Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

This wasn’t the first year I’ve done a countdown of the year’s greatest hits. I usually write one counting down my most popular articles and one listing articles that I thought deserved a second look. Here are all my end of the year articles since I began my blog in 2014:

2021:

Gadfly’s Most Outrageous Articles in 2021 That You May Have Missed or Been Too Polite to Share

Gadfly’s Top 10 Articles of 2021 – Shouts in the Dark

2020:

The Most Important Education Articles (By Me) That You Probably Missed in 2020

Outrunning the Pandemic – Racing Through Gadfly’s Top 10 Stories of 2020

2019:

Sixteen Gadfly Articles That Made Betsy DeVos Itch in 2019 

2018:

A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me)

2017:

What’s the Buzz? A Crown of Gadflies! Top 10 Articles (by Me) in 2017

Hidden Gadfly – Top 5 Stories (By Me) You May Have Missed in 2017

2016

Worse Than Fake News – Ignored News. Top 5 Education Stories You May Have Missed in 2016

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

2015

Gadfly’s Choice – Top 5 Blogs (By Me) You May Have Missed from 2015

Who’s Your Favorite Gadfly? Top 10 Blog Posts (By Me) That Enlightened, Entertained and Enraged in 2015

2014

Off the Beaten Gadfly – the Best Education Blog Pieces You Never Read in 2014

Standardized Test Scores are Incompatible with Your School’s Equity Plan

November 4, 2022 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Eugenics, history, Junk science, Learning, Local Control, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, School Funding, Schools, Scripted Lessons, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Toxic Testing, White Privilege antiracist, education, equity, field test, high stakes testing, Ibram X. Kendi, MAP test, Martin Shapiro, Politics, prejudice, public schools, racism, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, test makers, Test Prep, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy, W. James Popham

The primary goal of public education is to teach all children fairly.

But since its inception, the system has never been set up to actually accomplish this.

So these days you hear a lot of talk about fixing the problem – of how we can ensure students of color and other historically underserved children get the same high-quality education racially and economically privileged kids always have received.

This almost always concludes with two types of plan.

First, there is the serious venture made up of things like increasing spending to meet student need, wraparound services, early intervention, reducing class size, redistributive justice and cultural competence – a plan that looks the reality in the face and makes bold attempts to come to terms with it.

Then there is the cheap knockoff proposition – a buzzword-laden scheme where someone is trying to convince you their half hearted proposal is actually a solution to the very real problem of educational inequality.

And the number one thing you can use to tell the difference between the two is this – standardized test scores.

The first plan that is centered around actually fixing disparities makes no mention of test scores – or at least relegates them to obstacles. The second is built all around them – as an essential component of the overall scheme.

This is because the second feel-good-accomplish-nothing plan is essentially performative.

Therefore, it is constructed around standardized test scores as a metric of success.

Planners think: We’re going to do A, B and C to make our schools more equitable. And how will we know we’re doing it right? We’ll use our standardized test scores!

That’s not accuracy. It’s ostentation. These scores don’t demonstrate anything at all about equity. True, they purport to show readily apparent increases or decreases in academics.

However, even this is an illusion.

A rise or fall in test scores is not, in fact, based on authentic academic success but merely success at taking standardized tests designed for very different purposes.

And anyone who understands the history of these types of assessments and how they still work will know that this mirage is built at the cost of genuine equity.

In fact, the inequalities plaguing our public school system are due in large part to our national insistence that standardized test scores be the ultimate measure of success.

So constructing your plan to fix this problem around one of its root causes is like claiming you can fix a sinking ship by drilling more holes in its hull.

At best, it’s naive. At worst, it’s self-defeating and disingenuous.

The problem centers around the difference between standardized tests and assessments created by classroom teachers.

Both types of assessment are supposed to measure what students have learned. But not all learning is equal.

For example, a beginning chef needs to know how to use the stove, have good knife skills and how to chop an onion. But if you give her a standardized test, it instead might focus on how to make foie gras – something that would only come in handy at a high end French restaurant.

That’s not as important in your everyday life, but the tests make it important by focusing on it.

The fact of the matter is that standardized tests do NOT necessarily focus on the most important aspects of a given task. They focus on obscurities – things that most students don’t know.

This is implicit in the design of these exams and is very different from the kinds of tests designed by classroom teachers.

When a teacher makes a test for her students, she’s focused on the individuals in her classes. She asks primarily about the most essential aspects of the subject and in such a way that her students will best understand. There may be a few obscure questions, but the focus is on whether the test takers have learned the material or not.

When psychometricians design a standardized test, on the other hand, they aren’t centered on the student. They aren’t trying to find out if the test taker knows the most important facts or has the most essential skills in each field. Instead, there is a tendency to eliminate the most important test questions so that the test – not the student – will be better equipped to make comparisons between students based on a small set of questions. After all, a standardize test isn’t designed for a few classes – it is one size fits all.

New questions are field tested. They are placed randomly on an active test but don’t count toward the final score. Test takers aren’t told which questions they’ll be graded on and which are just practice questions being tried out on students for the first time. So students presumably give their best effort to both types. Then when the test is scored, the results of the field test questions determine if they’ll be used again as graded questions on a subsequent test.

According to W. James Popham, professor emeritus at the University of California and a former president of the American Educational Research Association, standardized test makers take pains to spread out the scores. Questions answered correctly by too many students – regardless of their importance or quality – are often left off the test.

If 40 to 60 percent of test takers answer the question correctly, it might make it onto the test. But questions that are answered correctly by 80 percent or more of test takers are usually jettisoned.

He writes:

“As a consequence of the quest for score variance in a standardized achievement test, items on which students perform well are often excluded. However, items on which students perform well often cover the content that, because of its importance, teachers stress. Thus, the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge and/or skills.”

Think about what this means.

We are engaged in a system of assessment that isn’t concerned with learning so much as weeding people out. It’s not about who knows what, but about which questions to ask that will achieve the predetermined bell curve.

This is important when it comes to equity.

If we are guided in large part by standardized test scores, we aren’t guided by authentic learning. We’re guided by a false picture of learning. Therefore, the most effective way – perhaps the only practical way – of raising test scores is to teach directly to a specific test. And not only the test, but the specific version of the test being given that year.

So if we do somehow manage to raise test scores, we haven’t improved academics at all but a mere semblance of it. And thus the equity we might celebrate in such a situation would be just as false.

You got a good score on the MAP test. Hurrah! But that doesn’t mean you know anything of real value except how to take this particular MAP test which, itself, will change after the next round of questions are field tested.

This has huge implications for the quality of education being provided at our schools. Since most administrators have drunk deep of the testing Kool-Aid, they now force teachers to educate in just this manner – to use test scores to drive instruction. So since the tests doesn’t focus on the most essential parts of Reading, Writing, Math, and Science, neither does much of our instruction.

And if we insist on evaluating the equity of our schools on these test scores, we will only make things that much worse.

We end up chasing the psychometricians. We try to guess which aspects of a subject they think most students don’t know and then we teach our students that to the exclusion of more important information. And since what students don’t know changes, we end up having to change our instructional focus every few years based on the few bread crumbs surreptitiously left for us by the state and the testing corporations.

That is not a good way to teach someone anything. It’s like teaching your child how to ride a bike based on what the neighbor kid doesn’t know.

It’s an endless game of catch up that only benefits the testing industry because they cash in at every level. They get paid to give the tests, to grade the tests and when students fail, they get paid to sell us this year’s remediation material before kids take the test again, and – you guessed it – the testing companies get another check!

It’s a dangerous feedback loop, a cycle that promotes artificially prized snippets of knowledge over constructive wholes.

And let’s not forget where these tests come from.

They were created in the 1910s and 20s by eugenicists to prove the supremacy of white Europeans over other racial and ethnic groups.

