USED Calls Parents and Teachers Dopes, Again

At Politico, Caitlin Emma took a pretty thorough look at the state of high stakes testing in this country, with a particular eye toward the Republicans who are making noises about rolling the testing juggernaut back a step or two (place your bets now on what kind of warm, friendly holiday greeting those guys have gotten from Pearson and friends in the last week).

Emma notes that the testing pushback has created some unusual allies from the left and right, and she notes that AFT and NEA have both come down on testing (she does not note the significance of this being pretty much the only aspect of reformsterism that the two unions have actually spoken up against). Emma also notes some of the staggering numbers of school hours spent on testing that are getting out to the public.

While they won’t back down on annual tests, Duncan and Obama recently responded to pressure to do something. They’re supporting a new effort to reduce testing led by state education chiefs and large urban-district leaders. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools will soon release findings that show where tests can be eliminated or improved. And they’ll announce a task force to develop recommendations for states and districts looking to cut back.

Yeah, we talked about that back when it first happened, and I feel safe predicting that the substantive part of that new effort-- the generating of optic-improving PR-- is already done, and we can expect to see nothing else of significance coming out of it.

Emma also gives a decent summary of the opt-out responses that have sprung up. Really, the whole article is worth your attention-- I just want to highlight one particular aspect.

”We’re responsible for student learning every single day and every single year,” an Education Department official said. “I want us to never back away from the fact that it’s our responsibility … Parents have a right to know how their students are progressing. Students have a right to know how they measure up.”

We've heard this from the feds before. It's one more translation of a driving idea for this administration that we could express more directly thus:

Parents are dopes and schools are filled with teachers and leaders who are some mix of liars and incompetents. Only with national high stakes testing will anybody know how students are doing.

The feds envision a world where a family gathers at home, befuddled. "So," asks Mom. "Are you learning how to read?" Junior shrugs and replies, "I don't know. I think so. Maybe. Maybe not." But Dad reassures them. "Don't worry. In a few months we'll get the test results from the state and then we'll know how you're doing."

Meanwhile, teachers huddle in staff rooms. "Do you have any idea whether your kids are learning anything or not," asks Mr. McNumbgnutts. His colleagues shrug. "Guess we'll just have to wait to get the test results back."

This, say the feds, is why testing must happen annually.

“If you’re waiting every three years to measure student learning, then what happens when a student has been falling behind?” the [unnamed Education Department] official said. “Do you wait until that third year to figure out what their interventions ought to be?”

The folks at the department of Education want testing because everybody else are dopes. Teachers, parents, students themselves-- nobody has a clue how students are doing in school without the wise intervention of Our Friends at Pearson (who are more than ready to step in -- they would like to tell us what the child should eat for breakfast and what kind of human being she is). 

"Do you wait until that third year to figure out what their intervention ought to be?" No, Sherlock. Most of us don't wait until the end of the week. In fact, a recent study of actual live human teachers tells us just how much use they get out of this nifty test data-- pretty much none. These quotes tell us, once again, just what stunningly low regard the guys in DC hold the (mostly female) teachers in classrooms.

This, perhaps more than anything the feds have done since the President arrived in DC, has been the biggest federal contribution to the destructive wave of reformsterism that has hit public education-- they have thrown full federal weight behind the idea that public education is an unmitigated failure and that nobody who's actually involved in it has a clue about anything at all.

Remember-- the feds didn't just agree to be facilitators for the reform plans of CCSSO, Achieve, Coleman, Pearson, et al. They also didn't say anything at all along the lines of, "You know, there are millions of trained, experienced, education professionals in the field. Maybe we should call a couple." It's understandable from the corporate reformsters-- teachers would only gum up their works, and they have no obligation to represent anybody but their own stockholders. But our political leaders simply cast a quick vote of no confidence in public education and let the bulldozers have at it. And they are still at it, buttressing each reformy idea with an argument that boils down to, "We have to do something because teachers and parents are dopes."

I sure hope we can remember this all the way into 2016. And in the interim, maybe Democrats should come up with a better campaign platform than the cartoonish, "We're going to tell you how it should go because you don't have a clue."

