Great little insider-y piece from Texas on the pushback to the school reform industry:
If there’s one person in America who’s responsible for your child stressing about filling in the right little ovals with a No. 2 pencil, it’s Sandy Kress, the “key architect of No Child Left Behind” who later became a lobbyist for Pearson, the testing company. As high-stakes testing faces a national backlash, lawmakers in Texas—the birthplace of high-stakes standardized testing—aren’t just dialing back the state’s emphasis on tests but are also turning their guns on Kress to limit his policy-making role.
Opposition to high-stakes testing is popping up nationwide. In Seattle, teachers protested what they saw as the inequity of the Washington state test by refusing to administer it, sparking a copycat strike at dozens of high schools in nearby Portland. In Providence, 50 high school students outraged that their diplomas required them to pass standardized tests, dressed up like zombies and marched through the downtown rush hour chanting “No education, no life.” Even Bill Gates, long a proponent of education accountability, recently penned a Washington Post op-ed opposing the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
But nowhere is the movement against high-stakes testing as strong as it is in Texas where all this started. Now, 86% of the state’s school boards have adopted resolutions opposing the over-reliance on high-stakes testing. Rick Perry’s last education commissioner called testing a “perversion of what is intended.” Volunteer moms, angry that a new testing regime forced their children to pass 15 standardized tests to get out of high school, lobbied the legislature with such vehemence that politicians began calling them “Mothers Against Drunk Testing.” The defenders of the testing status quo are now down to two: Kress, and Bill Hammond, a top business lobbyist who heads an organization that Pearson is a member of.
Kress advised Bush as governor, and when Bush became president, Kress—as a former Democratic Party official in Dallas—lobbied Ted Kennedy to support NCLB. He enjoyed a smooth transition into lobbying and has enjoyed an insider role in Perry’s administration,serving on state advisory boards and commissions that invariably found that the way to improve schools was more testing. It never caused a stir when Kress would testify before the legislature as a member of the state advisory panels in favor of more testing, leaving his status as a lobbyist for the testing company unstated. Now there’s a growing sense that testing has gotten out of control.
The backlash has now reached the chamber where this all started. When the Texas House passed a testing relief bill, lawmakers included two amendments aimed at Kress. Texas lawmakers, who have never exactly held business lobbyists at arm’s length, have had enough of Kress pretending he doesn’t have a conflict of interest while advocating unpopular policies that enrich his client. One amendment would ban testing lobbyists from serving on state education advisory boards, cutting to the heart of Kress’ ability to lobby from the inside. Another amendment would make it a misdemeanor for a testing lobbyist to make political contributions. When politicians make it a crime to give them money, something’s up.
Only congress can repeal No Child Left Behind, but Bush passed it by selling the notion that the tests worked in Texas when he was governor. Texas no longer believes in its own miracle, and the architect of this mess has lost his influence. Nobody’s buying what Sandy Kress is selling anymore.
I have a theory on why the school reform industry can’t quit pushing standardized testing. If your business plan includes the expansion of national chain charters and a lot of employee turn-over and federally-subsidied temp agencies and constant “cage-busting” churn, there’s no other way to evaluate a student, teacher or school than with a number. They don’t want parents to measure a school on anything other than a number because they’re not offering anything other than a number.
Everyone talks about the Atlanta scandal in terms of the cheaters, but I read the prosecutor’s report and I immediately imagined working in that environment or going to school there. No one trusted anyone else. It must have been a nightmare as a workplace, let alone as a school. The school reform industry is focusing on the cheaters, the few bad apples defense, but what was it like working or going to school there if one didn’t cheat? If people are wearing a god dammed wire at your workplace or school, “excellence” probably isn’t happening there, no matter the test scores.
This is a successful public school that has good numbers. They also have a team of people who work well together and have worked well together a long time. This school is as knitted-into the fabric of the town as a public instiution could possibly be. They have long and deep relationships both inside the school and in the larger community. They don’t spend tens of millions on advertising like the charter chains because they’re a truly public school, but if they did advertise they would have much, much more to sell to parents than a kid’s test scores going up or down.
The school reform industry focuses exclusively on test scores because that’s all they have. They aren’t selling local control and input or public schools as the backbone of a democratic society or a great school culture or long-term working relationships between teachers and among students and families and the rest of the people in a community.They can’t. It won’t work with their national chain privatization business model.
Punchy
Shorter shithead students: You mean I have to actually demonstrate I’ve learned something before you give me that sheepskin I feel like I should just be entitled to?
Real life, how the fugg duz it work?
piratedan
TY Kay, keep this kind of stuff coming…. it’s a war for the hearts and minds of parents in order to offer the most opportunity for our kids. Still have one in High School and it’s tough enough just having them grow up “normal” versus having them stress out over their basic competency values. Not all kids learn the same way or at the same pace. Some never even clue into education being important at the same time or even get cynical about how all of this makes them into better people by shaping them for the next steps.
gelfling545
Here’s a wild idea. Repeal NCLB, can Race to the Top and in its place put – nothing. Just try letting teachers teach their classes & test their students on what they have taught them. They are trained in how to do this. They are not, however, also trained in how to remedy poverty, violence, ill health and the thousand other issues that cause students to do poorly. Fix the safety net; fix health care; address income inequality. The last 30 years or so of so called reform have yielded an unholy mess of pseudo-education.
peach flavored shampoo
IANAL, but pretty sure there’s no way in our CU-crazy world that this is even remotely constitutional.
Kay
@Punchy:
You should read more about them.
Incidentally, you’re really making their point for them :)
The test protests aren’t really the best single measure of the students. The general consensus of the adults who took their challenge was “I would hire them”.
scav
Another thing that might rhyme is the recent short spate of vocalized outrage at the non-metric not-GPA-based evaluations used by universities. If their metrics-heavy approach doesn’t yield results at that level of academics, their long-term viability of selling their product to anxious parents is dicey.
lojasmo
Obummercare is doing the same thing to health care, according to my physician colleagues.