While these original tests are no longer in circulation, the assumptions behind them are an essential part of our modern day standardized tests.

The very method of question selection in today’s tests builds economic and racial bias into the very fabric of the enterprise.

According to Prof. Martin Shapiro of Emory University, when test makers select questions with the greatest gaps between high and low scorers, they are selecting against minorities. Think about it – if they pick questions based on the majority getting it right, which minority got it wrong? In many cases, it’s a racial or ethnic minority. In fact, this may explain why white students historically do better on standardized tests than black and Hispanic students.

This process may factor non-school learning and social background into the questions. They are based on the experiences of white middle-to-upper class children.

So when we continually push for higher test scores, not only are we ultimately dumbing down the quality of education in our schools, but we’re also explicitly lobbying for greater economic and racial bias in our curriculum trickling down from our assessments.

As Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to be an Antiracist” puts it:

“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies.”

This is incompatible with any enterprise aimed at increasing equity.

You are engaged in a never-ending cycle of teaching to the test at the expense of authentic learning. You’re engaged in making minorities think like their privileged peers – of overcoming who they are just to be accepted into a game.

This is not education. It is assimilation, and it will always put the assimilated at a disadvantage to the majority – those they are being forced to imitate.

Equity and standardized testing do not go together.

They CANNOT go together. They are anathema.

Those who suggest otherwise are either well-meaning fools or duplicitous malefactors.

There is a multi-billion dollar standardized testing industry dependent on keeping us testing our kids.

But we can no longer continue feeding that beast and pretending that we can somehow provide equity to our underserved children, too.

We have to choose – equity or testing. Fairness or unrestrained capitalism.

Do not believe anyone who tells you to support a plan built on both.

It does not exist.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

The Racist Origins of Standardized Testing Still Matter

October 6, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, history, Learning, Prejudice, Racism, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Toxic Testing, Uncategorized annual testing, Carl Brigham, education, Eugenics, high stakes testing, history, Lewis Terman, Politics, Robert M. Yerkes, standardized testing, teaching to the test, test makers, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

Would you walk across a bridge that was designed to break?

Of course you wouldn’t.

But what if someone told you the bridge had been fixed?

Would you trust it – especially if people were still falling off of it all the time?

That’s the situation we’re in with standardized testing.

The tests were explicitly created more than a century ago to fail minorities and the poor.

And today, after countless revisions and new editions, they still do exactly the same thing.

Yet we’re exhorted to keep using them.

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

Modern testing comes out of U.S. Army IQ tests developed during World War I.

In 1916, a group of psychologists led by Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association (APA), created the Army Alpha and Beta tests. These were specifically designed to measure the intelligence of recruits and help the military distinguish those of “superior mental ability” from those who were “mentally inferior.”

These assessments were based on explicitly eugenicist foundations – the idea that certain races were distinctly superior to others.

Colleague Lewis Terman made the goal clear in his book, The Measurement of Intelligence, that these “experimental” tests will show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.”

In 1923, another psychologist, Carl Brigham, took these ideas further in his seminal work A Study of American Intelligence. In it, he used data gathered from these IQ tests to argue the following:

“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”

Thus, Yerkes, Terman and Brigham’s pseudoscientific tests were used to justify Jim Crow laws, segregation, and even lynchings. Anything for “racial purity.”

People took this research very seriously. States passed forced sterilization laws for people with “defective” traits, preventing between 60,000 and 70,000 people from “polluting” America’s ruling class.

The practice was even upheld by the US Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision. Justices decided that mandatory sterilization of “feeble-minded” individuals was, in fact, Constitutional.

Of the ruling, which has never been explicitly overturned, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eventually Brigham took his experience with Army IQ tests to create a new assessment for the College Board – the Scholastic Aptitude Test – now known as the Scholastic Assessment Test or SAT. It was first given to high school students in 1926 as a gatekeeper. Just as the Army intelligence tests were designed to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the SAT was designed to predict which students would do well in college and which would not. It was meant to show which students should be given the chance at a higher education and which should be left behind.

And unsurprisingly it has always – and continues to – privilege white students over children of color. The same as nearly every standardized test still does.

HAS IT CHANGED?

None of this can be challenged. These are historical facts. They are simply what happened justified in the words of the people who perpetrated them.

However, champions of continuing the practice of standardized testing most often defend the practice by appealing to time.

This was all a long time ago, they say. Much has changed between now and then.

But has it? Really?

We certainly don’t use the editions of the tests written by the original eugenicists, but the practices used to create them and the results of these assessments are extremely similar.

In 1964, a Department of Education report found that the average black high school senior scored below 87% of white seniors (in the 13 percentile) on standardized assessments. Fifty years later, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that black seniors had narrowed the gap until they were merely behind 81% of white seniors (scoring in the 19th percentile).

Is that really the kind of progress you want to champion?

The reason for the disparity has nothing to do with the learning students of color (and the poor whose scores are similar) achieve nor their worth as human beings.

It is in the very concept of standardized testing.

Discrimination is purposefully built in to the standardization process, according to W. James Popham, PhD, Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles and former test maker. He explained in an interview with Frontline:

“Traditionally constructed standardized achievements, the kinds that we’ve used in this country for a long while, are intended chiefly to discriminate among students … to say that someone was in the 83rd percentile and someone is at 43rd percentile. And the reason you do that is so you can make judgments among these kids. But in order to do so, you have to make sure that the test has in fact a spread of scores. One of the ways to have that test create a spread of scores is to limit items in the test to socioeconomic variables, because socioeconomic status is a nicely spread out distribution, and that distribution does in fact spread kids’ scores out on a test.”

The scores have to fall into categories – Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced, for instance. If too many students cluster in the middle, the results are invalid. We need the scores spread out – even if we must resort to non-educational factors to get there.

Family income is not something the tests ignore, says Popham. It is an essential component specifically tested for in question construction. In fact, he claims that between 15-80% of the questions (depending on the subject area) on norm-referenced exams are linked to socio-economic status (SES).

Thus minorities with higher percentages of impoverished people are selected against. Not because of any explicit racist ideology – but to get the pretty bell curve standardized assessments require.

Young Whan Choi, Manager of Performance Assessments at Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, California, agreed.

“Too often, test designers rely on questions which assume background knowledge more often held by White, middle-class students. It’s not just that the designers have unconscious racial bias; the standardized testing industry depends on these kinds of biased questions in order to create a wide range of scores.”

For example, Choi recalled a 10th grade student in his class asking him about a standardized test question. “With a puzzled look, she pointed to the prompt asking students to write about the qualities of someone who would deserve a “key to the city.” Many of my students, nearly all of whom qualified for free and reduced lunch, were not familiar with the idea of a ‘key to the city.’”

So when they get such a question wrong, it isn’t necessarily because they don’t know the concept being tested, but they don’t understand what was being asked in the first place.

Test makers could work to eliminate such instances but that would reduce the spread of answers. It would destroy the bell curve – and thus invalidate the goal of the test which ultimately is not assessing learning but sorting and ranking students.

Jay Rosner, a national admissions test expert, explained how this bias is built-in to the process for each revision of assessments like the SAT:

“Compare two 1998 SAT verbal [section] sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by the Educational Testing Service, whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT. On one of the items, which was of medium difficulty, 62% of whites and 38% of African-Americans answered correctly, resulting in a large impact of 24%…On this second item, 8% more African-Americans than whites answered correctly…”

In other words, the criteria for whether a question is chosen for future tests is if it replicates the outcomes of previous exams – specifically tests where students of color score lower than white children. And this is still the criteria test makers use to determine which questions to use on future editions of nearly every assessment in wide use in the US.

Public schools have no control over these factors. That’s why schools serving poor and minority students invariably have lower test scores. Popham concludes there will always be a testing gap because that’s the way the system is designed.

He says it’s “A game without winners.” Or more likely a game where the poor and minorities cannot win.

