have imposed their norms and values and programs and reforms with absolute ease over the last several years … but the breaking point is here. The signs are all about … just look at the sort of political figures who have captured the attention of the people. They’re not oligarchic types at all .. in fact, they’re the antidotes to the giant itch that troubles this nation.

 

The really amazing thing about this reform/test counter-action is the resistance to the resistance. The educational oligarchs … just like the social and political absolutists … will not admit what is underfoot. They will not concede that the agitation is THEIR fault … caused by THEIR ineptitude and THEIR arrogance. That is a sure-fire fuse that will easily flame up. Nothing pisses off good people more than being played for dummies.

 

And the people are plenty pissed off.

 

This moment … in education … is an early prelude to what’s in store for this political season. I’m certaint these parents … who stood tall for their children and their neighborhood schools … won’t vanish for a long while. They’re just warming up.

 

The oligarchs have blown it … big time. And it all began with the biggest dummy of all … Arne Duncan … that mother-bashing fop who lit that fuse.

 

This Duncan quote about suburban moms might be the most memorable educational gaffe of recent decades: ” … “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

 

Duncan is still in search of the world’s largest vacuum … but those words have stuck in the craw of every parent from Long Island to Los Angeles. And now those moms … and dads … are the first in battle against the snob class. And they’re winning.

 

Denis Ian

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Opt Out, Parents, Resistance, Testing

San Diego: Yes, the Superintendent DID Scale Back Testing!

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2016 //
25

A few days ago, I posted that Cindy Marten, the superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, was cutting back on the time spent testing kids.

 
This was good news. But some folks are certain that there can never be good news and that I must have been hoodwinked. The usually insightful blogger Emily Talmadge insisted that I was wrong.  San Diego was not abandoning high-stakes tests, she wrote, it was buying into “competency based education,” in which children are continually assessed by computers. Emily said that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

 
I went to my sources in San Diego, and the good news is that San Diego is cutting back on testing   and it is not adopting competency based education.

 
Don’t take it on my word alone.

 
Take it from the teachers’ union, the San Diego Educators Association.

 
This is their response to the District’s decision to reduce testing:

 
“After months of organizing and working to educate San Diego Unified School District parents and leaders on the negative impacts of high-stakes testing, the educators of San Diego Education Association applaud the District for today announcing the significant reduction in the amount of District-mandated standardized tests.”

 
“San Diego’s educators are thrilled to learn that the District has listened to the concerns of nearly 7,000 educators who have said the current system of high-stakes testing is broken,” said SDEA President Lindsay Burningham.

 

“Today’s announcement from Superintendent Cindy Marten and SDUSD shows the power that educators and parents have when we stand up together to support the true needs of our students.”
I trust the teachers know what is happening in their own district.
Did Superintendent Marten’s cancel the tests mandated by the state and federal governments? No. She does not have the power to do so. But she canceled district assessments and data collections.

 

Marten notifies parents every year that they have a right to opt out of state testing. Does your superintendent do that?
The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote recently:
“At the start of the last spring testing window, Marten sent a letter parents that all but apologized for the tests. In February of last year, the San Diego school board adopted a resolution calling on Congress and the Obama administration to eliminate federally mandated testing requirements for third- through ninth-graders.”
Did your school district do that?
Emily, you are a bright and passionate educator. Take a trip to San Diego. Meet Superintendent Marten. Visit the schools. Talk to teachers. But go in the winter, when it is 10 degrees in Maine and 70 degrees in SD.
I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Categories Education Reform, San Diego, Standardized Testing, Testing

Robert Pondiscio: “Testing Alone Won’t Make Good Readers”

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2016 //
35

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow and vice-president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He previously worked for E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation and shares Hirsch’s (and my) belief that children need background knowledge to become good readers. That means that they should have many opportunities to learn about the world, about current events, history, science, and to broaden their understanding in the context of reading and experience.

