Big Time Education Testing Sucks

I should have a better headline with more specific vocabulary, but sometimes short guttural verbs are necessary.

Big time education testing is not quite ready for prime time. Yesterday, South Dakota school administrators received an email with the following information:

This email is to let you know that the testing window for the Smarter Balanced field test has shifted one week. Testing will now begin on Tuesday, March 25. We learned of this development late yesterday and wanted to share with you as soon as possible.
Needless to say, we are very disappointed to have to make this adjustment. As you know, the field test requires unprecedented collaboration among the participating states, districts and testing contractors. However, this puts all of us in a difficult position, particularly those of you who were planning to start testing on March 18. In the final analysis, the consortium decided the change is needed to ensure that we have taken all steps necessary to ensure that teachers, students and administrators have a productive experience with the field test. [emphasis mine]

I've read enough bureaucratic language to know that Smarter Balanced has discovered a problem and is engaged in posterior covering activities. The bolded lines do need special translation, however.For those not familiar with educational jargon, taking "all steps necessary to ensure that teachers, students and administrators have a productive experience" actually means "removing your eyeballs without anesthesia will be less painful and produce fewer emotional scars than this activity."

More importantly, the tests, even if they are not ready for prime time, may not be the most painful "productive" experiences. Some folks with advanced degrees in education have doubled down and engaged in stupid and repugnant behaviors that have no business in education. Valerie Strauss reports on "sit and stare" policies:

“Sit and stare” policies are enforced on those students whose parents have opted them out of taking a high-stakes standardized test but who are still required to be in the school building when the exams are actually proctored. Under this practice, kids are forced to sit at their desks and stare while their classmates take the test. They can’t read. They can’t write. They can’t put in earplugs and listen to music. They can only sit and stare. Really.

“Sit and stare” policies are being considered or adopted in schools from New York to California as a reaction to the growing “opt out” movement in which parents have decided that they do not want their children to have to take high-stakes standardized tests. Each state has its own policy about opting out, but they don’t generally provide districts with guidance about how to enforce it, so administrators come up with their own policies.

So, if students or parents don't want to engage in "a productive experience," steps must be taken to ensure students are as unproductive as possible. I wonder who field tested that idea.

Common Core Tests May Take Up To 10 Hours (Updated)

From this Diane Ravitch post:

Catherine Gewertz reports in Education Week that the new Common Core tests created by the PARCC consortium of states will require up to ten hours, depending on grade level.Here is the projection:

“The amount of time students will have to complete both the performance-based and end-of-year components in math and English/language arts:

Grade 3: 8 hoursGrades 4-5: 9 hours, 20 minutesGrades 6-8: 9 hours, 25 minutes 

Grades 9-10: 9 hours, 45 minutesGrades 

11-12: 9 hours, 55 minutes”

I do remember my previous discussion with Josh Verges, so I know that South Dakota is part of the Smarter Balance consortium not the PARCC consortium.  I also believe Emerson was correct when he asserts that bureaucracies prefer conformity to any other quality. I can confidently predict South Dakota's test will approximate these times.**

Locally, we allocated about 8 hours to finish the Dakota STEP test last year, but 2 hours were used for a science component. These tests will add 3 hours to the language arts and math tests plus whatever science and social science elements that will be added eventually.

**Update: I'm getting really sloppy about reading education articles. In the comments, Josh Verges points out the Education Week article Ravitch links to lists 7 to 8.5 hours for math and language arts. I missed it on first reading.

Pearson's Product Placement: States Pay For Tests And Advertising?

The following comes from a New York Post exclusive, and some of their exclusives haven't been accurate lately, so there might be a bit more to this story. If true, it's yet another example of the Common Core's corporate nature:

At lest a half-dozen companies got an unexpected boost in marketing their brands to New York’s children this week — with free product placement on the state’s English exams.

Teachers and students said yesterday’s multiple-choice section of the eighth-grade tests name-dropped at least a handful of companies or products — including Mug Root Beer, LEGO and that company’s smart robots, Mindstorms.

IBM, the comic book and TV show “Teen Titans” and FIFA — the international soccer federation — were also mentioned in the test booklets, some of them with what educators referred to as out-of-place trademark symbols.