And that’s how the system was designed.

Whether it’s the 1920s or the 2020s.

Standardized tests came from racists assumptions about human intelligence.

And that still matters today.

We no longer profess eugenicist ideas of racial purity embedded in our assessments as self evident or based on science. But they’re there none-the-less.

Today, the very concept of intelligence being quantifiable remains in question.

In “The Mismeasurement of Man,” evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould challenged many of these ideas – in particular those of Terman. Rather than see intelligence as a genetic trait, Gould envisioned it more abstractly and thus shattered the idea that any mere number could capture human value.

Complex instances of learning cannot be accurately standardized. They have to be measured in context of the students and the learning community where they were acquired.

But this is a relatively new idea. Accepting it requires us to turn the page on a rather dark passage of our national history.

We must move on from the original test makers narrow-minded, racist ideas about intelligence and human worth.

And to do that we must leave standardized testing far, far behind.

We can’t just give a faulty bridge a new coat of paint. We must demolish it and rebuild an entirely new structure to carry us into the future.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

When Good Students Get Bad Standardized Test Scores

October 1, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Child Predators, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing, Uncategorized annual testing, education, high stakes testing, MAP test, Politics, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

Ameer is a good student.

He takes notes in class, does all his homework and participates in discussions.

He writes insightful essays and demonstrates a mastery of spelling and grammar.

He reads aloud with fluency and inflection. He asks deep questions about the literature and aces nearly all of his classroom reading comprehension tests.

However, when it is standardized test time, things are very different.

He still arrives early, takes his time with the questions and reviews his work when he’s done – but the results are not the same.

His grades are A’s. His test scores are Below Basic.

How is that?

How can a student demonstrate mastery of a subject in class but fail to do the same on a standardized test?

And which assessment should I, his teacher, take seriously?

After all, they can’t BOTH be correct.

This is a problem with which most classroom teachers are forced to contend.

Bureaucrats at the administrative or state level demand teachers assess students with standardized tests but the results often contradict a year or more of observation.

Take the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test.

This year at my Western Pennsylvania district, administration decided to use this computer-based standardized assessment as a pre-test or practice assessment before the state mandated Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA).

I’ve already written about what a waste of time and money this is. A test before the test!?

But after reluctantly subjecting my classes to the MAP and being instructed to analyze the results with my colleagues, we noticed this contradiction.

In many cases, scores did not match up with teacher expectations for our students.

In about 60-80% of cases, students who had demonstrated high skills in the subject were given scores below the 50th percentile – many below the 25th percentile.

These were kids with average to high grades who the MAP scored as if they were in the bottom half of their peers across the state.

Heck! A third of my students are in the advanced class this year – but the MAP test would tell me most of them need remediation!

If we look at that data dispassionately, there are possible explanations. For one, students may not have taken the test seriously.

And to some degree this is certainly the case. The MAP times student responses and when they are input fast and furious, it stops the test taker until the teacher can unlock the test after warning them against rapid guessing.

However, the sheer number of mislabeled students is far too great to be accounted for in this way. Maybe five of my students got the slow down sloth graphic. Yet so many more were mislabeled as failures despite strong classroom academics.

The other possibility – and one that media doom-mongers love to repeat – is that districts like mine routinely inflate mediocre achievement so that bad students look like good ones.

In other words, they resolve the contradiction by throwing away the work of classroom teachers and prioritizing what standardized tests say.

Nice for them. However, I am not some rube reading this in the paper. I am not examining some spreadsheet for which I have no other data. I am IN the classroom every day observing these very same kids. I’ve been right there for almost an entire grading period of lessons and assessments – formative and summative. I have many strong indications of what these kids can do, what they know and what they don’t know.

Valuing the MAP scores over weeks of empirical classroom data is absurd.

I am a Nationally Board Certified Teacher with more than two decades experience. But Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a testing company out of Portland, Oregon, wants me to believe that after 90 minutes it knows my students better than I do after six weeks!

Time to admit the MAP is a faulty product.

But it’s not just that one standardized test. We find the same disparity with the PSSA and other like assessments.

Nationally, classroom grades are better than these test scores.

In the media, pundits tell us this means our public school system is faulty. Yet that conclusion is merely an advertisement for these testing companies and a host of school privatization enterprises offering profit-making alternatives predicated on that exact premise.

So how to resolve the contradiction?

The only logical conclusion one can draw is that standardized assessments are bad at determining student learning.

In fact, that is not their primary function. First and foremost, they are designed to compare students with each other. How they make that comparison – based on what data – is secondary.

The MAP, PSSA and other standardized tests are primarily concerned with sorting and ranking students – determining which are best, second best and so on.

By contrast, teacher-created tests are just the opposite. They are designed almost exclusively to assess whether learning has taken place and to what degree. Comparability isn’t really something we do. That’s the province of administrators and other support staff.

The primary job of teaching is just that – the transfer of knowledge, offering opportunities and a conducive environment for students to learn.

That is why standardized tests fail so miserably most of the time. They are not designed for the same function. They are about competition, not acquisition of knowledge or skill.

That’s why so many teachers have been calling for the elimination of standardized testing for decades. It isn’t just inaccurate and a waste of time and money. It gets in the way of real learning.

You can’t give a person a blood transfusion if you can’t accurately measure how much blood you’re giving her. And comparing how much blood was given to a national average of transfusions is not helpful.

You need to know how much THIS PERSON needs. You need to know what would help her particular needs.

When good students get bad test scores, it invariably means you have a bad test.

An entire year of daily data points is not invalidated by one mark to the contrary.

Until society accepts this obvious truth, we will never be able to provide our students with the education they deserve.

Good students will continue to be mislabeled for the sake of a standardized testing industry that is too big to fail.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

If Standardized Tests Were Going to Succeed, They Would Have Done So By Now

April 7, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Eugenics, history, Junk science, Learning, Local Control, No Child Left Behind, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized annual testing, charter schools, education, high stakes testing, Milton Friedman, Politics, school privatization, school vouchers, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability, testocracy

Standardized tests were supposed to be the magic remedy to fix our public schools.

They were supposed to make all students proficient in reading and math.

They were supposed to ensure all students were getting the proper resources.

They were supposed to ensure all teachers were doing their best for their students.

But after more than four decades, standardized tests have not fulfilled a single one of these promises.

In fact, all they’ve done is make things worse at public schools while creating a lucrative market for testing companies and school privatization concerns.

So why haven’t we gotten rid of them?

To answer that question, we have to understand how we got here in the first place – where these kinds of assessments came from in the US and how they became the guiding policy of our public schools.

Standardized testing has been around in this country since the 1920s.

It was the product of the pseudoscientific eugenicist movement that tried to justify white supremacy with bad logic and biased premises.

Psychologists Robert Yerkes and Carl Brigham invented these assessments to justify privileging upper-class whites over lower class immigrants, Blacks and Hispanics. That was always the goal and they tailored their tests to find that result.

From the very start, it had serious consequences for public policy. The results were used to rationalize the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 70,000 people from groups with low test scores, thus preventing them from “polluting” the gene pool.

However, Brigham’s greatest claim to fame was the creation of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to keep such undesirables out of higher education. These tests were not central to school curriculum and mainly used as gatekeepers with the SAT in particular still in wide use today.

The problem then – as now – is that standardized tests aren’t very good assessments. They work okay for really simple things like rudimentary math. However, the more complex a skill you’re assessing, the more inadequate the tests. For example, imagine just trying to have a conversation with someone where your only choices of reply were limited to four canned responses. That’s a multiple-choice assessment. The result is a testing system that selects against the poor and minorities. At best, it reproduces the economic and racial disparities of society. At worst, it ensures those disparities will continue into the next generation.

That isn’t to say the system went unchallenged. By the 1960s, the junk science and leaps of logic behind standardized testing were obvious and people began fighting back in court. Black plaintiffs began winning innumerable lawsuits against the testing industry.