Ask Arne: Testing and Accountability

You know I'm a huge fan of the Ask Arne video series, because who doesn't enjoy seeing their tax dollars used to produce little pieces of high tech advertising for failing policies? You can read about previous Ask Arne videos here, here, here, and here.

Today's entry was put up on December 9, but seems linked to the baloneyfest that started with CCSSO and CGCS announcing they were really looking at testing, with "looking at" meaning "trying to fix how it's playing in Peoria" and not "considering substantive changes." Then Arne said, "Me, too" in a Washington Post op-ed that dodged the issue of federal responsibility for testing issues. All of that happened back in October, but it appears to be in the recent past for the making of this video.

This video represents a real change in style for the Ask Arne franchise, which usually depends on a "conversation" between the Secretary of Education and ordinary civilians (hand picked by the Dept. of Education). Today's host is my personal favorite-- Emily Davis, on loan from her job teaching middle school Spanish in St. Augustine, FL-- but beyond her intro (filmed in what is below-standard lighting for this series), her function is to ask basically just one question.

Her intro sets us up. "Lately we've heard a lot of questions from educators, principals and teachers, as well as parents and students around the current climate of testing in schools." It's a nicely shaded choice of verbage, suggesting a more generalized curiosity ("So, how's that testing business shaping up?") rather than actual complaints ("What the hell is up with all this testing!?"). But she assures us that we're going to sit down with Arne to "discuss some of these challenges" (reminding me that the substitution of "challenges" for "problems" is on of the great modern rhetorical inventions).

And so, her question:

Arne, everyone is talking about testing. I recently came back from the Bus Tour [yes, the closed caption capitalizes it] and talked to principals and teachers in the Southeast. The President is talking about testing. The Chief State Officers and the Council of Great City Schools are talking about testing. You, yourself put out an op ed about testing, so I am just wondering what your thoughts are on the current testing environment.

Arne is not looking as chipper as he usually does for these little chats. His usual goofy grin is not in evidence; he looks a little stern and irritated, and as I type that I realize that had I known that blogging would lead me to a place where I would be even slightly expert in Arne Duncan's facial expressions, I might have chosen another path. Look what you have done to both of us, Arne.

Anyway, Arne opens with the philosophical observation that you can have an extreme too muchiness of anything. "Too much of anything is too much" is an actual string of words that comes out of his mouth. But the very next string of words notes that there are "some who would like to walk away from any assessments and go the other extreme" and my experience would suggest that "some" is a pretty small group since pretty much every teacher I've ever met uses some sort of assessment on a very regular basis. But sometimes Arne gets "assessment" and "standardized test" confused, so maybe that's it. At any rate, Arne does not support abandoning tests, and he wants you to know that he says that as "a parent with two young children." Because Arne has no idea how his kids are doing until he sees those standardized test scores.

 "We want to know how much our children are learning each year," says Arne, and I'm going to do some close reading here because "how much" implies that learning is a single homogenous quality like water or distance, acquired in uniform units and measured with beakers or yardsticks that can be used to measure any learning that has been poured into any child. He does not express an interest in knowing what students have learned or how they have learned or how they grew or what sort of people they are becoming. Physics or musical instruments, writing or cooking-- it's all the same. He just wants to find out whether the students had six or twelve or eighteen liters of learning poured into them. Yes, it's picking at a small thing, but the small things are revealing, and it's what I do here.

Arne then lays out exactly what testing problems he's concerned about. Redundant testing and duplicative testing-- those are bad. It also doesn't make sense to spend too much time on test prep or teaching to the test, says Arne, and I would suggest to Arne that those things make perfect sense in a world where the federal government has mandated that schools and teachers be evaluated based on those test results. This remains a point of sublime obtuseness for Arne. He mandated that teachers, schools, districts, and states would be rewarded or punished based on test results-- what could he have possibly imagined would happen? Does he seriously mean to say, "Your career depends upon these test results, but whatever you do, don't act as if your career depends upon these test results."

Emily observes that a principal in Nashville says that we're testing so much that we don't know what the good data is any more (pro tip-- nothing that comes from the standardized tests is good data). And she slides into some form of, "So you also wanted to make a point about the year's grace period." Arne is making such a face; with a frozen frame it looks like a bad moment in marriage counseling in which Arne is reacting to Emily's admission of some guilty with a face that says, "Well, that's what I would expect from an ignorant slut like you." It's a very odd moment.

