post in space: testing

Showing posts with label testing. Show all posts

criminalizing failure

Education Radio: Criminalizing failure: How high stakes testing warps identities, opportunities and communities:

"In this week’s program, we take a closer look at how high stakes testing is impacting what happens in classrooms, how teachers see students, how students see themselves, and the kinds of society we are building through how young people are being educated. The impact of high stakes tests is both broadly social and intimately personal. Socially, high stakes testing re-segregates our schools, marginalizes black and brown children, young people who live in poverty and children who do not learn in traditional ways. High stakes testing tells us who we will value, and who we will not value, and makes room for us to criminalize youth, especially black and brown youth, opening the path to the school to prison pipeline. It operates within and builds on white supremacy, and exploits long standing privileges and oppressions. And, as with any dominant discourse, high stakes testing enters our consciousness and begins to structure how we see ourselves, each other, and the kind of world we want to build."via Blog this'

A sensitive look at the full ramifications of high stakes testing and the way it impacts kids. Much of this would also apply to most forms of grading practiced in the US though teachers do have somewhat more control over that process. The schools are a service for families and kids and schools should support every child. And doing this fully and fairly would strengthen our social relationships and build our human capital. We cannot have a sift and sort approach to children: we can provide services that are supportive and helpful to families. We might be astonished at the variety and depth of the many skills and talents that human beings possess were we not so bent on invasive shaping and sorting, all based on disproved science and all extremely anti-social in design.

This is one of the best shows I have heard recently on this topic but I want to point out that testing links two different worlds together: the world we hear so poignantly about in this show and a another world, a world of good schools and clean suburbs, corporate campuses, and top colleges. The ones who pass these tests are also affected: they may feel smarter than they are and they may assume they know more than they do. Those who test well and get the grades and achieve may come to accept many aspects of this coercion and sorting system as beneficial. They may become comfortable with social and institutional practices that are overly punitive and destructive. They may not actually know what they think they know.

How could so many top-level economists not see the global financial crisis? How could so many economists follow groupthink and not question the models they learned? How could Europe actually try an austerity that is so vicious on its surface? How could anyone think that was the way to go forward? How much intellectual energy is expended on trivial activities that could have tackled more meaningful work? Why do we have so many poorly built and designed houses, suburbs, services and products? Why is there so much waste generated? The systems we raise our children within affect us all.

Those who do well on standardized tests may pose even greater challenges to all of us than those who fail.

background posts
side effects of the literacy factory model
school to prison pipeline
training passivity
social deficit
creeping institutionalization
socialization
the Prussian model
grading in the stone age
Howard Wainer on testing
better living through testing
the language of control: achievement

related
Over 230 Texas School Systems Pass Resolution to Rein In High Stakes Testing

remediation (and the PASS test)

De Cito Eindtoets Basisonderwijs.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was discussing again today why many universities will not accept anything that would allow a student to skip their introductory writing class. I mentioned that this practice makes a lot of money for schools. So many bad readers, so many ill-educated kids and so many families to blame. I guess it will just mean ... more school and more payments to schools. Funny how that works.

Why are strong readers being labeled remedial? - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post:

I woke up three or four days ago remembering that procedure and asking myself a question probably triggered by conversations I’m having with Rick Roach, an Orange County, Florida, school board member. You may remember Rick. I wrote about him in my December 5 Answer Sheet blog post — how he took a version of the state’s 10th grade high-stakes standardized reading test and got 62, a score that would have landed him in a remedial reading class. It would also have kept him from taking a class that led to his joining the swim team, becoming its captain, and being named the team’s Most Valuable Player.

It is unethical to limit participation in extracurricular activities based on grading. If grades are given, and they shouldn't be, expanding their use as gatekeepers is clearly wrong. It is not only unethical and penalizes students already penalized by the grade itself but it greatly narrows the social bandwidth within schools as well.

Grading is a punitive method of ranking that relies on disproved behavioral theories and dysfunctional social schemes. Teachers can stop grading as Joe Bower has done.

There is also no check on remediation, a system-defined problem that requires more time in the system and makes more jobs within the system. Note that remediation usually means entire separate classes and services that only prolong schooling; rarely is it support alongside the normal path. There is big money in remediation and no way to see what caused the problem and change that within the system.

There are three high schools in the part of Orange County that Rick represents. In those three schools, 30 remedial reading teachers are teaching about 3,000 students!