Perhaps the most famous case is Hobson v. Hansen in 1967, which was filed on behalf of a group of Black students in Washington, DC. The court ruled that the policy of using tests to assign students to tracks was racially biased because the tests were standardized to a White, middleclass group.

Nevertheless, just as the tests were beginning to disappear, radical economists like Milton Friedman saw them as an opportunity to push their own personal agenda. More than anything, these extreme capitalists wanted to do away with almost all public services – especially public schools. They hoped the assessments could be repurposed to undermine these institutions and usher in an era of private education through measures like school vouchers.

So in the 1980s, the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk,” a campfire tale about how America’s public schools were failing. Thus, the authors argued we needed standardized testing to make American children competitive in a global marketplace.

However, the report, which examined test scores from the past 20 years, was misleading and full of statistical and mathematical errors.

For instance, it concluded that average student test scores had decreased but didn’t take into account that scores had actually increased in every demographic group. It compared two decades worth of test scores, but failed to mention that more students took the test at the end of that period than at the beginning, and many of the newer students were disadvantaged. In other words, it compared test scores between an unrepresentative group at the beginning of the comparison with a more representative group at the end and concluded that these oranges were nothing like the apples they started with. Well, duh.

Most people weren’t convinced by the disaster capitalism at work here, but the report marks a significant moment in the standardization movement. In fact, this is really where our modern era began.

Slowly governors and state legislators began drinking the Kool-aide and mandating standardized testing in schools along with corporate-written academic standards the tests were supposed to assess. It wasn’t everywhere, but the model for test-and-punish was in place.

It took an additional two decades, until 2001, for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation to require standardized testing in ALL public schools.

With bipartisan support, Bush tied federal funding of schools to standardized test performance and annual academic progress. And from then on, the die was cast. This policy has been upheld through both Republican and Democratic regimes.

In fact, standardized testing intensified under President Barack Obama and was continued with few changes by Donald Trump and even Joe Biden. Far from changing course, Biden broke a campaign promise to discontinue the tests. Once in office, he thought testing was so important that he forced schools to give the assessments during the Covid-19 pandemic when districts had trouble even keeping school buildings open.

And that brings us to today.

From the 1980s to 2022 we’ve had wide scale standardized testing in our schools. That’s roughly 40 years where the entirety of what is done in public school has been organized around these assessments. They drive the curriculum and are the ultimate benchmark by which success or failure is judged. If this policy was ever going to work, it would have done so by now.

However, it has achieved NONE of its stated goals.

NCLB specifically stated that all children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. That has not happened. Despite spending billions of dollars on remediation and completely reorganizing our schools around the assessments, test scores have remained mostly static or even decreased.

The law also justified its existence with claims to equity. Somehow taking resources away from districts with low test scores was supposed to increase funding at the neediest schools. Unsurprisingly this did not happen. All it did was further increase the funding gap between rich and poor schools and between wealthy and disadvantaged students.

NCLB also championed the idea that competing for test scores would result in better teachers. However, that didn’t happen either. Instead, educators were forced to narrow the curriculum to cover mostly what was assessed, reduce creativity and critical thinking, and teachers who served poor and minority students were even punished for doing so.

If the purpose of standardized testing was all the things the law purported, then it was a decades long failure. It is the policy equivalent of slamming your head into a wall repeatedly and wondering why you aren’t moving forward. (And where did this headache come from?)

If, however, the purpose of standardized testing was to fulfill Friedman’s privatization dreams, then it was a resounding success. Public schools still persist, but they have been drained, weakened and in many ways subverted.

Look at the evidence.

Standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one today. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.

Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam.

But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the “failing schools” narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives.

Chief among these was charter schools.

The first charter school law was passed in 1991 in Minnesota. It allowed for the creation of new schools that would have special agreements (or charters) with states or districts to run without having to abide by all the usual regulations. Thus, the school could go without an elected board, pocket public money as private profit, etc. The bill was quickly copied and spread to legislatures across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Today, there are charter schools in 43 states and the District of Columbia educating nearly three million students. Charter schools enroll about 6% of the students in the country.

However, charter schools are rife with fraud and malfeasance. For instance, more than a quarter of charter schools close within 5 years of opening. By year 15, roughly 50% of charter schools close. That’s not a stable model of public education. It’s a get rich quick scheme. And since these types of schools are free from the kinds of regulations, democratic governance and/or transparency that keeps authentic public schools in check, another charter school scandal pops up almost every day.

But let’s not forget school vouchers. Before high stakes testing, the idea of using public money to pay for private or parochial schools was widely considered unconstitutional. Now about 4% of US students go to private and parochial schools some of which are funded with school vouchers. This is an option in 32 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 600,000 students participated in a voucher, scholarship tax credit or education savings account program last school year, according to EdChoice, a pro-voucher and school choice group.

There is little evidence that school vouchers actually improve student performance, however, and there’s even evidence that students who receive vouchers to attend private schools may do worse on tests than they would have if they had stayed in authentic public schools.

Moreover, the cost of attending one of these private or parochial schools isn’t completely covered by the voucher. On average, vouchers offer about $4,600 a year, according to American Federation for Children, which supports voucher programs. The average annual cost of tuition at a private K-12 school nationwide is $12,350, according to Educationdata.org, though that can be much more expensive in some states. In Connecticut, for example, the average tuition is almost $24,000. So vouchers only REDUCE the cost of attending private or parochial schools for a few kids while siphoning away tax dollars that should go to educating all kids.

In short, they’re subsidies for wealthier kids at the expense of the middle class and disadvantaged.

Without standardized testing, it is impossible to imagine such an increase in privatization.

High stakes testing is a Trojan horse. It is a way to secretly undermine and weaken public schools so that testing corporations, charter schools and voucher schools can thrive.

Judged by its own metrics of success, standardized testing is an abject failure. Judged by the metric of business and school privatization it is a rousing success.

And that’s why it has been so hard to discontinue.

This is corporate welfare at its finest, and the people getting rich off our tax dollars won’t allow us to turn off the flow of funding without a fight.

On the right, policymakers are often boldly honest about their goals to bolster privatization over public schools. On the left, policymakers still cling to the failed measures of success testing has not been able to meet time-and-again.

However, both groups support the same system. They only give different reasons.

It is past time to wake up and smell the flowers.

If we want to ensure education dollars go to education and not profiteers, we need to end standardized testing.

If we want to help students learn to the best of their abilities, we need to stop gaslighting them with faulty measures of success or failure.

If we want to allow teachers to do the best for their students, we need to stop holding them back with antiquated eugenicist shackles.

And if we truly want to save our public school system, we have to stop propping up privatization.

In short, we need to end standardized testing.

The sooner, the better.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Reducing Students to Their Test Scores Will Only Increase Their Pandemic Wounds

October 28, 2021 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, Allegheny County, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Education, Learning, literature, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized administrators, coronavirus, COVID-19, DiBELS, education, emotional, pandemic, Politics, schools, social, Students, teachers, Test Prep, test scores, testocracy

Read the following as quickly and accurately as you can:

‘I know I withought all by he middle on, ” said a between he name a buzzing, he for began open he the only reason for making.”

Very good, you’re told as your teacher clicks a stopwatch and writes on a piece of paper.

Now try this one:

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”

The teacher frowns and writes for a minute straight without comment.

Okay. Give this one a shot:

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elity, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”

No, this isn’t a crash course in some foreign language.

It’s the DIBELS test.

Students as young as Kindergarten (and sometimes younger) are asked to read a text aloud in a given time and each mispronunciation is recorded and marked against them.

And, yes, the texts are often pure nonsense.

My first example was from a nonsense generator of Winnie the Pooh, the second was from “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll and the last an example of Lorem ipsum, a placeholder text commonly used in the graphic, print, and publishing industries.