“I’ve been giving this test for eight years and have never seen the test drop trademarked names in passages — let alone note the trademark at the bottom of the page,” said one teacher who administered the exam.

I'm not too concerned that the tests mention Legos or the Teen Titans. I'm not sure there is a generic term for Legos; I'm not sure kids would understand the term "interlocking bricks." Superheroes are part of the public consciousness. Mentioning Robin or one of the other Teen Titans is no different than mentioning Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, or Bill Gates.

I have a larger  problem with logos being placed at the bottom of the page. The tests are paid for by tax dollars. States give corporations tax breaks; the corporations don't need free advertisements that are shown to a captive audience.

I wonder if the tests Pearson will write for South Dakota will mention Hy-Vee, Wall Drug, Sandford, or Citibank. We know they won't mention Chromebooks.

Quotations Of The Day: The Hollowness Of The Common Core Edition

From this Marion Brady post on The Answer Sheet:

First, a bit of common sense that the Core ignores:

Knowledge grows as we connect bits of it — as we discover relationships between, say, street width and sense of community, between birth order and certain personality traits, between capital investment decisions and political stability.

Compartmentalizing knowledge gets directly in the way of the basic process that makes kids (and the rest of us) smarter.

Then, of course there are a few other secrets that reformers and Core advocates try to ignore:

The standards have been swallowed by just about everybody, and as soon as they’ve been digested, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, and other manufacturers of standardized tests will be ready with contracts in hand for computerized tests in numbers sufficient to crash web servers.

The tests, of course, will build in a failure rate set by some faceless decision-maker — an easily operated spigot for meeting stockholder expectations. Open it — boost the failure rate — and up go sales of tests, test prep tools, instructional materials. And, of course, profits.

Even if I’m wrong about the eight other problems with the Common Core Standards (and I’m not), I don’t see any wiggle room on this one. If I’m right, the current reform effort’s centralizing of control of education, its micromanaging of classrooms by non-educators, its blocking of all innovation not tied to the core, and its reliance on destructive, simplistic tests that fail to take account of the fundamental nature of knowledge, and of human complexity and variability, will, in Senge’s words, exact an “enormous price."

That price will be the inability of our children and our children’s children to cope with a future shaping up to be more challenging than anything humans have thus far faced.

Why Don't Billionaires And Politicians Want Students To Think?

Jan Carr, a self described "scrappy public school mom" points out that real education is more than a bubble test; she rightfully asserts that a complete education is "inextricably entwined with books, literature, writing, and the life of the mind; it develops critical thinking." She also asks some questions I would like to hear answered:

For me, many years later, the task is this: determine the bias of those currently attempting to bury our public education system in data and testing requirements. One motivation is obvious: there’s profit to be made. If education can be wrested from the classroom – from teachers, principals, and other actual educators – and the focus shifted to cold data and analysis, then tech companies and faux educational corporations can gorge themselves at the public trough. Hey, if it looks like greed and smells like greed, it’s greed! But there’s another, underlying motivation. It seems no accident that prominent among those who would hijack our nation’s public education system are powerful billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch. . . . Why do they want students reduced to a string of data, our kids to fill in bubbles, not learn to think? Perhaps because kids who think critically will ask questions, key questions. For instance, why is there an increasing and radical disparity of wealth in our nation? And who exactly controls our nation’s political system now that corporations are free not only to pour money into lobbying, but also to anonymously contribute boatloads of bucks to political campaigns?

To have a real democracy one needs an educated populace. Why don’t these billionaires want our kids to think critically? And why are they trying to bust the union that serves and protects our nation’s schools? What exactly are they afraid of?

HT: Diane Ravitch

Testing Results Rank Students But Don't Measure Learning

The New York Times covers a Texas testing controversy. The statewide tests rank students but don't measure learning effectively:

Now, in studies that threaten to shake the foundation of high-stakes test-based accountability, Mr. Stroup and two other researchers said they believe they have found the reason: a glitch embedded in the DNA of the state exams that, as a result of a statistical method used to assemble them, suggests they are virtually useless at measuring the effects of classroom instruction.

Pearson, which has a five-year, $468 million contract to create the state’s tests through 2015, uses “item response theory” to devise standardized exams, as other testing companies do. Using I.R.T., developers select questions based on a model that correlates students’ ability with the probability that they will get a question right.