Although I oppose NCLB due to it’s unfunded mandate status, fuck all this noise.
Education, and health care both need to be held to measurable standards.
negative 1
@Punchy: No, what they actually did was invite the state (school reformer) Department of Education Chairperson to pass the test that she is forcing them to take. She declined. Off topic but possibly related, she has a 6% approval rating among teachers in this state. I’m sure that’s a great working relationship that helps kids immensely.
After all, if her contention that all of the (unionized) teachers are incompetent is true, than isn’t she unfairly punishing the kids? Or what about special ed, kids with special needs can’t graduate now? However, none of that should stop you from blaming the students, after all that’s what right-wing radio did around here.
Face
When it’s all said and done, the math is incredibly basic:
Higher taxes = better teachers + better facilities
Find the states with the lowest/worst tax bases, and I’ll show you some shitty-ass school disticts.
Rex Everything
I think your theory is 100% right.
rb
The ‘dirty secret’ – absurdly – of public education is that it’s mostly doing OK, especially considering the ridiculous degree to which it’s underfunded in non-affluent districts.
The rumored collapse of public ed is for the most part only actually happening in communities that are forever on the brink due to all the usual reasons, chiefly poverty and our catastrophic war on
poor peopledrugs.Like all poorly written policy, the unfunded education mandates simply serve to crush those already laboring under unbearable strain. And like all poorly written policy, they’ll only change when people with some political power are adversely affected.
So the zombie students may seem goofy, but I’m all in favor of more like that, please.
ETA: they emphatically DON’T seem goofy to me, by YMMV.
Kay
@lojasmo:
It’s a good comparison, health care and education, but I don’t agree with your frame.
I would argue that we have a universal public education system, unlike with health care, and we shouldn’t turn it into our for-profit, duct-taped together health care system.
Unless you want to be begging Congress for a public education option in 20 years.
rb
@Kay:
I would argue that we have a universal public education system, unlike with health care, and we shouldn’t turn it into our for-profit, duct-taped together health care system. Unless you want to be begging Congress for a public education option in 20 years.
And the award for this thread’s win goes to…
Cassidy
Would be nice if more teachers and students refused the tests with the parents backing them up.
The only problem I see with our education system, and not the associated factors of poverty, etc., is paarents who insist that their personal values be a part of the curriculum. I gives a fuck about your jeebus, I want my kids to learn some basic biology. Pisses me off to no end. Entitled white suburbanites is what’s fucking up education.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@rb: I agree with your post, but the tests have the added benefit of crushing the morale of teachers in good districts as well.
Average teacher career: has dropped from 20 to 5 years and is still getting shorter.
Randy P
@Punchy: Can you tell me which job in the real world bases your annual review on an SAT?
kindness
We tested when I was in school back in the pre-computer days (no we didn’t live in caves, just houses with only over the air TV reception). But the tests weren’t used like these current grifters got it.
I’m not against testing and I’m not against standardized tests but I am against rating a school, teacher or student on the basis of a test.
Tests should be a reference point, not the whole enchilada.
catclub
@Face: Mostly true, but DC spends about the most per student and is near the bottom in achievement. Take kids with lots of home resources and spend very little on their schools, lots will still do well.
Take kids with highly disordered home life and schools have a lot more to make up for.
catclub
@Randy P: Kaplan test prep?
barath
Would it be fair to say that, at its core, this sort of testing and “reform” is about commodification — making teachers replaceable cogs in a machine? If so, I guess it’s just like the trend in every other realm of modern life, where both individuals and the natural world are commodified.
rb
@Cassidy
Entitled white suburbanites is what’s fucking up education.
Come on now, you know Tyler and Spencer earn every A squeezed from their teachers’ cold, mangled hands.
paarents who insist that their personal values be a part of the curriculum
I agree, but we have to face facts. “We should teach biology in biology” and “teachers are pros; let them do their job” are values and needs to be defended as such to win the battle.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
Weird, when I was in school, I was able to demonstrate that through the grades I earned and didn’t have to take a separate standardized test to, like, totally prove that I really did learn something, honest.
How many times do we have to test students on the exact same shit before we believe they learned it? In Texas, they’re doing it twice a year for every year of high school.
eric
The singular fundamental problem with education policy is that there is no consensus on the purpose of education, such that there is no consensus on the best means to that end. If you believe that education is to make you employable, divorced from any other consideration, then task based, instruction following testing makes sense. If, however, you believe that education should strive to do something more, then the “more” will dictate the best or the many better means to that end. even among those of us that reject “employable” as the end of education, there is significant disagreement on the roles school and education should play.
Xecky Gilchrist
The school reform industry focuses exclusively on test scores because that’s all they have.
And the cheating scandals show they don’t even have that.
Omnes Omnibus
@rb:
This.
catclub
OT: Anybody else think that the Manchin-Toomey background check
agreement is getting far more coverage than it is likely to have earned by merit?
rb
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Agree 100%.
jibeaux
My complaint about the overemphasis on testing as it affects me personally is that my middle schooler, who could take a standardized test in his sleep, has to spend the last two to three months of his school year drilling the damn things. He could be building a rocket or trying to make a mummy or something that might actually maintain his interest in learning with that time.
Now twenty years ago in this state, we had schools in poor districts with 20, 25% of their students reading on grade level and no one was really trying to hold them to account for that, and I understand the need to give those schools a kick in the butt. But the schools are just getting sticks now, forget carrots, they can’t even get the basics.
Kay
@kindness:
I don’t have any problem with testing. I did well on them although I was a horrible student, and all of my kids did well on them, although one of my kids was a horrible student, so, you know, they’re not infallible measures of anything.
It’s different now. It’s the singular focus.