Arne says that states and districts committed to taking a hard look in the mirror and "figuring out if they had a coherent theory of action" and if they are getting actionable data-- "is it useful, timely, relevant" and if they can say yes to that, they are probably on a good path. Teachers and principals should be weighing on this conversation, which means I guess that they're not really involved in it to begin with, but just sort of consulting. Anyway, they should weigh in because the testing stuff is supposed to help instruction and student learning. If it is taking away from those things, then "it is part of the problem." Arne does not say what to do if you determine that all the things that are detracting from learning are the result of federal mandates, which is of course the real question that non-koolaid-drinking schools are wrestling with-- how do we do the things the government says we must, which we know are educational malpractice and a waste of time, and still educate? How do we keep the government off our backs while doing our jobs.

Emily says that out in the field nobody knows what the hell the flexibility year is about, and would Arne clear that up. Now Arne looks less angry and more sleepy.

Arne says that many folks are moving to the next generation of tests-- less filling of bubbles, more critical thinking and writing etc and as always, I'm going to call bullshit. Tests that actually measure those things do not exist. But policy appears to be that we'll just keep calling a watermelon a pig in the hopes that when you bite into a slice you'll taste pork. Arne says many places are also "thinking differently about teacher and principal support and evaluation" but the rest of his sentence is not "for example, the state of Washington, where we took their waiver away for thinking TOO differently."

The year, he says, is to play with this stuff without having scores count for teacher and principal evaluations. "There is no right or wrong answer here," says Arne. This is a great sentence because it captures both his wrongness (there are, in fact, lots of wrong answers, some of which have full federal support) and his disconnect between the words coming out of his mouth and the policies coming out of his office (he will certainly punish states that choose answers he thinks are wrong, e.g. Washington).

Some states are ahead, some are way ahead, there are no value judgments, blah blah blah. He is on a quest for a true accountability system.

Arne reiterates that student growth and gains should be a part of teacher evaluation-- so bad tests providing useless data run through discredited VAM models remain his fave. But don't put too much emphasis on testing or test prep. But include other things-- don't have just a test score and cut score. Let's get all holistic up in there.

"We now have states holding themselves accountable for graduation rates, reducing dropout rates, making and ensuring their high school graduates are truly college and carer ready."  Well, no. We have the feds holding states accountable for those things, and we have the feds strongly encouraging states about what the measures of those things should be. And we have Arne claiming not to see the obvious outcome of the federal mandates about what will be the goal and how success will be measured. Lower remedial class rates in college and more college completion would be great signs of success (though of course there's no right and wrong or value judgments and states can totally have any color Model T they like as long as it's black).

Emily reads her closing thank you's off her notes and Arne gives her a look that says, "Don't think I'm not going to send my boys to lean on that mailman you've been making eyes at."

High Stakes Testing 2.0

In the world of reformsters and their Orwellian word salads, statements often mean the opposite of what they appear to say. "We need to be able to hire more great teachers" actually means "We need to be able to fire any teacher we wish." "We want to rescue high-poverty low-achievement schools" turns out to mean "We want to starve high-poverty low-achievement schools of resources."

So it really should be no surprise that "We see that there's a problem with over-reliance on and over-use of high stakes testing" actually means "We intend to triple down on high stakes testing."

From the moment CCSSO and CGCS held their misleading phone conference, it was evident that they were not talking about backing off testing at all. Almost immediately (as if something had been sent out in the Education Reformsters Newsletter), High Stakes Testing 2.0 began to reveal its ugly face. You can see it in the test-cheerleading websites such as Minnesota's. Even Arne Duncan got in on the act of being against the tests before he was for them (as well as trying to shuck responsibility for installing HST at the center of US education in the first place).

This has been a version of all those crime dramas where the guy who has gone undercover punches his buddy in the face before the really dangerous guys can kill the buddy dead. It's a stalling tactic, mean to save the buddy, not actually harm him.

The Cult of Testing paused just long enough to generate some headlines meant to soothe the opposition, but we are already proceeding with High Stakes Testing 2.0, in which high stakes testing remains the hub around which all decisions in education must turn.