To my knowledge none are actually used on the DIBELS test but they give you an idea of what an adult version might be like if given to people our age and not just the littles.

Can you imagine being a child, feeling the pressure of a test and being presented with something that looked like those passages!?

The fear! The sense of urgency to say something before the time runs out! The feeling of inadequacy and confusion as you finished knowing you got it wrong!

And the assurance that this meant there was something wrong with YOU!

That’s reading assessment in the standardized testing age.

Decoding – or working out the actual pronunciation of words – is given primacy over actual comprehension.

Why? Because that way we can break reading down into simple, quantifiable tasks that can be used to sort and rank children.

You know. The goal of standardized testing.

It’s highly controversial among people who study reading acquisition, but extremely common in elementary and middle schools.

And extremely lucrative for the makers of the DIBELS test.

Today I was forced to leave my class of 8th grade students with a sub so an “expert”from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit could lecture me and the rest of my school’s English department in using DIBELS as a gatekeeper assessment for all students.

That way we can group the students more easily based on their reading deficiencies.

I literally had to stop teaching for THAT.

I was bopping around the classroom, reading students’ writing, helping them organize it, helping them fix their explanations and craft sophisticated essays on a short story.

But I had to STOP, so an outside contractor could explain to ME how to teach.

ME, a Nationally Board certified teacher with two decades of classroom experience.

And the rest of the department with similar experience and education. In the group was also the holder of a doctorate in education. Almost all of us at least held a masters degree.

It boggles the mind.

In this time of pandemic stress when just keeping enough teachers in the building to staff our classrooms is a challenge, administration is wasting our time with this.

Before Covid-19, I could almost imagine it.

We did a lot of stupid things back then. But now a deadly virus rages across the country. Several students and staff get sick every week.

There is a shortage of teachers, aides, subs, bus drivers, and other staff.

And even though most school buildings are open, most students are still suffering from the social and emotional effects of the never-ending disaster.

Yet the people who set school policy refuse to see any of it.

They’re like ostriches – in suits – with their heads planted firmly in the ground.

Covid safety protocols, reducing teacher workload, providing counselors for students – none of that is even on their radar.

All they want to do is reinstitute the policies that weren’t working well before the pandemic hit.

The only difference is their sense of urgency.

In fact, the only impact they even recognize of the last year and a half is the dreaded LEARNING LOSS.

Kids weren’t in class consistently. They were in on-line classes, or hybrid classes or maybe they didn’t even show up to class at all.

That means they don’t know as much today as they would have known had the pandemic not happened.

So – we’re told – they’ve lost learning.

Oh no!

But what these decision makers don’t seem to understand is that this whole concept is kind of meaningless.

All people learn at different rates. If you don’t know something today, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn it tomorrow.

There’s no time table for understanding. It’s not a race. It doesn’t matter when you learn something only that you continue making progress.

However, you’d need a classroom teacher to explain that to you. And these are more business types. Administrators and number crunchers who may have stood in front of a classroom a long time ago but escaped at the first opportunity.

They look at a class full of students and don’t see human children. They see numbers, data.

And they are just itching to get back to sorting and ranking students based on standardized test scores.

After all – say it with me – LEARNING LOSS!!!!

Unfortunately there’s a whole world of reality up here above ground that they’re ignoring. And up here continuing with their willful fantasy is doing real harm.

When I look at my classes of students, I don’t see overwhelming academic deficiencies.

Even their test scores don’t justify that myth.

According to the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA), they’re pretty much where I’d expect them any other year.

But their behaviors are off the hook!

They simply don’t know how to interact with each other without conflict.

My students are desperate for attention – any kind of attention – and will do almost anything to get it.

They’d prefer to be respected, but they don’t understand how to treat each other respectfully. So they aim for any kind of response.

To a large extent this is due to a disruption in the social and emotional development they would have received at school. But robbed of good role models and adequate consequences, they’re somewhat at sea.

Moreover, the pandemic has had a devastating effect on their support systems at home. Parents, family members and guardians have lost jobs, become sick and some have even died.

They don’t know who to trust and who they can rely on.

So when they get to school, we’re going to meet their needs with more standardized tests!?

That’s one of the worst things we could do.

Take a child who already has trust issues and force them to read nonsense sentences while we judge them with a stopwatch?

Erase their individual identities and try to see them primarily as their scores?

These are in the low group. These are in the middle group. These are in the high group.

Instead of giving them robust pieces of literature to read, they’ll get nonfiction scraps devoid of any connection to their lives, interests or aptitudes.

We’ll drill and kill them, make every day about teaching to the test instead of teaching to the student.

We’ll let data drive the instruction instead driving it based on the actual living, breathing, human beings we’re supposed to be serving.

And instead of relying on teachers – highly trained people with decades of experience in how children learn effectively – we’ll put our trust in mega corporations that make more money the less effective their materials are.

Prepare for a test – they make money.

Take a test – they make money.

Fail the test and have to remediate – they make money.

It’s a scam – an endless cycle – and administrators and policy makers keep falling for it.

Will this help meet kids social needs?

Absolutely not. They’ll be segregated by ability and forced to repeat confusing and mind numbing tasks as if that’s what education was.

Will it help meet kids emotional needs?

No way! Being forced to do the same thing over and over and continually told you’re a failure won’t teach anything except a kind of learned helplessness.

Kids will learn “I’m bad at math” or “I’m bad at reading” rather than the joy that can be found in both activities.

They’ll learn to give up.

And they’ll take out the negative feelings all this generates on each other and their teachers.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A new world is possible.

The pandemic offers us a chance to stop repeating the same mistakes of the past.

We can scrap standardized testing and focus on authentic assessments – teacher constructed assessments the are suited to the individual context, the individual students.

We can focus on lessons that engage students and encourage them to learn intrinsically.

We can focus on what students know instead of what they don’t so they learn that they are capable, that they have the power to do the lesson.

We could help students understand how to interact with each other and heal some of the social and emotional wounds of the past year and a half.

But we can’t do that if we’re forced to continue with the same mistakes of the past.

We have to recognize the reality teachers, students and parents are living through.

And we have to make decisions based on that reality, not the same old preconceptions that have never gotten us anywhere.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Economists Worry Covid-19 May End Standardized Testing Altogether

July 22, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Donald Trump, Education, Eugenics, history, Joe Biden, Learning, Local Control, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Toxic Testing, Uncategorized coronavirus, COVID-19, economics, economists, education, pandemic, Politics, Profit, schools, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

The sky is falling for standardized test enthusiasts.

Economists Paul Bruno and Dan Goldhaber published a paper this month worrying that the Coronavirus pandemic may increase pressure to end high stakes testing once and for all.

The paper is called “Reflections on What Pandemic-Related State Test Waiver Requests Suggest About the Priorities for the Use of Tests.” It was written for The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) – a Walton funded, pro standardized testing policy concern.

It’s easy to see why Bruno (who also taught middle school) and Goldhaber (who did not) are distressed.

Last school year President Joe Biden forced districts nationwide to give standardized assessments despite the raging Covid-19 pandemic.

Schools could barely keep their doors open and conduct in-person classes. Many educators were still teaching their students on-line or both on-line and in-person at the same time. Hundreds of teachers died from the virus. Thousands of students have lost parents, relatives or became sick, themselves.

Yet the Biden administration refused to give them any relief from the burden of standardized testing as the previous administration had just a year before.

And if increasing cases of the even more contagious Delta Variant continue to spread in 2021-22 while the last 30% of American adults are reluctant to get the vaccine, the situation could be even worse this spring.

For a third year in a row, standardized testing could be yet another unnecessary hurdle for students already overburdened with trauma. Would Biden double down on last year’s mistake or finally see the error of his ways?

The result has been an overwhelming backlash against the already unpopular education policy.