I actually think the opposition is playing out as opposition to testing, but it’s really a basic level of discomfort with all of the “reforms”, a feeling that it’s a profit center now, that it’s out of control. That’s my opinion. The tests are an easy, tangible target for that generalized unease.
tjmn
My son, a senior in high school, received an A in Algebra1. He has taken the Alg1 SOL test 4 freaking times. He has one more chance to pass it before he graduates. If he does not pass it, that will mean he gets a modified, not standard, diploma. He has Asperger’s Syndrome and with that comes anxiety. He is a history genius and wants to become a History professor. Goddamn, fucking SOLs.
Mnemosyne
@eric:
Not really. How many standardized tests do you take at your job? IMO, forcing rote memorization and rigid test-taking is one of the worst possible preparations for the “real world” because you end up with a bunch of kids who only know how to follow the rules to the letter and have no way of figuring out the solution to a problem that doesn’t follow the script.
I mean, I guess it prepares you to be an AT&T customer “service” representative, but I’m not sure what else it prepares you to do. Even a Wal-Mart cashier needs to be able to figure out how to do a return.
Kay
@tjmn:
Well, the school reformers never intended for that to happen, so take comfort in their pure and unsullied motives, no matter the reality.
This is how ridiculous this has become.
drbloor
@Punchy:
Most of those kids were from Classical High, one of the top 5-10% public high schools in the country. 90+ % of their kids graduate and go on to colleges, including several to Ivys and a bunch more to other top places.
More to the point, they’re right. The NECAPs are a colossal joke and recognized as such.
But just keep fuching that chicken, dude.
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
I’ll tell you how I’ve never seen it work: employers basing their employees evaluations primarily on standardized testing rather than job performance. Our schools managed to do just fine for well over a hundred years basing graduation decisions on years of grades. There’s no reason to think that a few days worth of standardized tests will do a better job of judging students’ worthiness to graduate than four years of grades. There is plenty of reason to think that high stakes standardized testing is undermining the quality of instruction, as teachers spend more time on test prep and less on teaching actual useful knowledge.
drbloor
@Punchy:
@Punchy:
Most of those kids were from Classical High, one of the top 5-10% public high schools in the country. 90+ % of their kids graduate and go on to colleges, including several to Ivys and a bunch more to other top places.
More to the point, they’re right. The NECAPs are a colossal joke and recognized as such.
But just keep fuching that chicken, dude.
Mnemosyne
@tjmn:
Does he have a 504 or AED with the school? I can’t believe there would be no accommodations available for students with documented disabilities. (Well, okay, I can believe it, but that would be really effed up.)
@Kay:
If my schools had gone by my standardized test scores rather than my actual grades, I would have been on the honor roll. I demand a recount! ;-)
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
I wouldn’t have been on the honor roll because I was usually suspended or pending suspension.
I did love me some standardized tests, though. Crank right thru that thing. Then take off :)
rb
@Kay:
a feelingthe total and demonstrable certainty that it’s a profit center nowModified for emphasis :)
eric
@Mnemosyne: in the minds of the testers sure. Remember the elite send their kids to private schools that can give them the education they deserve. You dont want too much critical thinking if you want to push policies that are rebutted by evidence and rational thinking. They are not worried about the future top 10%, they want to make sure that the “lower classes” can be marginally employable.
rda909
@Roger Moore: Heh.
http://oneteachersperspective.blogspot.com/2013/02/along-with-learning-lets-measure-love.html
Punchy
This proves…what, exactly? That she wasn’t sure she’d remember all her calculus from likely 30+ years ago? Or her 30+ year old memory of periodic table trends, projectile motion equations, or the definition of a past participle or pluperfect subjunctive? Everything a high-schooler has fresh in his brain?
Cassidy
@rb: True, but I was referring more to the jeebus riding a velociraptor through the waters Moses parted to find the golden blanket Ronald Reagan used as another incarnation of Baby jeebus, and fuck all the brown people “values” these assholes have.
I support a nationalized, standard curriculum with plenty of room for modification by individual districts as long as the modifications are based on enhancing the curriculum and not some baby jeebus inbred shit. There should only be two standardized tests per school year: one in the beginning to get a baseline of where everyone is and one at the end called a final exam.
Kay
@rb:
I agree, sadly. They have a new phrase, reformers. “Sector agnostics”. They want people to stop thinking K-12 education should be public.
Get it? They’re not public school supporters or reformers, although they sold themselves as such. They are “sector agnostics” on k-12 education, and the private sector model has been discriminated against. Incidentally, to make this bullshit work they had to relabel for-profit schools as “private sector” schools. My head spins.
Mnemosyne
@eric:
Honestly, I don’t even think they’ve thought that deeply about it. I think it’s a reflection of the corporate obsession with “metrics” and feeling like they’ve been able to come up with a way to judge a teacher’s performance based on a number. It doesn’t matter if the number actually tells you anything useful, as long as you can point to it and say, “But I have a number!”
It’s sort of like the way many economists like to pretend their field is a “hard” science like chemistry or physics because it uses numbers, but it’s not — it’s a social science that describes human behavior, not a hard science that measures objective phenomena.
rb
@Mnemosyne:
How many standardized tests do you take at your job? IMO, forcing rote memorization and rigid test-taking is one of the worst possible preparations for the “real world” because you end up with a bunch of kids who only know how to follow the rules to the letter and have no way of figuring out the solution to a problem that doesn’t follow the script.
This, god damnit, this.
And it’s only becoming more and more the case that flexibility and adaptability are the signal job requirements. Rote drilling someone to be a savant-level adept in a particular technology won’t be worth a damn in 10 years when that technology no longer exists.
rb
@Kay:
Christ. “Teach the controversy.” It’s tried and true.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
So if all of that knowledge is completely useless in the real world and will never be used again once they graduate, why make them be tested on it in the first place? Just for shits and giggles?