Take a look at Education Post, the website that has rapidly proven itself as a war-room agit-prop echo chamber for every talking point of the reformster movement (and so I'll not link to them unless absolutely necessary). They've been running a swell piece by Erika Sanzi who thanks Arne for insulting white suburban moms and praises testing because, well...

My gratitude now extends to his continued call for smart and meaningful testing of students. We cannot possibly provide kids with the education they need and deserve if we don’t have an accurate sense of what they know, what they don’t know, and how we can best help them.

I try not to do personal attacks here. I'll attack ideas and statements, but I remain conscious that these are real people with homes and families and lives and aspirations, I must assume, to do good. But what am I to make of a mother and teacher who says that she won't know how her children or students are doing unless someone shows her standardized test results? How do I not insult her when she has so handily insulted herself?

Sanzi also floats the talking point that standardized tests are just like diagnostic tests at the doctors office. This is a weak comparison-- doctors order tests, one test is not used for all patients no matter what, and diagnostic tests are not used to evaluate the doctor and hospital. If you want my full rant on why this comparison is bogus, you can find it here.

And Sanzi winds up with the other go-to argument for HST, which translates roughly as, "How dare you try to deprive poor, minority students of this chance to advance in the world!?" It is potent salad of baloney that tosses in some powerful ideas-- civil rights! racial equity! wealthy privilege! It makes it clear that you are risking being rhetorically tattooed as a monster if you try to cross them. It does not provide one whit of explanation as to how giving a poor, minority student a high stakes standardized test will open doors to opportunity for that student.

As someone who has taught in both privileged and underprivileged schools, I can’t imagine anything more threatening to students’ civil rights than denying them evidence that proves they are—or are not—learning. How else can we expose and aspire to close the achievement and opportunity gaps if we aren’t willing to acknowledge they exist?

This echoes the language of John White the CCSSO/CGCS phone call suggesting that only through testing will we ever know that students aren't learning. Because the trained professionals that spend 180 days with these students have no clue (or are big fat liars), and so only tests will tell us The Truth. This is one of the foundational pillars of HST-- that our entire army of professional educators simply can't be trusted to give us information about student achievement. If we don't give tests, we will never know.

And test we will.

A recent post on the US DOE blog highlights just how little of an impression the anti-testing pushback has made-- starting with the title "Investing in Evidence: Finding Game-Changing Evaluations."

The full post is a monument to governmental gobbledygook and a blind faith in testing, but just look at that title. There are two huge assumptions embedded there.

1) The game needs to be changed. Schools are such a disaster we must change everything, start a new game, play a new song, throw out bathwater, babies and basinets. Game-changing does not leave any room for the thought that some of the work being done is good-- no, we need a new game.

2) The way to change the game is with tests. Not with training. Not with personnel. Not even with shiny national standards. No, if games are to be changed, it is tests that will change them. It would be hard to come up with a clearer statement of belief that testing is the foundation, the fundamental bedrock of all education.

The proposal itself seems to be (the language is really impenetrable, and you know I have dug my way through some doozies) to collect up the best tests that are most effective for something something as identified by people who volunteer to answer some questions such as "what questions about P-12 education are still unanswered, because if we find the really good tests and connect up the programs that can't afford really good testing, we can sort of spread the testy love around and answer all the questions by using all the tests. Lordy, I may wade into this thing in greater depth some day, but knowing how way leads on to way, probably not.

Specifically, we are asking your help to identify what the most pressing education policy and/or practice questions are and how answering them could provide needed information to educators, parents and local, state, and federal governments to enable significant improvements in education. Our goal is to support the development of findings that have the rigor and power to inform significant improvements in how schools, districts, states, and the federal government provide services to students.

The clear takeaway is this-- this is not a plan for cutting back on tests or limiting tests. It's a plan for spreading tests out and around.

Every indication, from the feds to reformsters to reformster mouthpieces, is that HST 2.0 may be concerned about its optics, but it's not remotely interested in backing off on the noble goal of testing America's children (and teachers) into submission. So we can all stop pretending that testing caps and limits and restraint was ever a thing, because it wasn't, and it isn't. Get those opt out forms back out, because you're going to need them.