That produces a test that Mr. Stroup said is more sensitive to how it ranks students than to measuring what they have learned. That design flaw also explains why Richardson students’ scores on the previous year’s TAKS test were a better predictor of performance on the next year’s TAKS test than the benchmark exams were, he said. The benchmark exams were developed by the district, the TAKS by the testing company.

South Dakota also uses Pearson. The company's name appears 82 times in the 2012 Dakota STEP Test Coordinator Manuel. The Dakota STEP also uses "item response theory." According to the 2011 Technical report:

The process of calibration, linking, and scaling utilizes item response theory (IRT), which is based on the idea that the characteristics of individual items can be used in conjunction with student item responses to produce estimates of students’ levels of achievement. The particular model used in calibration and linking for the Dakota STEP assessment is the Rasch IRT model (Rasch, 1960). [Italics in original]

Earlier this month Josh Verges reported:

That will change soon as South Dakota gets on board with a national education reform movement that has the support of the Obama administration and Republican governors. By 2014-15, state law requires that half of every South Dakota public school teacher’s yearly evaluation be based on quantitative measures of student growth.

 Verges may have buried the lede:

Schopp doesn’t know how the state will evaluate its teachers two years from now, but she’s confident the process will be an improvement over what schools are doing today.

“It’s not going to be a perfect system, but it’s not a perfect system right now,” she said. “In fact, it’s pretty dysfunctional.”

Tying evaluations to tests that don't measure learning has made the system more dysfunctional. I have a sinking feeling that the final response, like the tests themselves, will follow a Texas model.

Do Students Want Someone To Show Them The Money?

Derek Thompson correctly analyzes the problem with testing regimes:

These tests are super-high-stakes for instructors and principals, where they can determine who keeps a job and where state resources are spent. But they are relatively low-stakes for individual students in the short-term, especially if those students aren't looking to go to college and don't care very much about a weak grade.

If one doesn't care about weak grades that go on a transcript, it's difficult to believe that they will care about a state mandated test that isn't transcripted.

Thompson points to a "new study by Steven D. Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, and Sally Sadoff [that] finds that Chicago students in low-performing schools did better on tests when they were promised money or trophies for their good grades."

The study shows that "[s]tudents were reportedly willing to exert significantly more energy at $80-an-hour, but not at $40-an-hour."  Locally, state mandated testing is spread out over 3 or 4 days and takes up a minimum of 10 hours, so 200 juniors could clear $800 each for a total of $160,000.  Students might love it; it might actually work, but I doubt taxpayers will buy it.

The study also showed "that the rewards were most powerful when they were framed as losses rather than gains  (i.e.: 'Here is $20. If you fail, I'm taking it away.')"

In addition, "'non-financial incentives,' like trophies, worked best with young people."  That fact offer little comfort, but it does lessen pressure on the bottom line.  Trophies don't cost $800 each.

Finally, "rewards provided with a delay -- 'we'll get you that check in a month!' -- did very little to improve performance."  In short, hand students the cash in an envelope as they walk out the door.

Bribing students to do well seems counterproductive for a couple of reasons.  First, $80 per hour will soon be $120 per hour.  Second, schools should not be about testing and grades; they should be creating lifelong learners and active participants in democracy.  I suppose the authors of this study will try to determine if voting would increase if everyone who voted got $80 for going to the polls.

This Just In: Testing, Merit Pay, and HB 1234 Still Irreparably Flawed

During the past legislative session, teachers frequently cited Daniel Pink to show that merit pay doesn't work.  HB 1234 passed as Governor Daugaard twisted arms in the best Chicago politicalmachine style.

In today's Inc. Jessica Stillman reports on Justin Moore's analysis that shows merit pay is counter productive. Moore, a "co-founder and CEO of business-continuity and disaster-recovery company Axcient" takes issue with merit pay on several levels.

Governor Daugaard premises his flawed plan on the idea that money will motivate good teachers to do better work.  He rejected the idea that many teachers work for more intrinsic rewards.  Moore doesn't share Daugaard's belief that "cash is king" or "greed works."  Moore asserts:

If you have a sense of purpose in accomplishing something, you're doing it because you get some personal reward out of it, not because there's a stack of money being given to you at the end of it. It's been shown that financial incentives, while they work in certain situations, long term actually reduce creativity and eliminate some of that sense of accomplishment.