What’s going on here? What’s changed? Why, a few years ago, was there was no apparent need for remedial reading programs for high school students, and now about one out of three are enrolled in them? Have ability levels dropped that far that fast?....

It’s easy. Make the passages to be read boring. Ask questions that have more than one right answer but count only one answer as correct. Throw in a few unfamiliar words or references. Increase the length of sentences. Make the test so long that fatigue or impatience set in. Add a few trick questions. Increase stress levels by setting a too-short completion time. Or, easiest of all, just arbitrarily raise the passing score.

Tests can be designed to yield any failure rate from zero to a hundred percent. Publishers just have to be careful not to make the failure rate so high that test buyers get suspicious.

The PASS Test
Marion Brady ends the piece with this:

And there’s not one shred of evidence that standardized tests are a more accurate and useful measure of learner performance than teacher judgment. Indeed, I’d argue that they’re far less accurate and useful, and therefore a harmful, expensive distraction.

I asked a bunch of nationally known reading experts to explain why standardized tests are timed. Here’s one’s response: “It has to do with the absurd notion of standardizing the testing situation in an attempt to get ‘valid’ results. If everyone takes the test under the exact same conditions, the results are valid information....Yeah, right. And so what we actually do is assess how well a population performs under testing conditions rather than testing what they actually know.”

Distraction? Grading siphons out children, changes the focus of learning, often makes kids feel like failures or they incorrectly assess their capabilities which leads many to vocational choices that are not optimum. Grades falsely alter learning by not allowing mistakes, and schools routinely use grades to discipline students. Grading is one of the principal ways children are filtered and class status is preserved. Grading alters talented students motivation and interests as well even if they benefit more from the game, it remains a pernicious practice at all levels.

There is an untimed standardized test created by homeschoolers and used by them and others. The remarkable PASS test was created in the early 1960s by Carl Hewitt and Raymond Moore, the home education pioneer and concern for test stress was implicit in the design:

The PASS Test was developed specifically for home schoolers. It has certain similarities to other achievement tests in that it measures student achievement in the subjects of reading, language, and math. But is has important differences:It was designed for parents to administer at home. This can greatly reduce the stress level of testing. We do not require that a certified teacher administer it.

It is untimed, which helps students relax.

It consists of many test levels instead of one per grade. As a result, students take a shorter test and find most questions challenging but not frustrating. By contrast, tests for an entire grade must cover a broad range of abilities and therefore many items are either too hard or too easy. A brief placement test is included with the PASS to help choose a test level of appropriate difficulty.

There is no need for standardized testing or grades to assess students and we can offer students paths to college without them. But for parents within the system opting out of standardized testing is important activism and the PASS test is another option some may choose.

related

the remediation windfall

compulsory hours of instruction

Standardized tests with high stakes are bad for learning (joebower.org)

SAT = family income measurement

How to predict a student’s SAT score: Look at the parents’ tax return | Daniel Pink:

"Take a look at the chart below. On the horizontal axis is family income. On the vertical axis is the combined average SAT score for students from families in each group. The general story is pretty simple: The higher the parents’ income, the higher their kids’ SAT scores."

The SAT test is a finely-honed way to ascertain which kids come from which socio-economic groups.

I've posted stuff by Daniel Pink before:

the joy of testing

New York City Student Testing Over the Past Decade - NYTimes.com:

In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York’s long march to a new age of accountability.

The article recounts the many test failures and issues.

opt out

January 7 has been declared a National Opt Out day for standardized testing. FairTest has links and information on the activism around this issue. The factory schools say they are trying to change the manufacturing process to where every child is quality-engineered to meet corporate job specifications. Homeschoolers have opted out: they have pioneered a way out for millions of families, families whose needs and wants are completely ignored by a public school system that is not truly public and not a social service for families and children.

Opting Out | FairTest:

Just Say No to the Test" 'Opting out' of testing is a potentially powerful way to resist No Child Left Behind and the way standardized testing distorts and corrupts K-12 classrooms. Growing numbers of parents and students are questioning the value of NCLB testing and saying they want to exercise the right to opt out.

In recent months, a number of Facebook and wiki pages, as well as a web site, have been created to nurture a national campaign to opt out of NCLB and state testing. Below are the names and links to the sites along with descriptions of each site by their creators. Visit them and spread the word to fellow parents and students.