In their paper, Bruno and Goldhaber looked at last year’s waiver requests asking for permission to cancel or modify statewide exams in 11 states and the District of Columbia.

Only the District of Columbia’s waiver was granted. All other states had to give the exams, but there was much leeway in how and when.

In the most revealing part of the paper, the economists explain why they think the US Department of Education seems to have refused blanket waivers last year:

“We speculate that there was concern that even temporarily waiving statewide tests would give momentum to those advocating for the elimination of testing all together. That is, [the US Department of Education] USDOE (and perhaps states that did not request that common assessments be waived) may be less interested in what happens with testing this year than worried about a slippery slope toward increasingly lax testing requirements.” [Emphasis mine]

So refusing testing waivers wasn’t about the need for last year’s scores. It wasn’t about making sure struggling students get resources. It was about ensuring that high stakes testing would go on for years to come.

In other words, it was about politics.

Speaking of which, the report then becomes focused on advice for standardized testing advocates to combat mounting pressure to end these mandated federal assessments.

If the public doesn’t see the value in the tests, Bruno and Goldhaber say, policymakers must explain why the tests are important, and not just in generalities. They must explicitly show how standardized test scores improve education and help specific students.

They write:

“We encourage policymakers to think carefully, explicitly, and publicly about how they have tailored their standardized testing policies to achieve various diagnostic, research, and accountability objectives. This will help to ensure that standardized tests have benefits for more schools and students and will bolster fragile political support for statewide tests.”

However, nowhere in the entire paper do Bruno and Goldhaber actually do this, themselves.

How do standardized tests help students?

That’s exactly the question at stake here.

In short, I would argue as I have countless times before that they DO NOT help students.

They DO NOT help allocate resources to struggling students.

They DO NOT help diagnose student learning difficulties.

They DO NOT even do a good job of showing what students have learned.

If the authors had good counterarguments, now would have been a good time.

The authors do say that standardized test scores are predictive of latter student outcomes but they ignore whether other assessments or factors are MORE predictive.

Yes, students with high test scores often graduate, excel in college or trade schools, etc. However, the same can be said with classroom grades. In fact, classroom grades are even more accurate.

This just makes sense. Classroom grades are based on at least 180 days of formal and informal assessment. Standardized tests are merely a snapshot of a few days work.

However, even more predictive is child poverty. The rich kids usually do much better than the poor kids. Same with race, class and the funding each student receives at his or her school.

If you want to help students, that’s where you need to begin – equitable resource allocation. Make sure all students have what they need to succeed, and realize that the more poverty you have, the greater the need, the greater the resources necessary.

Test scores are effectively useless.

If the only hope for testing is for cheerleaders to prove the policy’s efficacy, then have at it. Testing opponents have been demanding substantive answers to that question for decades.

To paraphrase Motown singer Edwin Starr:

“Testing! HUH!
What is it good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!“

And while you’re struggling to answer that question in the positive, make sure to explain why an assessment strategy designed by eugenicists is the best way to judge today’s children.

Standardized tests literally were invented to justify bias. They were designed to prove that higher income, higher class, white people were entitled to more than poorer, lower class, brown people. Any defense of the assessments today must explain how the contemporary variety escapes the essential racist assumptions the entire project is based on.

Standardized testing is a multi-billion dollar industry. The tests are written by huge corporations. They are graded by the same corporations. And when students fail, it is often the exact same corporations who provide the remediation materials, software and teacher training.

That is why the Biden administration didn’t waive the tests last year. That’s also why economists like Bruno and Goldhaber are sounding the alarm.

This is about saving an endangered cash cow. It’s protecting the goose that lays golden eggs.

It has nothing to do with helping children learn.

And there is no better image to prove that than forcing kids to take a meaningless test during a global pandemic.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

The Year Without Standardized Testing

April 12, 2021 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, absenteeism, Accountability, Allegheny County, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Data, Democrat, edtech, Education, history, Learning, Opt Out, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing annual testing, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, high stakes testing, pandemic, Politics, schools, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, test refusal, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

Last year was the first in nearly two decades that the US did not give standardized tests to virtually every student in public school.

Think about that.

Since 2001 almost every child took the tests unless their parents explicitly demanded they be opted out.

For 19 years almost every child in grades 3-8 and once in high school took standardized assessments.

And then came 2019-20 and – nothing.

No multiple guess fill-in the bubble questions.

No sorting students into classes based on the results.

No evaluating teachers and schools based on the poverty, race and ethnicities of the children they serve.

And all it took to make us stop was a global pandemic.

What are the results of that discontinuity?

We may never really know.

There are so many variables at play.

The Covid-19 pandemic closed school rooms across the nation for various lengths of time. Some are still closed. Some are beginning to close again.

Many classes were conducted remotely through conferencing software like Zoom and file sharing programs like Google Classroom. Others were conducted through a hybrid model combining in-person instruction and cyber instruction. While still others met in-person with numerous mitigation efforts like masks, social distancing and air purifiers.

Many students were absent, struggled to learn and experienced countless traumas due to the isolation, sickness and deaths.

About 561,000 people are dead in the United States because of Covid-19.

That’s more than Americans who died in the attack on Pear Harbor (2,403), the 9/11 terrorists attacks (3,000), WWI (116,000) or WWII (405,000).

Only the Civil War (600,000 – 850,000) has a larger death toll. For now.

As of April 1, nearly 3.47 million children have tested positive for COVID-19, most with mild symptoms, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. A few hundred have died, mostly children of color. Many more kids probably contracted the virus but were asymptomatic spreaders of the disease to adults.

As a result, between 37,000 and 43,000 children in the United States have lost at least one parent to COVID-19, according to USC research.

How do you sort through all these tragedies and traumas and say THIS was caused by a lack of standardized testing?

You probably can’t.

But you can ask questions.

For example, how many teachers really missed the data the standardized tests would have shown?

How many students and parents agonized over what last year’s test scores would have been?

How many government agencies really wanted to provide resources to schools but couldn’t figure out where they should go because they didn’t have test scores to guide them?

I’m not sure exactly how we could find answers.

We could survey teachers and staff about it.

We could survey parents and students.

We could even subpoena Congresspeople and ask them under oath if a lack of test scores determined their legislative priorities.

But we’re not really doing any of that.

It’s a prime opportunity to find out something valuable about standardized tests – mainly if people really think they’re valuable.

But we’re not going to stop and do it.

Instead we’re rushing back onto the testing treadmill this year while the Coronavirus pandemic still rages.

Is that logical behavior?

Not really.

We already have almost 20 years of data showing that annual testing did not improve student learning nationally. US kids were no better off from 2001-2019 having yearly tests than students in Scandinavia who were tested much less frequently. In fact, the countries with the highest academic achievement give far fewer assessments.

The effectiveness and fairness of standardized testing have come into question since before George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation enshrined them into law.

They were designed by eugenicists to justify racism and prejudice. Their partiality for wealthier whiter students and discrimination against poorer browner students has been demonstrated time and again.

But in 2001 we created an industry. Huge corporations write the tests, grade the tests and provide the remediation for the tests. Billions of dollars in taxes are funneled into this captive market which creates monetary incentives for our lawmakers to keep the system going.

Yes, some civil rights organizations have waffled back and forth over this as big donors who value the tests make or withhold contributions. Meanwhile, many other more grassroots civil rights organizations such as Journey for Justice Alliance (JJA), a group made up of 38 organizations of Black and Brown parents and students in 23 states, have continuously called for the abolition of high stakes testing.

It should be no surprise then that President Joe Biden – though as a candidate he promised to stop standardized testing if he were elected – did an immediate about face this year and insisted we reinstate the assessments.

A scientific mind would be empirical about this. It would examine the results as much as possible and determine whether moving forward made any sense.

This is especially true as the pandemic health crisis continues to make the act of giving the tests difficult at best and dangerous at worst.