Moore also enunciates a principle that every governor, secretary of education, and testing proponent should consider:

"Measuring the wrong thing is actually worse than not measuring anything at all, because it will actually focus all your energies in the wrong place."

The testing regime certainly focuses teachers' energies on the test instead of students' education.

Moore does two other things that Daugaard refuses to do.  First, Moore eschews the top down approach:

"We rarely give top down goals," says Moore. Instead, managers sit down with employees to discuss what they need to accomplish and help them work out their own targets and metrics."

That approach sounds far different than the HB 1234 work groups that epitomize top-down thinking.

Finally, all of these reforms began with NCLB and its efforts to make 100% of students meet top down goals.  That unrealistic Lake Wobegon expectation could have been avoided if politicians had followed Moore's method for developing metrics:

The art of setting metrics, he continues, is in fact ensuring employees don't set unrealistic expectations for themselves by asking questions like: Do you really think that's achievable? Do you think you should give yourself some more cushion? Have you taken into account the unknown?

One would hope that if Moore's questions had been asked, someone in power would have come to the realization that 100% is not achievable.

Unfortunately, Axient's "disaster recovery" recovers data; it doesn't help citizens recover from bad political policies, so teachers will be left to their own devices to fix the disasters that ed reformers' policies will create.

Shh! Don't Tell Anyone; High School Students May Learn Some Things That Won't Be On The Test

The National Forensics League has released ten potential Lincoln Douglas debate topics that students will debate during the course of the 2012-2013 school year.  NFL member schools will vote on the topics; five will be chosen for September/October, November/December, January/February, March/April and the NFL National Tournament in June 2013.  Individual Students will have to develop a value based position to write separate cases to affirm and negate the resolution

Lincoln Douglas Topic List for 2012 – 2013

Resolved: The constitutions of democratic governments ought to include procedures for secession.

Resolved: When making admissions decisions, public colleges and universities in the United States ought to favor members of historically disadvantaged groups.

Resolved: United States Supreme Court justices should be subject to term limits.

Resolved: The United States is justified in intervening in the internal political processes of other countries to attempt to stop human rights abuses.

Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory.

Resolved: On balance, the privatization of civil services serves the public interest.

Resolved: On balance, labor unions in the United States are beneficial.

Resolved: The United States ought to guarantee universal health care for its citizens.

Resolved: Oppressive government is more desirable than no government.

Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal justice system.

Lest the policy debaters accuse me of neglecting the work that some will be starting next week, the the policy resolution for the entire 2012-2013 school year is:

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its transportation infrastructure investment in the United States.

Two person teams will develop affirmative containing a plan and negative positions on the topic.

The testing uber alles proponents may not like find these topics to their liking.  After all, it's probably impossible to develop a bubble test to answer these questions.  It's also hard to write a test that allows students both to affirm and negate the questions.

STEM fans like Governor Daugaard and Melody Schopp might take umbrage at the fact that many of the topics can't be answered with the pat answer: "use more technology."

Both the extreme testers and the STEM-will-save-everyone advocates will be hard pressed to explain that these topics won't help students survive in the "real world."  Right now, these bureaucrats probably think that if they ignore the facts high school debate will go away.  Of course, they governors and secretaries of education can do a bit more than hope;they can just pass laws like HB 1234 and the testing regime that comes with it.  If that effort fails, they can just cut education funding again.  In a single party state like South Dakota, the majority can do both without any debate whatsoever.

Quotations Of The Day: One Of These Statements Has To Be Wrong Edition

I haven't seen either Prometheus or John Carter, but I apparently am going to have to if I want to understand the following analysis that seems to come from a planet other than Earth.  I have no other explanation for why Matthew Di Carlo is a senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C. would write the bolded analysis below.

In education discussions and articles, people (myself included) often say “achievement” when referring to test scores, or “student learning” when talking about changes in those scores. These words reflect implicit judgments to some degree (e.g., that the test scores actually measure learning or achievement). Every once in a while, it’s useful to remind ourselves that scores from even the best student assessments are imperfect measures of learning. But this is so widely understood – certainly in the education policy world, and I would say among the public as well – that the euphemisms are generally tolerated.