In addition, FairTest has materials relevant to opt out efforts. These include an explanation of relevant federal policies, as well as fact sheets on tests, the consequences of high-stakes testing, and better ways to assess and evaluate students."

United Opt Out National | The movement to end punitive public school testing:

For the week of December 11th we are asking everyone to spread the word of January 7th, National Opt Out Day, by sharing it on Facebook. Last week we asked that the information be placed in your email signature – easy peasy way to spread the word without any legwork. This week, make it go viral on FB!! Here is the info to share:

United Opt Out National has declared January 7th as National Opt Out Day. On this day we are encouraging Occupy movements everywhere to endorse this action. We are asking parents, students and community members to write letters/postcards to their school districts stating how they will OPT OUT. We have created a postcard that allows for multiple ways to opt out and it can be purchased in bulk to share. Of course, the slam dunk is opting out of the state test as this will shut down corporate education reform. If everyone opts out in mass they will have NO test data to punish students, teachers and communities. Our postcards can be found at http://www.zazzle.com/unitedoptout.

test ed

“Poverty Is the Problem”: Efforts to Cut Education Funding, Expand Standardized Testing Assailed:

BRIAN JONES: Well, it depends on the school, but I’ve seen schools that begin right away, that begin the first week of school, where they begin with pretests to try to, you know, tell the kids—if you ask a kid in Harlem—go to any school in Harlem and ask a young elementary school student, "What’s the point of school? Why are you here?" They’ll tell you, "It’s to pass tests, so that I can get a job."There’s nothing about—you know, I heard Jonathan Kozol speak at the Save Our Schools march, and he said something that really stayed with me. He said, at the wealthy schools, at your Phillips Exeter and Andover Academies, you know, those kids get to feast on the treasures of the earth. They get to enjoy literature and savor it. And they get to savor their savoring of it. And in our schools, too often kids are given these kind of cardboard passages that are meant to show them what a noun is. But there’s no joy in it. And there’s no—I would argue there’s no real learning.

and this:

AMY GOODMAN: Talking about big business, big business and the tests

DIANE RAVITCH: Right. And the testing industry itself is a multibillion-dollar industry that has grown and fattened over the past decade. Pearson, for example, McGraw-Hill, the two big ones. Pearson has a $500 million contract with the state of Texas, another, I forget how many, hundreds of millions with Florida. Now they’ve just taken the New York contract. This is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. So, it will be very difficult to back away from what we’re locked into now, the kind of intellectual wasteland of so many of our public schools, because there is big business in keeping it this way.

Open source and open access schools, where families can pick and choose and get the services they need could potentially expand service while conserving by bundling services as needed by the people they serve.

yong zhao on testing security

Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » Ditch Testing (Part 4): Test Security Measures in China Zhao has written a five-part series of posts in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. They are all worth reading.

I want to focus on #4 Ditch Testing: Test Security Measures in China. Zhao describes the extensive security measures China takes to ensure that testing happens without cheating. From his post:

There are more layers of test security measures not mentioned in the Xinhua story. On testing days, there are electronic surveillance vehicles patrolling outside the testing site to intercept electronic signals; electronic devices are used to interfere electronic transmission; and devices to block cell phone reception. The reason for all these measures is the increased use of sophisticated wireless devices for cheating. Many of these devices rival equipment used by James Bond and his colleagues. Since 2001, electronic devices such as earpieces, watches, pens, and pencil erasers have been modified as receivers. Cheaters use these devices to receive answers transmitted from powerful equipment hidden in places near the test sites. The answers are provided by individuals who make a huge profit in this operation (prices differ for different tests but RMB2,000 is often mentioned per subject per test). These individuals hire content experts to come up with the answers to test items, which may have been transmitted by test proctors who use mini-cameras hidden in glasses or clothes they wear. Various government agencies, including the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Industry and Information, Ministry of Public Safety (Police), and Ministry of Finance, have been working together to develop anti-cheating technologies and measures. But they are always behind. There is always newer anti-anti-cheating technology being developed. Ironically, the race between cheating and anti-cheating may have helped China’s technology advancement.

When citizens accept extreme measures like this as a daily thing, there are consequences. Citizens become used to authoritarian tactics and, growing ever more dangerous, private spending coalitions are formed that inflate the need and ensure that this sector cannot easily be changed. In simpler terms, there are good jobs in over-testing and once you start down that road, it is hard to change paths. Even China may want to examine that path (as they indeed are) seeing that the US, since WWII, has found it nearly impossible to control a military that has brought the largest economy on the globe to near disaster pursuing endless wars that were never a real threat to the US. Eisenhauer's famously prescient warning about the military-industrial complex did not take into account the birth of the modern corporation whose empowerment further reduces the effectiveness of citizens and communities to live their lives in freedom.

