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A guest post on The Answer Sheet this month about a school board member in Florida who took a version of a standardized test and was horrified at what he found drew an unusually large readership. It could be a fluke that the post went viral, but it is more likely that the Dec. 5 post, written by veteran educator Marion Brady, hit a nerve with an audience increasingly disturbed about test-based school reform.

Students across New York State will sit longer for high-stakes standardized tests in language arts and math this April compared with past years, education officials indicated Friday, drawing criticism from school leaders and parents who believe that lengthier tests are a move in the wrong direction.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported that criminal charges have been filed against 20 students in an affluent New York suburb for allegedly cheating on the SAT. Some are accused of paying stand-ins up to $3,500 per test to take the exam for them; others accepted payment to take the test. Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North High School, which five of the accused students attended, suggested that the experience of his community is the tip of an iceberg. "I think it's widespread across the country," he told The Times. "We were the school that stood up to it." We have every reason to believe he's right. While criminal authorities and the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, investigate, parents and educators should ask: What have we done to lead teens to such an act of desperation?

This is a follow-up to Monday's guest post about a school board member who took a version of a state standardized test and was horrified at what he found. That post was written by veteran educator Marion Brady, who said he did not name the board member to save him from mean personal attacks by critics. The board member, however, agreed to talk to me about the experience on the record because he has come to feel very strongly about the issue. The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.

he results are now public from the 2011 federal testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And once again, schools on the nation's military bases have outperformed public schools on both reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.

This was written by Fred Smith, a retired New York City Board of Education senior analyst who worked for the city public school system in test research and development. In this post he writes about New York state's standardized testing program for students. Though his comments are specific to New York, the same types of problems are prevalent in other states as well.

Consider the constant chatter that the U.S. is declining economically, socially, and globally and that schools must be drafted to stop that decline. The low scores of U.S. students on international tests is Exhibit 1. Even without getting into the shortcomings of the tests used to rank nations internationally and measure students domestically, the untoward consequences of raising the stakes on state test scores (e.g., narrowed curriculum, withholding diplomas, closing schools) are evident today. Look around to see if the U.S.'s global economic position has improved. It has not after a decade of NCLB and a burst housing bubble. But betting that a federal law would miraculously spur economic growth and a larger chunk of foreign markets is not necessarily dumb. It is a national ideological tic that American policy elites have had in "educationalizing" social, economic, and political problems (Labaree Paper-Ed_Theory_11-08 ). Hurtful habitual behavior even on a national level is, like individuals continually smoking, understandable only if we see the behavior as addictive.

The two consortia-which, you probably recall, are working with federal Race to the Top money-have released documents that shed a bit more light on what the tests might look like when they're fully operational in 2014-15. We say "might" because there is a very long road to travel between these documents and the final tests-lots of tweaking, field-testing, revising, reviewing. But the accumulating stack of documents offers interesting glimpses.

In education, teacher evaluations are supposed to gauge what is and isn't working in teachers' practice, and provide feedback to ensure teachers are at the top of their game. Even though administrators have always had this responsibility, teacher evaluations have rarely met that standard. They often are little more than quick snapshots, taken by a principal sitting in the back of the classroom with a checklist once a year. Yet these snapshots-"drive-by evaluations" as they are known-frequently serve as the basis for decisions to keep or dismiss teachers. More recently, so-called reformers have pushed to replace that inadequate snapshot with another kind-once-a-year standardized student test scores in math or English-even though such tests are not designed to evaluate teachers and the majority of educators teach subjects not currently assessed by standardized tests.  Neither of these limited approaches makes any sense-for neither one does anything to improve teacher practice or increase student learning. And after all, isn't that the point?

The Republican education commissioner of Texas, Robert Scott, might not be the first person you'd think would find common ground with California's Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, but Scott has savaged high-stakes testing in language that would make Brown smile. Speaking to the Texas State Board of Education late last month, Scott said that the mentality that standardized testing is the "end-all, be-all" is a "perversion" of what a quality education should be. What's more, he called "the assessment and accountability regime" not only "a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex." And he attacked the Common Core Standards Initiative as being motivated by business concerns.