In the real world, Diane Ravitch's analysis seems far more accurate:

One thing is clear. The tests are the linchpin of the attack on public education. The politicians throw about test scores as evidence that our entire public education system is a failed enterprise. (For a recent example, see my review of the Council on Foreign Relations report, which made the absurd claim that public education is a "grave threat" to national security.)

If it were "widely understood" that scores from even the best student assessments are imperfect measures of learning," even the best spin doctor could not make them "the linchpin of the attack on public education."

Justin Bieber Hears And Delivers Words Of Wisdom

I feel a bit cheap posting this, but I need to improve my readership among the all important 'tween girl demographic.

The Answer Sheet blog reports that Ellen DeGeneres conducted a high school graduation ceremony for Justin Bieber.  Bieber earned his GED earlier this year.

The post provides a transcript of the DeGeneres's comments.  The best part of the speech occurs when DeGeneres compares herself to the pop sensation:

You’re only 18 and you are already an international superstar. When I was 18 my biggest accomplishment was drinking a whole bottle of boysenberry syrup from the International House of Pancakes.

The post does not transcribe the most important part of the ceremony.  Bieber thanks a business that all graduates keep profitable in this testing for the sake of testing era: Bieber thanks "Ticonderoga pencils number 2 and number 3."  If a teen pop singer whom many believe guilty of vapid lyrics understands that education is being reduced to commercialism and filling in the bubbles, it seems odd that education bureaucrats can't arrive at the same conclusion and stop foisting foolish policies on students.

A Minor Musing About Attacks On Teaching Literature

Diane Ravitch asks why David Coleman dislikes fiction.  She admits that she doesn't know why Coleman, "a member of the writing team for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts/Literacy," would speak disparagingly about literature or why the Common Core Standards will reduce the amount of literature that high school students will read.

Perhaps Coleman agrees with Joel Stein who suggests that too many adults read young adult novels. Perhaps he worries that young girls will become depressed if they  read too much dystopian fiction.  He may agree with Tim Parks who asserts that readers don't need the intensification of self that novels provide.  He may have had an English teacher who made him angry by asking him to find too many symbols.

Because he peppers his little essay with the phrase "college and career," I suspect, however, that he agrees with Thomas Jefferson who infamously claims,

“A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life."

This objection has several flaws.  First, those who suggest that elementary and secondary education exists only to prepare students for a career come perilously close to asserting that students exist only to do the work of their employers, so they do not exist as end to themselves.  One does not have to be Kant to understand the moral risk of seeing human beings primarily as means to profit others.

Second, focus on what Jefferson calls "all the real business of life" or being college and career ready in Coleman's case leads to missing the gorilla because one is too focused on watching the bouncing ball. For those unfamiliar with the experiment, this YouTube video illustrates the problem. In this case, the bouncing ball serves as a metaphor for test scores.



Finally, a comment on Ravitch's post reminds all of us that fiction is a necessary tool in any effort to speak truth to power:

“…A good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society or government is very fond of writers.”
~ John Steinbeck

One hopes Coleman is merely too focused on test scores.  That mistake is forgivable; believing that human beings should be treated as a means to end or attempting to limit efforts to expose injustice is not.

Why Would A Wise Forest Animal Eat A Talking Pineapple?

Or why I don't want any part of my pay based on a standardized test.

The New York Daily News covers a New York State test developed by Pearson PLC.  Students were asked to respond to questions from a story about a race between a talking pineapple and a hare.

In the story, an apparent take-off on Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare, a talking pineapple challenges a hare to a race.  The other animals wager on the immobile pineapple winning — and ponder whether it’s tricking them.

When the pineapple fails to move at all and the rabbit wins, the animals dine on the pineapple.

Students were asked two perplexing questions: why did the animals eat the talking fruit, and which animal was wisest?

Let's be clear, none of the animals were named Socrates and none claimed to be the wisest animal because it knew nothing.  Apparently the unanswerable questions had been tested elsewhere.

The new exams have higher stakes for principals and teachers statewide, whose evaluations will be based in part on student scores beginning as soon as this year.

Scarsdale Middle School Principal Michael McDermott said the question has been used before and “confused students in six or seven different states.”