Punchy
@Randy P: Tell me what job in the real world doesn’t collect some sort of standard quantifable metrics as a measure for promotion and raises….(aside from priests)
What’s the point of a HS degree if the person hasn’t learned anything?
rb
@Mnemosyne: @Punchy: Just for shits and giggles?
Tormenting the plebes is icing on the cash cake.
tjmn
@Mnemosyne: He has an IEP. This is the state of Virginia, which explains so very much.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
Some of them object to being used as “teacher evaluation units”, which I thought was an interesting take. That isn’t what they go to school for. They’re not actually there to determine their teacher’s “bonus” or to contribute to a national database. All of these justifications have nothing to do with them, yet they have to take the tests.
gelfling545
@Kay: I occasionally had to proctor the tests with some of the special ed teachers in my school. Kids who were 12 years old and did not have complete letter recognition were required to take the same tests as all the other 7th graders. The absolutely most ridiculous was the young man in aprox. grade 8 special ed (12-1-1 setting) who was legally blind, spoke Arabic as his main language & was partially deaf but still had to take the test. I don;t know if it’s still the same but at that time, in NY, you sort of got penalized double if your special ed students didn’t score adequately. If the whole mechanism were exposed to parents, even those who support testing would oppose this system.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
Huh? I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that required me to take a standardized test twice a year. I’ve always been judged on subjective metrics like time management, organization, etc.
Sales jobs have metrics, but there’s a whole world of jobs out there that don’t involve sales and don’t have a specific metric to judge people by. My husband is a warehouse supervisor, but nobody counts the number of packages sent out and gives him a demerit if they only send out 75 a day instead of 100 a day.
rb
@Punchy: What’s the point of a HS degree if the person hasn’t learned anything?
Straw man cleanup in aisle 5!
The tests don’t test “learning.” They test test-taking, and to a limited degree whether one might do decently on Jeopardy.
tjmn
@Kay: Dear God in Heaven. I have no words.
Kay
@gelfling545:
The NY situation is silly. The local leaders are telling the school reform industry that they’re afraid parents are going to opt out. The school reform industry response? If 5% of parents opt out, they lose their federal funding. under NCLB
Presto! Another failed and failing public school district!
Honestly, if you’re a local school board member, WTF are you supposed to do with that? Put them in the back of a patrol car and take them to the test?
tjmn
@rb:
Straw man cleanup in aisle 5!
Right next to the Bics, please.
BruceFromOhio
@Punchy: I’ll wager you do not have children in public school. And you obviously did not read the article or links provided. No cookies for you.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Punchy:
You really don’t know what a Measurement Problem is then, do you? Sorry, you fail this portion of the test, thank you for trying. FYI, you’ve been filed under the category of people who haven’t learned anything. Please study harder before trying again.
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
Mine. My job evaluation is made by my boss and is purely subjective. Every performance evaluation is supposed to include a list of things that I’m supposed to be working on for the coming year, but everyone knows that it’s provisional and subject to changing circumstances. In theory, HR reserves the right to block raises for what are basically disciplinary reasons (e.g. you haven’t taken your annual safety class) but those are the only quantifiable metrics I have to meet.
I doubt that this is that unusual, either. There are lots of jobs where progress is inherently hard to measure with standardized metrics, so subjective evaluation by the boss is what really matters.
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
@Punchy: I dunno, isn’t that what grades are for?
scav
imagine trying to design a standardized test for what an actual good manager does (the compromise finder, people-skills-tasks-expectations juggler squishy-problem muddle-resolver) rather than the assume-away-complicating-factors-and-mathematically/logically-optimize sterotype MBA manager promises to do on paper. How much of any successful human-to-human actual messy interaction (call center to teen-behinf-the-counter to waitstaff on up to full nobel-level problem envisionng and solving) can be tidied away into a set of clean, tight, machine-gradeable rules and regurgitated/applied upon demand?
rda909
@Punchy: That brings up a good point. We should be measuring adults too through our entire lives! We need baseline numbers on our level of citizenship, and we should track our progress until each of us dies.
There’s a huge investment in all/most of us in K-12 so we know what a past participle is and how to figure things out on our own, and it shouldn’t go to waste as people get older and simply do their highly-specialized, sometimes robotic, tasks at their jobs until they retire, and waste all that education through night after night of watching sports, primetime TV shows, or blogging for hours upon hours. As you said, the “real world.”
Why should learning stop when you turn 18, or after college if you go that route? If we were held to account forever and Social Security and other benefits were tied to how well you score, or our community scores, I bet people would become better citizens. The magic of measurement!
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
I’ll accept that nobody should graduate from High School if they haven’t learned anything. Now you just have to demonstrate that standardized tests do a better job of measuring student learning than grades do. Good fucking luck.
Cassidy
@Punchy:
And how, exactly, does standardized testing determine this?
rb
@Mnemosyne: I think it’s a reflection of the corporate obsession with “metrics” and feeling like they’ve been able to come up with a way to judge a teacher’s performance based on a number.
Somewhat OT, this so pisses me off.
There is no good idea that the corporate mindset can’t fuck up. It actually HAS been a problem in education research that good evaluation has been hard to come by. New programs SHOULD build in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations and metrics, but now the latter term is about as appetizing as Santorum.
Sure as sunrise, beancounting will reduce the most well-designed measurement to an invalid, unreliable checkbox useful only for threatening those already burdened beyond capacity. It is truly warped and stupid, and makes trying to do better seem hopeless.
Mnemosyne
@Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage):
I think standardized testing was partially sold as a way to end the scourge of “grade inflation,” but it of course means that it just put a band-aid over the actual problem, which was parents pressuring teachers and administrators to “fix” their kids’ grades.
Suffern ACE
I dunno. You have to pass the bar exam to become a lawyer, write a dissertation to get a PhD, pass the CPA to become an accountant, sit for the boards to become a doctor. Why shouldn’t you need extra tests after the test you took to pass Algebra I to join the high school graduate profession?
scav
@Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage): Or, how’s this? It’s not all the games you won-tied-lost over a season or career, it all comes down to the single score on the final game of your career.