On Monday, parents and guardians will be able to access individual student scores from this year's state tests. SchoolBook asked some teachers to help put the scores in the context of classroom learning. Their overall response: consider the test results as a snapshot and take them with a proverbial grain of salt, or two.

Nine year olds should not have to take tests that will determine the fate of their schools or their teacher's jobs.  NCLB mandates that they do, so I decided to take a look at the New York State 3rd grade math test from 2010.

As any astute reader but no automated essay scoring program might have gleaned by now, I actually do have my doubts about the automated essay scoring study. I have my doubts because I worked in the test-scoring business for the better part of fifteen years (1994-2008), and most of that job entailed making statistics dance: I saw the industry fix distribution statistics when they might have showed different results than a state wanted; I saw it fudge reliability numbers when those showed human readers weren't scoring in enough of a standardized way; and I saw it fake qualifying scores to ensure enough temporary employees were kept on projects to complete them on time even when those temporary employees were actually not qualified for the job. Given my experience in the duplicitous world of standardized test-scoring, I couldn't help but have my doubts about the statistics provided in support of the automated essay scoring study -- and, unfortunately, that study lost me with its title alone. "Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis," it is named, with p. 5 reemphasizing exactly what the study is supposed to be focused on: "Phase I examines the machine scoring capabilities for extended-response essays." A quick perusal of Table 3, however, on page 33, suggests that the "essays" scored in the study are barely essays at all: "Essays" tested in five of the eight sets of student responses averaged only about a hundred and fifty words.

"The uproar over high-stakes testing associated with Common Core in New York State and complaints that children are being tested on things they were not taught, has obscured the deepening of racial, ethnic and class divisions in education in New York and the United States. Not only are the tests unfair, but according to a new study by the National Urban Research Group (NURG), math instruction and the educational system in the United States are deeply unfair, especially to Black and Latino students from poorer families."

"New scores from standardized tests   aligned with the Common Core State Standards were released earlier this month in New York, and, as expected, the number of students who did well plummeted. This decline was predicted by New York State officials. How did they know? Here to explain in an eye-opening piece is award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who has for more than a year chronicled on the test-driven reform in her state"

"Katie Zahedi is principal of Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, which is located in upstate Dutchess County. She is active in the association of New York Principals who bravely oppose the State Education Department's educator evaluation plan based mostly on test scores. Zahedi has been a principal and assistant principal at her school for twelve years. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not those of the district or her school. Suffice it to say that she is a woman of unusual integrity and courage, who is determined to speak truth to power. She wrote this piece for the blog in response to the release of the Common Core test results in New York, in which scores collapsed across the state."

"With prime testing time upon us, PARCC's newly released guidance to schools (see below) calls for: 9¾  hours testing time for third grade, 10 hours for grades 4-5 , 10¾ hours for grades 6-8 and 11 to 11¼ hours for grades 9-12."

This is the intro to links to the following articles: A Dangerous Obsession Linda Darling-Hammond Avoiding the Poverty Issue Paul Thomas Costly, But Worth It Marcus Winters Wasting More Money Molly Putnam One Factor Among Many Kevin Carey Trust Principals, Not Tests Michael Petrilli Too Much For Tests to Bear Clara Hemphill

"While any teacher evaluation system must include a measure of growth of student learning over time, a snapshot of a student's skills, understanding and content knowledge doesn't give a true picture of a teacher's performance. Our current state tests are not designed to measure growth from year to year, and we are years away from having valid state tests that are. "

Yesterday, the state finally released school test scores; for NYC schools they are posted here.   Individual student test scores will only be made available August 17 - through the ARIS system, for which you will need your child's OSIS number.  Although the city showed gains of a few percentage points, the results were nothing to write home about: only 43.9 percent of city students in grades 3-8 met the standards in reading and 57.3 percent in math.