If Governor Daugaard or Education Secretary Schopp want read the story and take a stab at answering the questions, they can do so here.  I'm sure that they will claim that South Dakota checks its tests more carefully.  That claim may be true, but the difference between South Dakota's inane questions and New York's inane questions is difference of degree not of kind.  South Dakota's tests have their fair share of inane questions.

I have my own slightly less inane multiple guess question:

After hearing about the pineapple and the hare, Governor Daugaard and Secretary Schopp will

a. stubbornly insist that standardized testing is a great way to evaluate teachers.
b. claim that paying math and science teachers more than English, history, art or music teachers will help students answer the question about why the animals ate the pineapple.
c. offer Pearson a 10 year contract to write Dakota STEP tests.
d. all of the above.

Why Corporations And Politicians Want Teachers To Teach To The Test

Claire Needell Hollander sums up how the current focus on testing reading destroys students' experience of reading literature.

We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.

She correctly points that standardized tests like the Dakota STEP "are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous."

Hollander quotes Franz Kafka who claimed “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.”  Therein lies the rub.  Helping students have a richer inner life doesn't fit with the purpose that corporate America believes that they should perform.  That purpose is succinctly and humorously summed up in this tweet:

"Oh, nooes!!! It's 'economic change'. What should we do? We won't be able to sell enough McShit!!"
— umair haque (@umairh) April 21, 2012

Diane Ravitch correctly sums up the stakes with this tweet:

Education is increasingly a race between civilization and a system of accounting that has no brain and no heart.
— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) April 21, 2012

I fear the battle for hearts, minds, and souls may be already lost; McShit has won.  

Daugaard's Assualt On Teachers Part Of Republican Governors' Strategy

The Republican Governors' Conference must have assigned a group project.  Writing in The Answer Sheet blog, Diane Ravitch shows how Governor Daugaard's merit pay, continuing contract, and testing proposals seem to have been plagiarized.

Gov. Jindal is in a race to the bottom with other Republican governors to see who can move fastest to destroy the underpinnings of public education and to instill fear in the hearts of teachers. It’s hard to say which of them is worst: Jindal, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, or .... There are so many contenders for the title, it’s hard to name them all.

They all seem to be working from the same playbook: Remove any professionalism and sense of security from teachers; expand privatization as rapidly as possible, through charters and vouchers; intensify reliance on high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers and schools; tighten the regulations on public schools while deregulating the privately managed charter schools. Keep up the attack on many fronts, to confuse the supporters of public education.

The governors appear to be working from the ALEC playbook, ALEC (or the American Legislative Exchange Council) being an organization that shapes model legislation for very conservative state legislators.

Using the right coded language is a very important part of the assault on public education: Call it “reform.” Say that its critics are “defenders of the status quo,” even though the status quo is 10 years of federally mandated high-stakes testing and school closings. If possible, throw mud at the defenders of public education and say that they only have “adult interests” at heart, while the pseudo-reformers — the rich and powerful —are acting only in the interests of children.

Soon after I spoke, Jindal’s newly selected State Superintendent John White had a conference call with reporters to challenge what I said, which was odd because he was not present and did not hear what I said. He had no substantive response to my research review showing that charters, vouchers, and merit pay don’t produce better education. He had no substantive response to my critique of the vagaries of value-added evaluation of teachers. Instead, he pointed to the New Orleans model as a paradigm of “reform,” meaning, I suppose, the benefits of closing down public schools, turning the children over to private management, breaking the teachers’ union, and hiring inexperienced, uncertified teachers.

Ravitch's comments do prompt a few sardonic questions.

1. Did the Governor come up with his "I'm a lobbyist for the students" line by himself or did the other Republican governors help him with his homework?

2. Dr. Ravitch puts Governor Daugaard in the too many to mention category. Does that mean he's not in the top 20% of Republican governors and won't get merit pay?

3. Was there a special session about ignoring evidence or are these governors just winging their responses?

4. Is the Governor hoping to create a South Dakota miracle or a South Dakota model of reform? (I hope he remembers that the Texas miracle was based on a lie and that the data do no not support a New Orleans model or Michelle Rhee type reforms, but then again, I'm a hopeless romantic.  I still hope my students will use the study guide to remember the names of Greek gods and heroes.)