Cassidy
@scav: Horrible metaphor. The 2007 Patriots aren’t remembered for having an undefeated season, but losing the Super Bowl.
scav
@Cassidy: Many ‘mericans are known to be horrifically bad at evaluating what’s important. So I’m still happy with the point I was aiming for.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think they can do a subjective evaluation if they’re a chain charter who just parachuted into that district, with a 50% employee turn-over. They don’t know anything about the place or the people who work there or the students. They just sent a reformer from Cleveland to Chicago. She immediately closed 50 public schools. Give me a break. What in the hell could she know about Chicago Public Schools? There’s no “subjective evaluation” going on there. She doesn’t know anything. She never set foot in the schools. What does she “know”?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@rb:
Anecdata (with all the caveats implied): but all of the accountants that I work with and/or know personally, both CPAs and the uncertified people doing the daily grunt work of AP/AR/GL, have a pretty good grasp of the difference between quantitative and qualitative measures and which of them is most appropriate to use under what circumstances. They are the last people who would fuckup an organization like that. It is the MBAs that are the problem, not the accountants.
Punchy
I love the fact that I support testing marks me as someone who hasn’t learned anything. Badge of honor, I guess.
I’m jealous that all of you get raises and promotions on the basis of not having to demonstrate objective competency in your line of work. I guess y’all just sleep with the boss or something?
Cassidy
@scav: I get the point, just thinking the sports metaphor doesn’t work. “You’re only as good as your last game/ fight/ match, etc.” But oh well, not something to debate about.
rb
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Point taken and I agree. I was referring to the mindset that thinks of students like ‘beans’ that can be put into boxes labeled ‘has learned’ and ‘hasn’t learned’ with a single number. But it’s a poor choice of words.
Mnemosyne
@Suffern ACE:
I can’t tell if that was tongue-in-cheek (if it was, you may need surgical assistance to get it removed), but I’ll answer seriously anyway. I don’t think I have a huge problem with, say, two tests in high school — one the first week of freshman year, and one the last week of senior year — to see if your knowledge actually increased through the four years of high school.
What I have a problem with is the constant, twice-a-year testing in addition to the testing that happens in each class. It forces teachers to concentrate more on the standardized test and less on what they actually want to teach. What if a teacher thinks his or her students will respond better to Great Expectations than to A Tale of Two Cities, but the students’ knowledge of A Tale of Two Cities is what will be evaluated on the standardized test?
Cassidy
@Punchy: Nope. I go to work and do my job. I accomplish my tasks and I get raises. I don’t take a test or two throughout my evaluation period to determine if I’ve learned enough about MS Office or anything like that.
Don’t double down on your stupid. It’s unseemly.
Punchy
Are you really going to argue that tests dont contain material that the student should know? Really?
So by your logic that standardized tests couldn’t possibly reflect a general knowledge and competency of the test’s content, we should just jettison the MCATs, PSATs, LSATs, and let everyone and anyone into medical or law school? What about bar exams? Are they the suxxors, too? OMG! Can we toss out ACTs and SATs while we’re at it? Why should a college have admissions standards at all?
rda909
@Punchy: Missing the point. Business and schooling kids are not comparable. Totally different goals and process. Get it?
We’ve always had “measurement” in schools. It’s called “grades.”
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
Or, you know, have jobs that aren’t easily broken down into numbers. I’m a secretary, so what objective metric do you picture my bosses judging me on? The number of phone calls I take a day? How many calendar appointments I set up? The number of e-mails I read and send out?
“I’m sorry, Mnemo, but the standards for this job say you’re supposed to answer 15 phone calls on my line every day, but you only answered 10 a day while I was on vacation, so I’m afraid you get a poor evaluation this year.”
Roger Moore
@Suffern ACE:
Writing a dissertation is about as far from taking a standardized test as it’s possible to be. A dissertation is free-form written description of years of work, not a multiple guess test. And, at least in the graduate school at my work, a student’s committee will monitor their work and tell them when they’re ready to write their dissertation. The real test is getting your committee to agree you’re ready to write up your work, and the writing and defense are more or less a formality.
I know that there are similar things in other fields. My brother told me that in his field (theoretical physics) you start applying for postdocs when you think you’re ready to graduate. When somebody offers you a PhD level job, you take the job offer to your boss, and he’s forced to acknowledge that you’re ready to graduate. Again, actually writing the dissertation and defending it are more or less formalities rather than the real test of your readiness to graduate.
scav
@Cassidy: i was hoping that people who don’t actually think about actual educational testing might at least have had arguements about the ins and out on that topic, preferably with beer (that certainly featured heavily in many academic arguements on similar). hoped to point out the similarity of big blob of issues. Wasn’t meant to be a slam-dunk on the solution to the bag of mess.
Tyro
@Mnemosyne: and yet plenty of schools, their grades are not reflective of the fact that they don’t actually know the material, in part because there is not consistent standard the students have to adhere to across the state.
NY state has always been pretty good about this by having Regents exams and a Regents diploma.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Punchy:
Your scores on the reading comprehension section of this test are pretty dismal too. Fortunately the other commentors are scoring well, so we won’t have to mark this as a failed blog and close it.
Tyro
@Mnemosyne: it wasn’t parents pressuring the teachers. It was administrators pressuring the teachers not to fail or hold back students who failed the classes.
Receiving a high school diploma is not a constitutional right. It may well be that some people to to high school and aren’t able to fulfill the requirements of a high school diploma. And while in some cases that may be the fault of schools and the social safety net which did not provide adequate resources, it means that they should provide more resources, not that it’s unnnnfaaaaaiirrrr that they don’t get a high school diploma.
rda909
@Tyro: Consistent standards are good. Basing a school’s funding and whether or not it closes based on nothing more than standardized tests, without any consideration to the socio-economic challenges different communities face, is bad. Really bad.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
I guess you’ve never heard of test prep for those standardized tests. It’s big business these days. They don’t teach you what’s on the tests — they teach you how to game the test and guess at what answer the test is looking for by the way the question is worded.
