Group items tagged

"What they're focusing on is high-stakes testing, which is a political way of saying that "We just don't like testing. Let's be real clear." - Florida Education Commissioner Robinson I agree. Let's be real clear.This is not an anti-testing resolution. To state that the resolution opposes testing and accountability is disingenuous and silly. If the Commissioner, his staff, or their chief consultants at Florida's Foundation for Excellence in Education actually read the 'Resolution Opposing Over-Reliance on High Stakes Tests,' they'd understand that, as its title states, it opposes the over-reliance of this one test taken on this one day. It is not testing we oppose. Rather, it is what this one test has morphed into that we oppose. It is not accountability we oppose. Rather, it is the irrational and costly accountability built into this one test we oppose.

First do no harm. In their impatience with a teacher evaluation system that needs improvement, proponents of a system based on student test scores ignore this simple moral imperative. No newspaper has done more to report on how test-driven policies can go wrong than USA TODAY, with its coverage of former Washington, D.C., chancellor Michelle Rhee and the nation's test-erasure scandals. Yet the real scandals are ingrained in these test-based systems; they exist with or without fraud. We sell our children short when we send them to schools where testing supplants teaching, test-taking supplants learning, and test scores are the ultimate goal.

Ditch Testing (Part 5): Testing Has Not Improved Education The evidence is clear. Test-score cheating is not isolated to Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other schools, as testing proponents tend to suggest. It is not a problem that can be fixed with technical measures such as tightened security. It may be human nature but it is the high and unreasonable pressure of high-stakes standardized testing that leads to corruption. Thus, we cannot minimize the problem, trivialize potential solutions, or blame a few educators who have been caught. The Atlanta scandal should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially to those who continue to promote testing as a necessary and effective way to improve education.

Educational interventions are often evaluated and compared on the basis of their impacts on test scores. Decades of research have produced two empirical regularities: interventions in later grades tend to have smaller effects than the same interventions in earlier grades, and the test score impacts of early educational interventions almost universally "fade out" over time. This paper explores whether these empirical regularities are an artifact of the common practice of rescaling test scores in terms of a student's position in a widening distribution of knowledge. If a standard deviation in test scores in later grades translates into a larger difference in knowledge, an intervention's effect on normalized test scores may fall even as its effect on knowledge does not. We evaluate this hypothesis by fitting a model of education production to correlations in test scores across grades and with college-going using both administrative and survey data. Our results imply that the variance in knowledge does indeed rise as children progress through school, but not enough for test score normalization to fully explain these empirical regularities.

Teachers who give standardized tests are required to sign affidavits swearing they will not copy the tests, or divulge their contents. Thus teachers are forbidden from airing concerns they might have about the contents of the tests. The tests have become the ultimate authorities in our schools, and the test publishers are virtually unquestionable. The standardized testing technocracy has convinced our policy makers that the only way we will be competitive in the world is if everyone learns the same information, and has that learning measured in ever-finer increments. We are not supposed to look behind the curtain to see the way this data is arrived at.

The backlash against high-stakes standardized testing is growing into a genuine nationwide revolt. Nearly 400 school districts in Texas have passed a resolution opposing high-stakes testing, and the number increases every week. Nearly a third of the principals in New York state (some at risk of losing their jobs) have signed a petition against the state's new and untried, high-stakes, test-based evaluation system. Today, a group of organizations devoted to education, civil rights, and children issued a national resolution against high-stakes testing modeled on the Texas resolution. The National Testing Resolution urges citizens to join the rebellion against the testing that now has a choke-hold on children and their teachers. It calls on governors, legislatures, and state boards of education to re-examine their accountability systems, to reduce their reliance on standardized tests, and to increase their support for students and schools.

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must. Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed. Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

In 1972 I spent considerable time interviewing individuals and groups of young children in order to learn more about how they went about solving test questions on standardized tests. My interest was spurred by the discovery that my fluent bookworm son did badly on a 3rd grade test, and that the students who left our cozy 4-room Pre-K to 3rd grade mini-program at PS 144 were scoring poorly in 3rd grade. I knew virtually nothing about tests until that experience. I was a good test-taker and assumed such tests were good at detecting my talents. I was stunned by what I learned. I wrote a publication.

Last spring students, teachers and parents endured the outbreak of what we soon called "testing madness." On top of the regular state tests, teachers across Mecklenburg County were required to administer 52 new high-stakes standardized tests, part of then superintendent Peter Gorman's goal of testing every child in every subject every year. The tests were tied to a pay-for-performance scheme that was slated for rapid approval by the state legislature. We were racing down a fast track to nowhere. This year, however, the rush has slowed. The pay-for-performance legislation has stalled. Interim superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh announced recently that CMS was scrapping the 52 extra tests. For the moment, students and teachers can focus more on learning, and breathe a little easier. Why the change? People stood up for the kind of education they believe in.

"This post is a follow up to my previous post in which I discussed the misguided arguments for maintaining a system of annual standardize testing of all students. In my post, I skipped over one argument that seems to be pretty common among the beltway pundits. I skipped this argument largely because the point is moot if we plan on using testing data appropriately to begin with. My point in the previous post was about tests, testing data and how to use it appropriately. But just as the beltway pundit crowd so dreadfully misunderstands tests and testing data, they also dreadfully misunderstanding demography and geography and the intersection of the two. A related example of the complete lack of demographic "data sense" in the current policy discourse is addressed in my recent post on "suburban poverty.""