Yet Another Education Quotation Of The Day

From educator and author Marion Brady in an Answer Sheet guest post,

Here’s the problem I think deserves billboard-level attention: Kids can’t be taught to think better using tests that can’t measure how well they think.

The logic should be obvious. What gets tested gets taught. Complex thinking skills — skills essential to survival—can’t be tested, so they don’t get taught. That failure doesn’t simply rise to the level of a problem. It’s unethical.

This quotation seems extremely appropriate on a day when the Argus Leader reports that South Dakota Department of Education announced that it will not release test results as scheduled.

The Department of Education had planned to get results to the schools by last Friday and make them public today. But Mary Stadick-Smith, the deputy education secretary, cited issues with the system for the delay of the release.

Tests Test But They Don't Predict

When I read "[a]t my South Bronx elementary school, we had a Teachers College consultant who encouraged us to 'teach tests as a genre of literature,'” I almost lost breakfast and lunch and broke the computer.  After all the Hulk is an acceptable role model.  I'd sooner treat Fox News as real news than entertain the idea that tests can be literature.

Although he doesn't take on NCLB or Race to the Top mandated testing, Jonah Lehrer provides some perspective on testing.  Citing the work of Paul Sackett, psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Lehrer points out that there are two types of performance.  "Maximum" performance occurs when people know they're being tested whereas "typical" performance occurs when people don't know they are being watched.

Lehrer asserts

We live in a society obsessed with maximum performance. Think of exams like the SAT and the GRE. Though these tests take only a few hours, they're supposed to give schools and companies a snapshot of an individual's abiding talents.

Or consider the NFL Scouting Combine, in which players entering the draft perform short physical and mental tasks, such as the 40-yard dash. The Combine is meant to measure physical ability; that's why teams take the results so seriously.

 Although high priced colleges and graduate schools and $9 billion industries like the NFL may like tests because these tests "don't take very long,". . . "can quantify many people," . . . .and "make assessment seem relatively straightforward," Lehrer writes,

Though the SAT does a decent job of predicting the grades of college freshmen—the test accounts for about 12% of the individual variation in grade point average—it is much less effective at predicting levels of achievement after graduation. Professional academic tests suffer from the same flaw. A study by the University of Michigan Law School, for instance, found that LSAT scores bore virtually no relationship to career success as measured by levels of income, life satisfaction or public service.

Even the NFL Combine is a big waste of time. According to a recent study by economists at the University of Louisville, there's no "consistent statistical relationship" between the results of players at the Combine and subsequent NFL performance.

 Citing Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Lehrer claims that "grit" and "self-control" "consistently predict levels of achievement." He concludes,

The problem, of course, is that students don't reveal their levels of grit while taking a brief test. Grit can only be assessed by tracking typical performance for an extended period. Do people persevere, even in the face of difficulty? How do they act when no one else is watching? Such traits often matter more than raw talent. We hear about them in letters of recommendation, but hard numbers take priority.

The larger lesson is that we've built our society around tests of performance that fail to predict what really matters: what happens once the test is over.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has asserted, however,  that the Race to the Top tests "will be an absolute game-changer in public education"  Further, and one must cue the original Six Million Dollar Man intro, these tests will "better, smarter assessments -- the kind of tests our teachers want and our students need.” 

Because we have the technology, cue the original Six Million Dollar Man intro again, 

Much of the testing will take place via computer, allowing teachers to get results more quickly. One coalition would use computer adaptive technology so that students at certain skill levels would skip to appropriate questions to more efficiently pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses.

Of course what has happened is that teachers are going to spend time teaching to a test; the kids will get bored; learning won't take place. Yet, under Race to the Top, "thousands of colleges have agreed use them as one indicator that students are ready for entry-level courses." The NFL makes $9 billion dollars a year.  It tests for easily measurable things like speed and strength.   All one needs to access these qualities is a stop watch and a a lot of weights.  Yet the NFL can't find a test to determine an athlete's opportunity for success.

Every bureaucrat who has forced NCLB's or Race to the Top's tests down schools' throats should be forced to read Lehrer's article every day for the next three years.  There won't be a test.  Instead, we'll see if the habit develops the "grit" necessary to understand that tests cannot predict success.