The extreme growth of top secret business after the 9/11 attacks, shows how large bureaucracies that are not anchored securely into citizens lives can act against us. Clearly, sustained economic stability is a security issue that big banks and the military are now collapsing in the name of security and risk diminishment. Railing against government doesn't define the problem and only empowers private corporations which have the very same structure. I have blogged about how schools may have contributed to this by making everyone a bit too comfortable with large, hierarchical organizations and their procedures. And I continually write about how getting families in control of the process seems to me to be the best way to ensure that the provision of education resources for communities has a mechanism for anchoring educational bureaucracies to the citizens they should serve.

Zhao has the data and he makes the case against heading down a path we cannot afford to walk. More high-stakes testing, more quants making tests secure, will only further diminish our communities and their economic viability.

more testing

Fighting the Scourge of Drug-Impaired Scrapbooking - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

The ACLU of Pennsylvania is reviving a challenge to the Delaware Valley School District's drug testing policy, which requires all students participating in extracurricular activities to supply an initial urine sample and agree to random screening thereafter. The plaintiffs are Glenn and Kathy Kiederer of Shohola, who were surprised by the paperwork their 12-year-old daughter brought home after she signed up for her school's scrapbooking club:

"I feel I'm being coerced into signing this paper," Glenn Kiederer said Monday during a hearing in Pike County. "To drug test at this age makes it normal for them. If it's normal, when they have children, what will be normal for them? A chip in your arm that tracks where you go?"

Invasive testing of kids for drugs is not how a public system would treat the people it was working for if families and kids actually had power and input into a system that has become autonomous from the very people it should serve. Schools have driven the use of stimulant drugs in kids because there is no ability to modify or customize schedules even for kids having stress.

Testing brains and testing bladders are similarly useless efforts to control learning and it is completely unnecessary. People naturally like to learn, families are always interested in jobs for their kids, and authoritarian tactics serve class interests.

brown down on testing

Bachardy's portrait of California Governor Jer...

Image via Wikipedia

Official portrait of Jerry Brown as Governor of California,
from the California State Capitol Museum.
Painted by Don Bachardy.

California Governor Puts the Testing Juggernaut On Ice - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher Governor Jerry Brown is proposing ending some of the massive testing driven by NCLB.

The humanity and dignity of our children is not yet a collective value in the US and Brown stands out in his perception that the factory system we foist on our young people is an inhumane way to approach education. This approach was new and offered some great strengths when the US was an agricultural society and schooling was short and jobs did not depend on school at all. The whole world around the schools has changed but the schools have not.

From the article, Brown wrote this, a rare and literate view:

The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a "one size fit all" approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive memberof society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.

Also linked to within the post: Standardized Testing Mythbusters! - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

infographic SAT scores by state

SAT Scores by State

via Real Online Degrees

parents opting out

Mother hopes others will opt out of standardized testing - CNN A story about a parent getting involved and making choices for her kids even when they differ from what the schools advise.

Michele Gray's sons -- Ted Rosenblum, 11, and John Michael Rosenblum, 9 -- did independent study the week of March 14 while their classmates were filling in hundreds of bubbles in classrooms with doors marked, "Quiet. Testing in Progress."

video from CNN

From a post called Parents Taking Action in PA -- What CNN left out

Ted had already started doing research and pointed me toward a Huffington post by Dr. Slekar on his struggles with the testing. I contacted Tim, and he invited me to a showing of the Race To Nowhere. It was there that Dr. Vescio and I connected. We were both deeply affected by the Race to Nowhere and knew we had to do something. Then Ted showed me an article about the scoring of the tests which had outraged him. I contacted two of the people mentioned in the article, Todd Farley and Dan DiMaggio. After speaking with them, I bought and read Farley’s book about his 15 years inside the standardized testing industry, “Making the Grades.”

howard wainer on testing

Joe Bower maintains the excellent blog, for the love of learning, and he put this up with a recommendation to listen and it is very interesting.

But we don't need expert analysis of complex testing issues to recognize the inhumanity of testing that supports a factory approach to education that is authoritarian and undemocratic and forced on children and young people. We just need to know that treating our kids well will always be the way forward.