There is no way a logical mind can look at the situation and not come to the conclusion that the status quo on testing is a triumph of capitalism over science and reason.

In a month or so, the year without testing will be just that – a single year.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill:

We shall go on to the end. We shall test during Covid, we shall test in the classes and on-line, we shall test with growing confidence and growing strength wearing masks, we shall defend our industry, whatever the cost may be. We shall test in the homes, we shall fill in bubbles on sanitized desks, we shall test in the fields and in the streets, we shall test in the hospitals; we shall never surrender!

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Lawmakers Backing Standardized Tests Should Practice What They Preach

March 26, 2021 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Data Driven Instruction, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election Reform, Joe Biden, Labor, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, satire, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Unions, voting Accountability, annual testing, education, high stakes testing, Politics, satire, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, test makers, Test Prep, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

When it comes to the whip, one side is definitely better than the other.

Everyone wants to hold it by the stock. No one wants to get hit by the lash.

That’s why politicians as diverse as Donald Trump and Joe Biden have struggled so desperately to defend standardized testing.

They want to keep control of the torture device they’ve inherited from their predecessors without feeling its sting, themselves.

Take the current Covid crisis in our public schools.

Educators are scrambling to teach safely and most lawmakers stand aside unsure how to help.

We can’t figure out which students to assist, they say, without first giving them all a batch of standardized tests.

It’s absurd, like paramedics arriving at a car crash, finding one person in a pool of blood and another completely unscathed – but before they know which person needs first aid, they have to take everyone’s blood pressure.

I mean come on! We’re living through a global pandemic.

Nearly every single class has been majorly disrupted by it.

So just about every single student needs help – BUT SOMEHOW WE NEED DATA TO NARROW THAT DOWN!?

Our duly-elected decision-makers seem to be saying they can only make decisions based on a bunch of numbers.

The fact that they have so little imagination that they can’t visualize the problem without a bar graph is truly disturbing.

But this isn’t rocket science. They don’t HAVE TO be creative thinkers.

Just use class attendance to see which students have received consistent instruction and which have been absent all year.

Look at classroom grades, which outline students’ academic performance from day to day.

Those are numbers. And they clearly show which kids have been impacted the most by Covid-19.

But for some reason actually using the data we already have is just crazy talk!

Scores on a standardized test are the ONLY data that counts.

Okay.

Then I have a suggestion for these legislators.

Why don’t you practice what you preach?

If the only logical way to make decisions is based on test scores, you should provide those scores to the greatest decision-making body in the country: voters.

Every lawmaker who CHAMPIONS standardized tests should have to TAKE standardized tests.

I don’t mean the same tests as the students.

That would be silly.

After all, student tests are designed to favor answers from privileged white people. Most of these lawmakers are the target demographic already. They passed a standardized test (or paid someone to pass the test for them) as a smokescreen getting into whichever prep school or ivy league college where they were legacy enrollments, anyway.

I’m talking about a new series of standardized tests designed to show how much these lawmakers adhere to the principles of their respective political parties.

So there’d be two versions – one for Republicans and one for Democrats.

A high score means the test taker is a bona fide example of their party’s ideals. A low score means they should probably be booted out on their butts.

For example, a question for Democrats might be:

Which policy is progressive?

A) School privatization
B) Fracking on native lands
C) Drone strikes
D) Universal healthcare

And an example for Republicans:

Which policy is fiscally responsible?

A) School privatization
B) Tax cuts for billionaires
C) More unnecessary wars
D) Investing in infrastructure

The answers are both D and that’s because this test would be in high De-mand! Get it?

Think of what we could do with these scores!

Lawmakers could tout their assessment achievements as they campaign.

They could say, “Vote for Sam Smith. He got an Advanced Score on the Democratic System of Statesperson Assessments (DSSA).”

Or “Don’t vote for Megan Mission. She only scored a Satisfactory on the Partnership for Assessment of Republicanism for Congress or Klan (PARCK).”

What an improvement that would be!

Finally, we wouldn’t have to rely on a politician’s voting record or campaign contributions or platform…. We could just look at the score and vote accordingly.

But who would we get to make and grade the tests?

It couldn’t be the politicians, themselves, or even their respective political parties. That wouldn’t be standardized somehow.

If we can’t let teachers create tests for their own students, we certainly can’t trust politicians to do the same for their fellow campaigners.

I guess we could task the testing corporations with making these assessments, but that’s a conflict of interests. We should instead rely on the educational experts, people with the credentials and the most experience actually giving standardized tests.

And that would be…. Classroom teachers!

So these tests should be written by the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

But, of course, this isn’t free. We’ll have to pay these test-creators, and pay them handsomely.

That’s billions more dollars spent on assessment. What an expense! What a waste of tax dollars!

Still, can we really afford not to?

I’m sure would-be lawmakers would like a leg up on the competition, so the teachers’ unions could make workbooks and software packages and apps and teach remedial courses to help folks pass the tests. That would probably bring in more money than the tests, themselves.

And since the teachers would get to grade the assessments, they could make sure the scores are curved so only a very limited number pass each year. We can’t have grade inflation, after all.

What would the teachers do with this money, I wonder?

Well, they could reinvest it in our schools.

See? We’ve just solved two problems at once.

No more under-resourced schools. No more educational inequality. Every school in the country could be like the Taj Mahal!

And all of this just because of standardized testing!

Maybe the lawmakers have the right idea in prioritizing high stakes testing!

Or maybe they understand the value of benefiting from the testing industrial complex and not being subjected to it.

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

Standardized Testing During a Pandemic is Stupid. And Cruel.

March 5, 2021 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, Biden, Budget, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Democrat, edtech, Education, Joe Biden, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology, Whiteness Accountability, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, high stakes testing, Joe Biden, pandemic, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, Test Prep, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

When the Biden administration announced that schools across the nation would have to give standardized tests during the global Coronavirus pandemic this year, America’s teachers let out a collective sigh of disgust.

If it had to be put into words, it might be this:

“I can’t even.”

Imagine a marine biologist being told she had to determine if the water in the dolphin tank is wet.

That’s kind of what the demand to test is like.

Determine if the water is wet and THEN you can feed the dolphin.

Imagine a person on fire being told to measure the temperature of the flames before you could put them out.

Imagine a person staving in the desert being required to take a blood test to determine previous caloric intake before anyone would offer food or water.

It’s literally that dumb.

No, it’s worse.

The reason the Biden administration gave for requiring testing this year was to determine the amount of learning loss students had suffered during the pandemic.

I wrote that in one sentence but it will take several to show how dumb that idea is.

First, there’s the idea of learning loss.

What does it mean?

It’s based on the idea that kids learn on a schedule.

You need to know A, B and C when you’re in 3rd Grade. You need to learn D, E, F in 4th grade. And so on.

And if you miss one of the letters somewhere in there, you’re learning will be disrupted forever.

The Biden administration seems to be worried that kids are not intellectually where they SHOULD be because of the pandemic and that if we don’t do something about it now, they will be irreparably harmed.

It is pure fantasy.

There is no developmental, psychological or neurological basis to it.

Some fool at a standardized testing company just made it up to sell more product.

And it doesn’t take much to prove it wrong.

Do a thought experiment with me.

Imagine you needed directions to the store.

You didn’t get them yesterday. You got them today.

Was your brain irreparably harmed?

You were still able to learn how to get to the store, weren’t you? You just did it one day later. No problem.

It might have stopped you from getting your groceries yesterday, but you can certainly go shopping today.

Now imagine we weren’t talking about directions. Imagine we were talking about addition and subtraction.

Some kids are ready to learn these concepts earlier than others. Does that mean there’s something wrong with them?

No. Absolutely not. It’s just that people’s brains develop at different rates.

And if you don’t learn something one year, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn it a year or two later.