"Anya Kamenetz's The Test comes from the conversation she's had again and again with parents. She and they have "seen how high-stakes standardized tests are stunting children's spirits, adding stress to family life, demoralizing teachers, undermining schools, paralyzing the education debate, and gutting our country's future competitiveness." Like so many Gen X and Gen Y parents, Kamenetz sees how "the test obsession is making public schools … into unhappy places." Kamenetz covers ten arguments against testing, starting with "We're testing the wrong things," and ending with "The next generation of tests will make things even worse." I'd say the second most destructive of the reasons is #4 "They are making teachers hate teaching." The most awful is #3 "They are making students hate school and turning parents into preppers.""

Dear 8th Graders, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I spent last night perusing the 150-plus pages of grading materials provided by the state in anticipation of reading and evaluating your English Language Arts Exams this morning. I knew the test was pointless-that it has never fulfilled its stated purpose as a predictor of who would succeed and who would fail the English Regents in 11th grade. Any thinking person would've ditched it years ago. Instead, rather than simply give a test in 8th grade that doesn't get kids ready for the test in 11th grade, the state opted to also give a test in 7th grade to get you ready for your 8th-grade test. But we already knew all of that. What I learned is that the test is also criminal.

New York's chief testing and data guru has been forced out after prematurely releasing details of the state's plans to lengthen tests in grades 3 to 8, sources told The Post. David Abrams, the longtime assistant commissioner in the Office of Standards, Assessment and Reporting, resigned just days after sending a memo to principals across the state announcing that annual reading tests would nearly double in length - topping four hours in each grade. Math tests would take roughly three hours over two testing days. The proposal to lengthen the exams, including for kids as young as 8, immediately raised hackles among parents and educators who already feel that kids are over-tested in public schools.

"In a Louisiana public school, female students who are suspected of being pregnant are told that they must take a pregnancy test. Under school policy, those who are pregnant or refuse to take the test are kicked out and forced to undergo home schooling. Welcome to Delhi Charter School, in Delhi, Louisiana, a school of 600 students that does not believe its female students have a right to education free from discrimination. According to its Student Pregnancy Policy, the school has a right to not only force testing upon girls, but to send them to a physician of the school administration's choice. A positive test result, or failure to take the test at all, means administrators can forbid a girl from taking classes and force her to pursue a course of home study if she wishes to continue her education with the school."

In our nation's public schools, March Madness has taken on a whole new meaning. It is test prep time in America. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is fond of saying that we should not teach the test. At the same time, there are huge consequences for schools, teachers and principals that do not raise test scores. The NCLB waivers allow states to eliminate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the majority of schools, but huge pressure will still be applied to the bottom tier of schools, those with high poverty and large numbers of English learners. And new policies mandated by the NCLB waivers require the inclusion of test scores in teacher and principal evaluations. As the month of March begins, across the country schools are in the midst of the most pressure-packed time of the year. We have just a few short weeks before the tests will be given that determine the fate of our students, our schools, our principals and ourselves. It is test-prep time.

Those dreaded state tests are here again. All third-to eighth-graders in New York began Tuesday the first of three consecutive days of English Language Arts assessment, to be followed next week by three days of math tests. And those state tests have never been longer. A typical third-grader last year spent 150 minutes over three days taking the ELA test and 100 minutes over two days on the Math exam. This year, all students will spend 270 minutes in the ELA exam and 270 minutes in the Math test - 90 minutes over each of six days. The stakes also have never been higher, not for the pupils who take the tests or the teachers whose evaluations will be based on their students' performance or the schools that could face closure if pupil scores drop.

Over the last several weeks, in light of all the standardized testing taking place in the state of New York, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the ideas of assessment and testing and how important they are in the world of public education. In New York State we have reached a point where our children are sitting for at least 6 days of standardized testing in grades 3, 4 and 5 in the areas of English Language Arts and Mathematics. As if that weren't enough, the results from these tests will serve as the proverbial rock thrown into the middle of a placid lake on a beautiful spring day. We all know what happens next because we've seen it - the pond fills with ripples and the rock disappears. These ripples represent our children, their families, our classroom teachers, fellow building principals, schools as a whole and our communities at large. Everyone, at least in the state of New York, will be impacted and judged based on the results of these various standardized tests.

I learned that the tests themselves are being kept secret because the state Department of Education and Pearson, their test development contractor, wrote strong confidentiality provisions into the contract. My understanding is that this was so that they both could reuse test questions in the future. In order for the questions to be re-usable, they have to be kept secret, otherwise students could prep too easily for the tests, and Pearson's other customers would be able to get the tests from the public domain. We only know about the gaffes because students exposed them. Educators have been sworn to secrecy.

I was part of a National Academies of Science committee that was asked to carefully review the nature and implications of America's test-based accountability systems, including school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, test-based teacher incentive-pay systems, pay-for-scores initiatives and other uses of test scores to evaluate student and school performance and determine policy based on them. We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated, focusing on the most rigorous and credible studies of incentives in educational testing and sifting through the results to uncover the key lessons for education policymakers and the public. Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.

More than 100 school districts in Texas have passed a resolution saying that high-stakes standardized tests are "strangling" public schools, the latest in a series of events that are part of a brewing revolt in the state where the test-centric No Child Left Behind was born. State-mandated standardized testing has become so dominant in Texas that, according to Denise Williams, testing director of the Wichita Falls Independent School District, high school students are spending up to 45 days of their 180-day school year taking them, according to the Times Record News. Students in grades three through eight spend 19 to 27 days a year taking state-mandated tests.