And, again, there’s a big difference between taking a test that helps you apply to college and taking a test that means you will not graduate from high school at all no matter what your actual grades were.
tjmn’s son got an “A” in his algebra class, but he’s not going to be allowed to graduate from high school because he can’t complete the standardized test within the time limits due to his Asperger’s. So I guess the kid deserves to work at McDonald’s the rest of his life no matter how smart he is because he can’t pass standardized tests without accommodations?
scav
Another thought experiment. Imagine the reaction by the expected venues and actors if Obama enacted a Nationalized Standard HS-exit-test modelled expliciltly on the French Baccalauréat. Iz are kidz been stolen yet?
Roger Moore
@Tyro:
I think it’s actually a lot of cases where the problem is lack of resources, not just some, especially when it comes to schools with systemic failures. But instead of getting the resources they need, those schools have been forced to divert time and energy into coaching students to take standardized tests. It’s not a sensible solution to our educational problems.
rb
@Punchy: we should just jettison the MCATs, PSATs, LSATs, and let everyone and anyone into medical or law school? What about bar exams? Are they the suxxors, too? OMG! Can we toss out ACTs and SATs while we’re at it?
Much closer to the truth than you realize. I can move your score on any of these half an SD without teaching you anything other than test strategy.
And yet by comparison to the tests administered under NCLB, those you list above are masterpieces of valid measurement.
cvstoner
The operative word here is “industry,” and as an industry, the only number they care about starts with “$”
Randy P
@Punchy: Those tests have never been used to determine if students passed the course. The students already had tests in their courses that determined that. With final exams and everything.
Pick your favorite era of “good old days” when the students weren’t whiny. Yours for instance. Was your graduation really not based on filling course requirements? Was there really a standardized multiple choice test you had to pass above and beyond your course final exams in order to be allowed to graduate?
As for the job: my job performance is based on how I perform job tasks. Not a written test.
You have a weird job I guess where there’s no way for a supervisor to judge your work and instead has to give you outside tests to know if your work was accomplished. And you had a weird high school where passing a course didn’t mean getting a certain grade in it.
Cassidy
@Punchy: Outside of your denial of reality, strwmen, and hyperbolic attempts to deliberately misrepresent everyone, I will answer you.
That’s not what I said at all. You asked:
And I responded with:
Current standardized testing (context of this conversation) doesn’t measure how much a student knows. It measures how much a student memorizes. These rae two different things. So, if a HS diploma is to be awarded based on what a student has learned, then the current standardized testing is a poor measure of that.
I said no such thing and you clearly have a dubious definition of logic. Could a standardized reflect general knowledge and competency? Sure, absolutely. Do they at this time? No, not at all. That’s not really how they’re used anyway.
I already told you not to double down on your stupid. You know as well as I do that your examples are not the same thing. If you don’t know it, then you’re not educated enough to be a part of this conversation. Which is it?
Punchy
@rda909: Nope, not missing the point. Sorry. The argument I’m rejecting is specifically that standardized testing cant/wont properly measure compentency in the subjects in which it tests. If that’s indeed your argument, than why are you trying to differentiate between HS standardized tests and pre-professional exams? Whats the diff if they’re both standardized?
And if you’re arguing that they’re not different, than I proffer: why support ACTs or LSATs or MCATs? If those standardized tests are just as flawed, shouldn’t anybody off the street be admitted to medical school without a qualifying entrance exam?
Suffern ACE
@Punchy: A high school graduate isn’t actually a profession. I just made that up in my snarky rant above. It’s barely a creditial in the real world and having one does not make anyone a subject matter expert.
NonyNony
@Punchy:
You fail reading comprehension too, because you missed this bit:
People aren’t mocking you for being in favor of testing – they’re mocking you because it’s patently obvious from your initial response that you don’t know what you’re talking about and haven’t even read the articles being cited in this very thread to educate yourself.
The problem with standardized testing isn’t testing – it’s that standardized tests do not actually measure what their proponents say they measure.
What should be going on is an accreditation process to be able to tell whether or not a school is doing what it’s supposed to be doing with its students. Standardized testing has no purpose in an accreditation process.
As a hint – how many colleges have you attended that had a graduation test to prove that you know something leaving college? And how many of them have accredited degree programs?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@scav:
Can I take the Obamatest on my Obamaphone?
Tyro
@Mnemosyne: test prep involves a lot of preparation for the material on the test– studying for the SATs involves dumping a boatload of vocabulary on the students and math preparation.
“Testing strategy” helps a little, but only to prevent students from making mistakes and maximizing their odds of honing in on the right answer, as one should do with most tests of any kind.
Punchy
Sorry, Mnem, but this is just baloney. I’ve taught for Kaplan Test Prep for 14 years. Content is 95% of the course.
And with that, I’m out. It was fun!
scav
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Obamandatory!
Cassidy
@Punchy:
Ahhhh….that’s the problem. You don’t read too good, do ya! Who here has made this argument? You’re trying to say that theoretical standardized testing of your mind is the same as the current standardized testing that’s in use and you’re embarassingly wrong.
And the tell comes out.
scav
I think Punchy’s vest is showing. Not surprising that he might be conflating the 95% of content with the vitamins and active ingredients.
Mnemosyne
@Tyro:
I don’t disagree. I just think that the requirements should be based more on the actual work that you did in your classes rather than all of it being overridden by a single test.
So, again, if a student gets an “A” in algebra but is unable to complete the standardized test within the time limits because of a learning disability, they don’t deserve a high school diploma? What’s the rationale, that if they really wanted to graduate, they shouldn’t have been born with a learning disability?