 

 

This article by Pondiscio has a curious title: “Testing Alone Won’t Make Good Readers.” If the word “alone” were deleted, the title would make sense. Testing doesn’t make good readers. Reading makes good readers. Love of reading makes even better readers. Writers usually don’t write titles, so I assume this title reflects EdNext’s love of testing.

 

The other peculiar thing about the article is that it celebrates the new Secretary of Education John King for his belief in a rich, well-rounded education. When King was Commissioner of Education in New York, he kept these views secret and instead was a zealous advocate for testing.

 

Perhaps Secretary King has turned a corner. Perhaps he now regrets his fervent support for testing and VAM, which narrowed the curriculum.

 

Let us hope.

Categories Testing

Leonie Haimson: Can You Trust Computers to Grade Student Writing?

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2016 //
15

Leonie Haimson, parent activist, worked with a group of other concerned critics to review the explosion of computer-massessment, in particular, the scoring of writing.

 

“On April 5, 2016, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, Parents Across America, Network for Public Education, FairTest and many state and local parent groups sent a letter to the Education Commissioners in the states using the federally funded Common Core tests known as PARCC and SBAC, asking about the scoring of these exams.

 

“We asked them the following questions:

 

“What percentage of the ELA exams in our state are being scored by machines this year, and how many of these exams will then be re-scored by a human being?

 

“What happens if the machine score varies significantly from the score given by the human being?
“Will parents have the opportunity to learn whether their children’s ELA exam was scored by a human being or a machine?
“Will you provide the “proof of concept” or efficacy studies promised months ago by Pearson in the case of PARCC, and AIR in the case of SBAC, and cited in the contracts as attesting to the validity and reliability of the machine-scoring method being used?
“Will you provide any independent research that provides evidence of the reliability of this method, and preferably studies published in peer-reviewed journals?

 
“Our concerns had been prompted by seeing the standard contracts that Pearson and AIR had signed with states. The standard PARCC contract indicates that this year, Pearson would score two-thirds of the students’ writing responses by computers, with only 10 percent of these rechecked by a human being. In 2017, the contract said, all of PARCC writing samples were to be scored by machine with only 10 percent rechecked by hand.”

 

Haimson refers to research that demonstrates that computers can’t recognize meaning or narrative, although they admire sentence complexity and grammar.

 

This,she writes, means that computers will give high scores to incoherent but windy prose.

 

“The inability of machine scoring to distinguish between nonsense and coherence may lead to a debasement of instruction, with teachers and test prep companies engaged in training students on how to game the system by writing verbose and pretentious prose that will receive high scores from the machines. In sum, machine scoring will encourage students to become poor writers and communicators.”

 

Only five state commissioners responded after a month. They learned that the state commissioner of Rhode Island, Ken Wagner, testified that machine scoring was more valid and reliable than trained and expert humans.

 

Haimson concludes, quoting Pearson’s literature:

 

“Essentially, the point of this grandiose project imposed upon our nation’s schools is to eliminate the human element in education as much as possible.”

 

Read this well-documented article. It is up to parents to stop this headlong rush to the dehumanizing of education.

 

Categories Education Reform, Teachers, Technology, Computers, Testing

Michigan Drops Common Core, May Adopt Discarded Massachusetts Standards

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2016 //
17

This is ironic. Michigan wants to drop the Common Core standards and substitute the Massachusetts standards that were dropped by Massachusetts to make way for the Common Core standards!

 

A bill is moving through the Michigan legislature to do exactly that. Michigan has had a groundswell of opposition to the Common Core standards, like most other states. Their solution is to take the standards of the nation’s highest performing state, Massachusetts, and make them specific to Michigan.

 

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, those standards were jettisoned because the state won a Race to the Top Grant and agreed to adopt the Commin Core.  As it happens, the Massachusetts state Commissioner of Education is Mitchell Chester, who was until recently, the chair of the PARCC testing consortium. So naturally he wanted his state to drop the MCAS and use PARCC.