A Modest Testing Proposal (Yes I Know It's A Cliche)

I was one of the staff members selected to help administer the South Dakota state-mandated DSTP test today.  South Dakota requires all who administer this test to swear oaths to several major deities not to reveal any details of the test or use the term evolution.  We can't even say that the test has evolved from earlier versions.  Those oaths are sanctified by burnt offerings of mammals, fowl, fish, reptiles, and amphibians.

While watching the young minds deal with the conundrums that the state allegedly paid some publisher a million dollars to create, I had an epiphany:  opposing the test is really counter productive. 

South Dakota should expand the test.  Every person who currently supports the NCLB and its mandated tests would probably leap at the chance to take them.  South Dakota Public TV could even broadcast the test taking and announce the results.  It could be a local version of Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?  The show could be called Are You Smarter Than Next Year's Senior? 

This plan should be a win-win situation.  South Dakota Public TV might get some extra revenue from this wonderful program.  Those who think that testing will force teachers to finally do their job and teach will get to show how great tests are by taking them and proving that those tests illustrate practical knowledge that everyone needs to succeed in business without really trying.

Of Sticks, Hammers, and Carrots

The Answer Sheet blog points to a couple of items of concern.

First, it reprints an open letter from Jim Horn to President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan about reauthorizing NCLB. The key quotation,

Despite all the politicizing of the teaching profession, at heart teachers remain child advocates and cultivators of the next generation of citizens. Teachers want children to succeed and flourish, but it is not because they have been paid to do so. A student’s growth and well-being remain the teacher’s most ardent concerns, despite the fact that she is undervalued, demonized, ridiculed, mistrusted, and paid less than most other professions that require the same level of education and training.

If a child’s test scores are to be used to make decisions regarding a teacher’s most basic needs for adequate sustenance for her family and for a dollop of dignity from her principal, then you risk damaging the teacher-student relationship that goes as far back as Socrates.

Second, a report on Florida's efforts to "hammer" teachers.  The term "hammer" comes from one of the bill's authors.  The legislation would tie teacher pay directly to student test scores.  Districts could not take into account years of service or education.  The key quotation,

This approach could easily spread beyond the borders of Florida. It’s everybody’s business.

The Florida approach can easily find a home in South Dakota.  The State currently offers few legal protections for teachers or any other workers.  That fact won't stand in the way of people's perceptions that teachers are overpaid, lazy people who teach for the thrill of June, July, and August.

Teachers need to make it possible for their students to learn.  They should know their material and how to communicate that knowledge.  Although Socrates famously argued that he know nothing, he obviously know enough to ask great questions. Test scores won't show whether teachers help students learn, know their material, or promote asking great questions;  test scores illustrate whether students can take tests.  That's it.

Further, high school students need to take responsibility for their education.  As a wise man once told me, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink; you can send kids to school but you can't make them think."  Tying test scores to continued employment or pay automatically allows students avoid thinking and learning.  They get to put the responsibility on someone else.  In fact, they can fail every test and every class, and it will be the teachers' fault.

The efforts to link teacher pay or job security to student results indicate a lack of reading skills.  Proponents will probably admit to using a carrot and stick approach because the best teachers will get the "carrot" of higher salary while the poor teachers will get the "stick" or in this case the "hammer"of lower pay or unemployment.

A careful reading of the story, however, reveals that the boy never got results while using the stick to punish the donkey.  The more he "hammered" the donkey with the stick, the less work the donkey accomplished.  It was only after the stick became an extension of the boy's arm and was used to dangle the carrot in front of the donkey that the donkey began to pull the cart.

The people who love NCLB or who support the Floridan bill seem to assume that testing will produce students who are better prepared to work or attend college because teachers who have been doing absolutely nothing for the past fifty years will suddenly start teaching and thousands of new applicants will eagerly seek the benefits that come to teachers whose students pass NCLB mandated tests.  They are wrong on both counts.  A high school career that allows students to blame someone else for their failure to learn will produce graduates who need extra workplace training or remedial college classes.  The proposed changes to NCLB and the Florida approach will make the teaching profession more desirable for only those people who enjoy being "hammered."  In that case, future teachers will have to be drunks or masochists or both.