Again, I’m not arguing that students who haven’t done the work should be automatically promoted to the next grade or allowed to graduate. I’m pointing out that having a single measurement for every student regardless of ability that could end with the entire school being closed down is way too much pressure and, frankly, doesn’t do anything to evaluate how individual students are learning, which should be the focus.
High-stakes testing is about punishing teachers, not about checking up on how well individual students are doing. And I say this as someone who always did better on standardized tests than I did in class.
Suffern ACE
@Punchy:
Before they had MCATs, medical schools managed to figure out ways to exclude students. If there were a few hundred more of them in this country such that they had open spaces, you’d bet that they would take anyone off the street who could afford the tuition.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Cassidy:
Aside from the potential conflict of interest exposed (My Ox! Gored it is being! Help, help, I’m being repressed), that somebody with huge gaps in their basic reading comprehension and ability to frame logical arguments is teaching test prep tells us a lot about the value of test prep.
Mnemosyne
@Punchy:
Oh, sweetie. It’s so cute that you think you can teach kids all of the information they need for the SAT in a 6-week course.
How often do you go into an urban school to teach those skills rather than spending all of your time with upper-class kids who already have the knowledge base that they learned in 12 years of actual classes with real teachers?
(Edited because the first version didn’t make sense. I guess I would have failed the test if this was standardized.)
rda909
@Punchy: Oh my word. You really should take a deep breath and try understanding this thread better. You’re digging yourself deeper and deeper in a hole. Your questions have been answered by others above, and much better than I could. You’re welcome.
Kay
@Punchy:
But none of these people are saying ban standardized testing. The parents in Texas think it’s ridiculous that their kids take 15 standardized tests over 4 years of high school. They also couldn’t help but notice they spent a billion dollars over ten years on tests, and they had a test industry lobbyist embedded in their state legislature like a tick.
There’s a standardized test for gym now in Ohio. My fourth grader gets 22 minutes of gym, which he enjoys ( and he dutifully and stoically takes his myriad other standardized tests, so you’d like him) and now he’s supposed to evaluate his gym teacher? I don’t send him to school to test his gym teacher. I already know his gym teacher. All my other kids had him.
FlyingToaster
@Punchy:
What kind of horrible-ass job do you do?
NONE of my jobs or gigs (since 1986) have ever done anything but measure “Did you build the thing we’re paying you to build? If not, why not?”
Those aren’t metrics. They’re a toggle, with a finagle factor for “we built 3/4 of what the client asked for and then the client contact got pink-slipped and our project was cancelled.” Or “We were late because the city inspector failed to show up the first 4 appointments”.
Most non-service jobs these days are “Did you complete the task in the timeframe? If not, why not?”
None of the standardized testing deals with that. Grades (and especially grades on projects) will tell you a hell-of-a-lot more than anything else about what a student has learned and if they can apply it.
peach flavored shampoo
OT:
For the bill dubbed the “Manchin-Toomey Compromise” background checks bill, Toomey himself says he may not vote in favor of his own damn bill.
If that’s not the modern GOP in a nutshell, not sure what is.
maurinsky
@Mnemosyne:
Another problem with the standardized tests is that the kids are compared with their grade cohort and not on their own individual progress*. You have a 10 year old who can’t read when they start the school year able to recognize and process 3 letter words at the end of the school year, that’s huge progress for that kid, but his test scores mean he’s a failure, which they interpret as the teacher has failed. It’s not in any way a good measurement of how good a job the teacher is doing.
*We did have state tests that tracked your child’s improvement (or not) with each new batch of tests, they were called the CMTs, but with Common Core, they are going away.
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
That isn’t how they’re using the tests, though. They’re using the tests to close public schools.
I’m not a teacher. I have no dog in the fight on teachers, but I have to tell you if you’re going to evaluate this law office on our win-loss record I have to object. It matters, a lot, what we take.
I’ll tell you something else. The teacher evaluation czar in LA had 2 years as a TFA temp. She’s 27 years old. There is not a lawyer in this country that would accept being evaluated by a 3rd year law student. Not one. All holy hell would break loose. You know who regulates lawyers? Their state supreme court. Judges.
Randy P
@peach flavored shampoo: My senator. I’m so proud.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@maurinsky:
I’m not against standardize testing, and we can argument the pros and cons of different methodologies. What I am against is the unchecked growth of a Testing Industrial Complex and the collateral damage it is doing to other aspects of the educational process which resist quantitative measurement.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
What the heck is a standardized test for gym? I know we used to have to do the President’s Fitness Test every few years, but we would be judged based on how we had done previously, not a standard measure of how kids in X age group should do.
(That test I really sucked at because I had undiagnosed asthma. In retrospect, I could have walked the mile in under 15 minutes rather than trying to run it and giving myself as asthma attack in the process that slowed me down.)
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Kay:
This smells like a feature, not a bug, AKA We have always been at war with East Pedagogistan. Every morality play needs a good villain and teachers have been chosen to fill this role.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
It’s has nothing to do with the kids. It’s to evaluate the gym teacher. Gym teachers are in the cohort of people who get tested by their students, or whatever.
My 4th grader actually liked the President’s Physical Fitness Test, or whatever it is, because he is a goofball and I don’t know if you remember it, but it’s just full of opportunities for 4th grade laughter :)
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
This is it.
scav
@Kay: And, while we’re listing the mismatch beteween what the tests might measure and how the results are used, remember this little factoid. Poor students, poorly behaving or other issues, are often assigned to good teachers, teachers with experience about working with students and getting better results for and from them. Just like the sickest patients get shuffled to better doctors and trickiest cases to more experienced lawyers. Just a scaling issue between targetting teachers and targetting firms or schools using on the wrong tool.
ETA: didn’t mean you were likely to it, was a follow on echo of my aunt’s favorite rant. She taught some fascinating fifth graders over the years — Eddie, you’ll never know the legends you’ve spawned.