 

When PARCC started, underwritten by the US Department of Education, 24 states and DC joined its consortium. Now it is down to 6 states and DC. Massachusetts is using a hybrid: part PARCC and part MCAS.

 

What a fine mess!

 

When will states figure out that an effective reform strategy is far more complicated than standards, testing, and accountability. When Massachusetts adopted its standards, it invested new resources and  increased equitable spending. It expanded pre-k and raised standards for new teachers.

 

There is still much to be done in Massachusetts. But it is important to remember that it achieved good results by sensible improvements in schools, not by closing schools, firing teachers and principals or mass privatization (until recently, Massachusetts had only 25 charter schools in the state).

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Massachusetts, Michigan, Testing

Texas: “Moms Against Drunk Testing” Call for Moratorium on State Standardized Tests

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2016 //
7

Texans Advocating for Meaningful State Assessments (TAMSA) is known in Texas as Moms Against Drunk Testing. In the past, they successfully lobbied the Legislature to drops plan to require students to pass 15 high school exit exams to graduate. The number remained five.

 

They issued this statement, called ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

 

 

“TAMSA Calls for Moratorium due to Testing Errors

 

 

“In his news release today, Thomas Ratliff, Vice Chairman of the State Board of Education, brings to light serious issues of misalignment between the STAAR US History EOC and the state mandated curriculum. Based on these and ongoing concerns with the validity of the test, Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment (TAMSA) calls for a moratorium on using the STAAR tests, and at the very least, the US History EOC, for high stakes purposes related to student graduation and school accountability.

 

“It is fundamentally unfair to hold students or schools accountable for questions that are not contained explicitly in the curriculum standards” said Dineen Majcher, President of the Board of Directors of TAMSA. Ratliff describes two questions on the US History EOC that asked for information about historical figures, but those specific historical figures were not included in the current TEKS. In one case, the figure, Shirley Chisholm, was removed from the TEKS in 2010.

 

“The logical conclusion is that 1) either the testing vendor was utilizing an outdated version of the TEKS on which to base questions, or 2) there is an underlying assumption that any historical figure fitting general criteria, whether or not they are mentioned in the TEKS, is fair game. “Neither conclusion is acceptable,” said Majcher. “If students are not given a full opportunity to learn what is tested, there are serious consequences for the system. It is completely unfair to students and teachers to have a high stakes test that is not based clearly and unequivocally on known material that is required to be taught, and instead on information not specified in the curriculum.” Already on shaky ground when legislators like Jimmie Don Aycock, Dan Patrick, Larry Taylor, and Kel Seliger have declared that the current STAAR system is broken, further proof has parents across the state declaring that “enough is enough.”

 

“Based on concerns over test alignment with curriculum standards, and fundamental fairness to students to learn what will be tested, TAMSA is requesting:

 

“1. An immediate moratorium on the stakes associated with STAAR tests.

 

“2. A complete review of the tests to ensure the vendor has utilized current TEKS and that the test questions are properly aligned with state curriculum.

 

“3. An exploration by the attorney general, or other appropriate state official, of whether the test questions not aligned with the curriculum should be the basis for action against the testing vendor, particularly if outdated standards were the basis for the faulty questions.

 

““We cannot continue to hold our students and schools accountable for performance on these tests when the State cannot guarantee that these tests are valid.” Putting a moratorium on the high-stakes means that the STAAR tests would still be administered and scores reported, but performance on the tests would not prevent students from being promoted to the next grade or from graduating. Also, schools’ ratings based on STAAR test scores would not be altered during the moratorium. “If we are to continue to administer state-designed assessments, we must have 100% certainty that the tests are aligned with the curriculum that the State has required” said Majcher. Without a guarantee that the tests are completely aligned with the curriculum, a moratorium on using those tests for high stakes purposes is essential.”

 

Go, TAMSA!

 

In your next action, dare the legislators to take the tests they mandate and publish their scores. Double-dare.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Parents, Resistance, Testing, Texas
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