There may be issues with core concepts like language acquisition being delayed too long over larger amounts of time, but these are extreme cases.

Delaying one or two years of school curriculum won’t make or break you.

For most of us, not learning something now doesn’t preclude learning it later.

So learning loss is nonsense.

No child has lost the ability to learn because of the pandemic – except any who died as a result of catching Covid.

That’s perhaps the biggest way the Biden administration’s testing requirement is dumb. It’s justified on assessing something that doesn’t exist.

But if we redefine learning loss into the next best thing that DOES exist – learning – it at least makes sense.

So maybe Joe meant that we need standardized tests to find out how much kids have learned (not what learning they’ve lost).

It’s still deeply stupid, but at least it’s coherent.

Here’s the problem. Standardized tests are completely unnecessary to assess learning. In fact, they’re notoriously terrible at measuring this.

Under normal circumstances, standardized tests don’t show how much a child has learned. They show how well the child can take the test. They show how well the test taker can play the game of test taking.

Most questions on these tests are multiple choice. They limit the possible answers to 4 or 5 choices.

If you’re asking something extremely simple and clear, this is achievable. However, the more complex you get – and by necessity the more subjective the question gets – the more the test taker has to think like the person who wrote the question.

That’s why it’s a standardized test. That’s what it means – conforming to a standard.

Out of all the possible ways to answer the question, the standard test taker will answer like THIS. And whatever that is becomes the correct answer.

The test makers get to decide what kind of person to set the standard as, and most of the time it’s white, male, Eurocentric kids.

This doesn’t matter so much when you’re asking them to calculate 2+2. But when you’re asking them to determine the meaning behind a literary passage or the importance of a historical event or the cultural significance of a scientific invention – it matters.

As a result, kids from richer, whiter homes tend to score better on these tests than those from poorer, browner homes.

And that doesn’t mean poor, brown kids aren’t intelligent. It just means they don’t necessarily think like the standard rich, white kids.

We don’t need to give standardized tests to tell us who gets low scores during a pandemic. It will be the poor minority kids. During a pandemic, during a recession, during a stock market boom, during a revolution, during anything.

Moreover, the idea that the amount of learning children have done in school is a mystery is, itself, a farce.

Of course, most kids have learned less during the pandemic than under normal years.

Schools have been disrupted. Classes have been given remotely, in-person and/or in some hybrid mix of the two. Parents, families, friends have gotten sick, jobs have been lost or put in jeopardy, social interactions have been limited.

You really need a standardized test to tell you that affected learning?

You might as well ask if water’s wet. Or fire’s hot? Or if a starving person is hungry?

But let’s say you needed some independent variable.

Okay. How about looking at the classroom grades students have earned? Look at the amount of learning the teacher has calculated for each student.

After all, most of these kids have been in school to some degree. They have attended some kind of classes. Teachers have done their best to assess what has been learned and to what degree.

Look at teachers’ grades. They will give you 180-some days worth of data.

Look at student attendance. See how often children have been in class. I’m not saying that there aren’t justifiable reasons for missing instruction – there are. But attendance will tell you as lot about how much students have learned.

Ask the parents about their kids. Ask how they think their children are doing. Ask what kind of struggles they’ve gone through this year and how resilient or not their children have been. Ask about the traumas the children have experienced and what solutions they have tried and what kind of help they think they need.

And while you’re at it, make sure to ask the students, themselves. I’m sure they have stories to tell about this year. In fact, many teachers have suggested students keep Covid diaries of what they’ve been going through.

Finally, take a look at the resources each school has. How much do they spend per pupil and how does that compare with surrounding districts? Look at how segregated the school is both in comparison to other districts, other schools in the district and class-by-class within the school. Look at class size, how wide or narrow the curriculum is, how robust the extra curricular activities offered, what kind of counseling and tutoring each school offers. That will tell you a lot about how much learning students have achieved – not just during Covid times but ANYTIME!

If that’s not enough data, I don’t know what to tell you.

There are plenty of measures of student learning this year. Standardized testing is completely unnecessary.

But unfortunately that doesn’t end the stupid.

Now we come to the rationale behind assessing learning in the first place.

The Biden administration says we have to give standardized tests to tell how much students have learned SO THAT WE CAN PROVIDE RESOURCES TO HELP KIDS CATCH UP!

Are you freaking kidding me!?

That’s the reason behind this fool’s errand?

You need something to tell you where to direct the resources?

Let me give you a little advice. If you’ve got a hungry dolphin, stop worrying about the wetness of the water. Feed the dang thing!

If someone’s on fire, put away the thermometer and take out the hose.

If someone’s starving, put away the needle and take out a glass of water and a sandwich.

Because that’s the ultimate problem with test-based accountability.

It purports to offer resources to students in need but never really does so.

There is no additional funding coming to help kids overcome the hurdles of Covid. Just as there were no additional resources to help children of color after many failed standardized assessments.

There’s just a boondoggle to be given to the testing companies on the dubious promise that the next time kids take the tests, they’ll do better.

There’s no money for tutoring or counselors or extra curricular activities or reducing class size. But there’s a treasure chest full of gold doubloons (i.e. tax dollars) for testing companies to give us test prep materials.

Common Core workbooks, standardized test prep software, test look-a-like apps – they’re all there.

It’s all just corporate welfare for the standardized testing industry. It’s not about helping kids learn.

In any normal year, that would be bad enough.

But this year it’s even worse.

Not only will the tests fail to bring any relief to children struggling to learn in a pandemic, they will actually stop them from learning.

Because, after all, one of the most precious resources this year is time. And that’s exactly what these tests will gobble up.

Wasting time on testing is bad in any year, but in a year when school buildings have been closed and learning has been conducted remotely, when we’ve struggled with new technologies and safety precautions, when we’ve seen our friends and neighbors get sick, quarantine and hospitalize… Every second learning is that much more valuable.

Instead of using what few days remain of the academic year to reinforce skills, discuss new concepts or practice problems, the Biden administration insists teachers proctor standardized tests.

That takes time. A lot if it.

Yes, Biden is allowing all kinds of leniency in HOW we take the tests. They can be shortened, taken in school, taken remotely, even taken at a later date – but they must be taken.

So goodbye, time that could have been spent on authentic learning. Hello, hours, days and weeks of test-taking drudgery.

That’s not a trade off many teachers, parents or students think is fair.

So President Biden can stop the charade.

America’s teachers aren’t buying it.

We know how deeply stupid this testing mandate is.

Stupid and cruel.

Paging, Dr. Jill Biden. Paging, Dr. Jill Biden. Where you at?

Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

testocracy

When Good Students Get Bad Standardized Test Scores

If Standardized Tests Were Going to Succeed, They Would Have Done So By Now

Economists Worry Covid-19 May End Standardized Testing Altogether

The Year Without Standardized Testing

Lawmakers Backing Standardized Tests Should Practice What They Preach

HONORABLE MENTION

11) WPIAL is Wrong! Racist Taunts at a Football Game are NOT a Matter of Both Sides

10) Federal or State Legislature May Raise Teacher Salaries so Schools Have Enough Staff to Reopen

9) Why Even the Best Charter Schools are Fundamentally Inequitable

8) Every Teacher Knows

7) With the Death of Queen Elizabeth II, the US Should End Its Biggest Colonial Enterprise – Charter Schools

6) Holtzman Resigns as MASD Superintendent After Questions Over Contract Shenanigans

5) Silencing School Whistleblowers Through Social Media

4) If Standardized Tests Were Going to Succeed, They Would Have Done So By Now

3) Top 5 Charter School Myths Debunked

2) The MAP Test – Selling Schools Unnecessary Junk at Student Expense

1) Posting Learning Objectives in the Classroom is Still a Dumb Idea

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

2021:

2020:

2019:

2018:

2017:

2016

2015

2014

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

HAS IT CHANGED?