Kay
@scav:
I sometimes do delinquency work, so I spend quite a bit of time in county schools. There’s a district here that tests poorly, compared to the other county schools, I think it’s because it’s a dying railroad town with tons of rental properties and low wage workers and a meth problem, but I am not Bill Gates, so WTF do I know.
In any event. I sort of love their teachers. I sometimes have to call them in court and examine them, and they always know so much about the kids. They offer these really nuanced opinions and specific incident reports, and they got those after years of watching and living in that community. So that’s something that wouldn’t be measured in testing. I think that has value. I know it does.
RSR
>>They don’t want parents to measure a school on anything other than a number because they’re not offering anything other than a number.
Because that number is a proprietary, income-generating algorithm that cannot be independently tested for validity or reliability.
Randy P
@Kay: They still have that thing? It was started by JFK as part of the Space Race. We’ll train up our young boys (nobody thought much about girls in the early 60s) in science, math and athletic skills and show them Russkies a thing or two.
Having grown up in the umbrella of the Space Race and making my living in the sciences, having politicians turn against science has been very very weird. And appalling beyond words.
Hoodie
Great post and thread. This is absolutely true:
My wife has taught in MD, GA and NC. By far, her best experience was at a middle school in GA, where she taught when I went back to school. They had a great principal (African American in a majority white district), but the community had a real impact as well. The week before the school year, the local bank held a dinner to introduce the new teachers to the community, like they were some kind of local heroes. My wife said it was the only school she ever worked at that really understood the middle school concept, and she has worked at supposedly superior middle schools elsewhere. I don’t know, but it probably has deteriorated because the town has been swallowed by the gaping maw that is the Atlanta suburbs, but you just can’t replace that community support with the corporatized, metricized crap that is in vogue now. In fact, I’ve never worked anywhere where those metricized approaches didn’t end up being corrupt and/or corrupting. You’re no doubt correct that this is being driven by corporate greed, but it is also being driven by the deterioration of communities due to larger factors, and it’s just not poor communities that are being affected. A lot of deterioration is due to chain merchandising and fungibility of labor. We’re now getting big box education, where you have beautiful stores filled with salesmen who know nothing about their products.
rikyrah
you rock again, telling the truth, Kay
Omnes Omnibus
@Punchy:
Probably a dead thread but I would still point out that the SATs, ACTs, LSATs, and MCATs are aptitude tests not achievement tests. As a result, their merit as predictive devices doesn’t even enter into the discussion at hand.
Lurking Canadian
Definitely a dead thread, but speaking as someone who has to create two final exams Real Soon Now, multiple choice questions that test “what students know” are the laziest, easiest and most worthless evaluations possible.
Open ended problems that test what students have learned to do are harder to design and harder to grade, but actually might tell you whether you’ve taught them anything.
gelfling545
@Kay: The Buffalo school district has already decided that it is not even the responsibility of the parents to ensure school attendance, It is the responsibility of the teachers because, why not? Everything else is.
different-church-lady
ZOT!
Bingo, that’s it right there: big-box retail dogma comes to education. The way it works in big box is you make one set of easy decisions at the corporate level and that allows you have elevenventy billion stores without making elevenventy billion individual decisions. You can’t have unique stuff in store #483 in Des Monies because you can’t buy it in bulk and you can’t SKU it* for just that store, etc. etc.
The problem is, of course, that when you buy and stock 400 thousand lightbulbs, all those lightbulbs are the same. And school children aren’t. You wouldn’t think you’d need to explain that to folks, but…
What I’m curious about is, who are these assholes who get into this “business?” You want to be in a company that is run like a Wal-Mart? Then join Wal-Mart. Or Lowes. Or Target. Or any of the other nine thousand options you can pick from. Why the desire to fuck over education the same way we fucked over smaller scale retail? Do they start off as people genuinely interested in education and get seduced and corrupted?
johnny aquitard
That, and possessing the desirable property of being easy to fudge, as we have seen with the Atlanta school cheating scandal.
johnny aquitard
I am continually amazed at the self-fulfilling aspect on conservative dogma. “Government is the problem” so they elect people who specifically do not believe in government solving problems and who actively seek to destroy any ability it has to do so. And thus, their premise become indistinguishable from their conclusion. And their ideology is always correct, again.
Same with public education. They do everything they can to make their ideology come true, always seeking to twist reality to comport with their beliefs.
Same with their hostility to the concept of a common good, of society. Their ‘society’ is where no one trusts anyone else. So they try to make that the reality.
It’s no surprise then they see guns everywhere in schools as a natural conclusion.
And it just depressing that they succeed as well as they do in making everyone else’s world as hollow, petty, distrustful and disconnected as theirs is.
They really are nihilists and saboteurs aren’t they? People who deep down do not believe in society or democracy. I always wonder what the hell they are doing here, in this country. They absorb the benefits from the very things they are weakening. Like so many tapeworms in the guts of our communities.
I suspect this is why we hear so much from them about ‘takers and moochers’. If you ever want to know what really goes on in the head of a conservative, listen to what he accuses the weakest and most vulnerable of doing.
Ohio Mom
@Kay: This thread is very dead but just wanted to add for posterity’s sake that my kid’s HS gym teacher, here at the other end of Ohio, like Kay’s kid’s gym teacher, is now being evaluated by a very unfair system.
She is being evaluated in part by how much exercise the kids in her class get OUTSIDE OF, and IN ADDITION TO, the class she teaches.
Every week my kid has to fill out an on-line form stating what exercise he got during that week and it’s supposed to add up to an hour a day, seven days a week. He gets to claim a half hour for gym on the days they exercise (they do class work on health on days they are resting from their weight training).
The rest of it, well, we fudge because my kid is as far from a jock as you can get.
This is like evaluating a dentist on whether or not his patients brush after every meal and floss. Obviously crazy but our state government is overrun with Republicans so what can you expect?