The talk by Howard Wainer is below. Note that he differentiates between schooling and education and insists that schooling is what we are referring to when discussing what happens in a school whereas education may or not may not happen, the words should be separate. Homeschooling activists know this.

Wainer discusses issues about score scales and many other inequities and class warfare methods used on our children by forced mass schooling and its use to ensure a system of credentialing to preserve class status.

We shouldn't subject families to this sort of manipulation: we need schools that provide voluntary and humane learning services for citizens who choose what they want and need. And kids can go on the record and build portfolios for credentials when they choose. We don't need to use Victorian methods in the 21st century.

via for love of learning

a brief history of standardized tests

A brief overview of Standardized Testing (NOTE: broken link at Mothering magazine. The quote below is from the article and I have added two current links to this text as well. ) and its roots in the eugenics movement is up at Mothering magazine. Many do not know of testing's link with the eugenics movement. An excerpt (emphases mine):

At this point, 49 states have core standards around which standardized tests are implemented. Twenty-seven of those states back up the standards in a high-stakes environment, meaning students can be held back or denied graduation based on their test scores alone. Most recently, George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act has mandated high-stakes testing in grades 3 through 8 across the country and guaranteed that more testing under more pressure is well on its way. One might hope that the education bureaucrats of our day would listen to the words of Carl Brigham, the creator of the SAT. Near his death, Brigham wrote a five-page letter to the president of Harvard, stating, "If the unhappy day ever comes when teachers point their students towards these newer examinations, then we may look for the inevitable distortion of education in terms of tests." Yet neither his words nor the progressive education movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s could stop the political steamroller of testing. In 1983, the Reagan administration published the report, A Nation at Risk, which went on to push for more exams as the answer to education's shortcomings and the global economic trends of the time. From then on, there was nearly uninterrupted support for widespread testing. In the last few years, however, voices challenging standardized exams have become louder.

I have linked on this blog to the work of Yong Zhao.

we are not falling behind: more from Yong Zhao

There is a lot of talk about how the US is falling behind other nations. Results on tests are endlessly cited. It is a drum beat that is hard to ignore.

But it is wrong.

Here is some more of the wonderful work of Yong Zhao who points out that we are striving for standardization and testing just as the Chinese feel they can finally break free of that and move closer to the way US education used to work. We are going backwards.

In contrast, the Blueprint for the reauthorization of ESEA in the U.S. pushes to another extreme. Despite all the language about innovation and flexibility, the true leverage the federal government wishes to use is test scores in a few subjects on a national scale. “Common standards” in math and language arts are to become a mandate for all states. To implement these standards, common assessment is called for. One can well expect that once common assessments in these two subjects are in place, schools and teachers will be evaluated based on their students’ performance on these tests. Then accountability measures follow. Soon, the US will have a system like China’s gaokao.

The gaokao [big test for college] has not produced citizens China wants in the 21^st century. I doubt it will do wonders for the United States.

For the record, the way forward, the real 21st century approach will be open source and progressive beyond what is has been. Alberta, Canada is moving toward it; Finland may also (my guess). My post: real school reform: (and a changing view on attendance) is here.

More good articles on this on Zhao's site:

better living through testing

Corporate propaganda: Educational Testing Service, from their manicured campus in Princeton, New Jersey, and their CEO Kurt Landgraf, formerly of DuPont Pharmaceuticals, say they have your child's best interests at heart as they expand the already global reach of testing services into your home, co-opting your family to be America's Smallest School.

For homeschoolers, a business or public institution describing the learning and growth that takes place within the family as a school only makes clear the complete arrogance of our educational institutions who now see all learning done by human beings as part of something they feel authorized to control.

No, the family is not the child's first school and the parents are not the child's first teachers. All learning cannot be contained within the word school and this invasive use of a metaphor diminishes the deep craftwork of motherhood and fatherhood, the first human relationships of the child.

The vast majority of human existence has been lived without schools and many things have been learned, from language to farming, without schools. The implicit metaphor reveals how deeply embedded the experience of mass compulsory schooling is within our collective psyche. The family provides the child's first human relationships and human relationships are critical to our mental and physical health. Schools are not.

In fact, families of all kinds pay for teachers and schools and, in a truly democratic society, these services should work for families providing voluntary educational services of a wide range as needed and requested.

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