How Big Is The Honesty Gap

Sooo many folks are Deeply Concerned about the Honesty Gap. Just check out twitter

Parents and educators deserve accurate data about how their students are performing in the classroom: http://t.co/FeIjLPlwZ4 #HonestyGap

— StudentsFirst (@StudentsFirst) May 14, 2015

.@EvanE4E: Gap between state expectations & NAEP confirms need for rigorous, consistent, clear standards http://t.co/P3WiuEt9a6 #HonestyGap

— Educators4Excellence (@Ed4Excellence) May 14, 2015

States are saying students are “proficient” when they're not actually well prepared. We need to fix the #HonestyGap: http://t.co/JbinzeO3aF

— CAP Education (@EdProgress) May 14, 2015

Awesome Products + Dubious Rewards = Bad Experience http://t.co/MdnibIcIZ7 #SurveySweepstakes #HonestyGap

— Customerville (@customerville) June 12, 2014

Oops! That last tweet was apparently about some other Honesty Gap.

The Gappers are repeatedly expressing concern that parents need to know the truth about how their children are doing, specifically whether or not students are ready for college. Apparently everyone in the world is lying to them. Schools and teachers are lying when they assign grades. Even college letters of acceptance are Big Fat Lies. Everyone is lying-- the only possible way to know how your child is doing is to have that child take a Big Standardized Test, and not just any BS Test, but one from our friends at PARCC or SBA. Only those profoundly honest tests will do.

I got into a twitter discussion about this because I asked why, if NAEP is the gold standard by which state tests can be measured, why do we need the state test? Because the NAEP only samples, and we need to test every single child so that parents can get feedback. Okay, I asked-- doesn't that mean that the tests are for two different purposes and therefor can't really be compared? No, they can be compared if NAEP disaggregates well. So then why can't we-- well, I don't blame the person on the other end. Trying to have a serious conversation via twitter is like having sex by semaphore.

I gather that proof of state honesty would be more students failing, because once again we have an argument that starts with, "We know states suck at education and that students are doing terribly, so we just need to design an instrument that will catch them sucking." It's so much easier to design the right scientific measure if you already know what the answer is supposed to be.

So where is the actual honesty gap?

Is it where Common Core promoters claim that the standards are internationally benchmarked? Is it when CCSS fans suggest that having educational standards lead to national success? Is it when they decry low US test scores without noting that the US has been at the bottom of international test results as long as such things have existed?

Is the honesty gap in view when these folks say that parents need transparent and clear assessments of their children's standing, but what they mean is the kind of vague, opaque reports proposed? You know-- the report that basically gives the child a grade of A, B, C or D on a test whose questions nobody is allowed to see or discuss? Is the honesty gap cracking open even wider every time somebody suggests that a single math-and-reading test can tell us everything we need to know about a child's readiness for college and career?

Are we looking into the abyss of the gap when advocacy groups fail to mention that they are paid to support testing and the Core, or that they stand to make a ton of money from both? Does the honesty gap yawn widely when these folks fail to state plainly, "We think the world would be a better place if we just did away with public education, and we work hard to help make that happen." Is Arne Duncan's voice echoing hollowly from the depths of Honesty Gap Gulch when he suggests that telling an eight-year-old that she's on the college track either can or should be a thing?

It is ballsy as hell for the reformsters, who have been telling lie after lie to sell the CCSS-testing combo for years (oh, remember those golden days of "teachers totally wrote the Common Core"?), to bring up concerns about honesty.  I admire their guts; just not their honesty.

They have a hashtag (because, you know, that's how all the kids get their marketing done these days) and I encourage to use it to add your own observations about where the #HonestyGap actually lies.

FL Testing: Crash and Burn

From the Florida Time-Union comes word that computer-based testing in Florida is not running smoothly.

Yesterday Duval Public Schools called off testing for the second time this week, and reports are coming in from around the state of students who are staring are at blank screens, just trying to get logged into the testing program. This was the first week of the testing window in Florida, and as more students were added to the load, the system appeared not quite up to the task.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti is quoted in the article:

Unfortunately, as I expected, with the larger districts joining the testing process this morning, along with middle schools, the system imploded. Students across the district saw white, blank screens when trying to log on. Districts throughout the state are reporting the same problem. I have directed all schools to cease testing.

Meanwhile, state ed department officials are declaring the testing a success, with Education Commissioner Pam Sewart announcing that she "feels with 100 percent certainty that everything is working as it should." Vitti had a response for that:

If the commissioner believes thousands of students staring at a blank screen for 30 minutes statewide is successful, then I am afraid that we have dramatically different levels of expectations for securing a reliable and valid testing environment.

 Florida actually followed Utah out of the testing consortium, using testing materials developed for Utah's test by AIR (the same people that developed the SBA test that Utah dropped out of in the first place). Bottom line: the same people whose test is grinding to a slow crawl in Florida are the people behind the SBAC. So good luck with that.

No word yet on what effect testing gurus think the bollixed roll-out will have on test results. How focused and test-effective is a student who just waited a half hour for the next question to come up?

FWIW, we went down this road in Pennsylvania several years ago. I've always suspected that's why we're one of the few states still sticking with paper and pencil. Of course, that doesn't generate nearly as much revenue for corporations, but no matter how bad our test is, at least our students can actually take it.

Russ Walsh: Checking the PARCC and SBA

Russ Walsh is a reading specialist who also maintains a mighty fine blog. While Russ is always worth reading, over the last two weeks he has produced a series of posts that you need to bookmark, store, steal, link--whatever it is you do with posts that you want to be able to use a reference works in the future.

Walsh ventured where surprisingly few have dared to tread. He looked at the readability levels of the Two Not-As-Big-As-They-Used-To-Be tests-- the PARCC and the SBA.

The PARCC came first, and he took three pieces to do it justice.

In Part I, Walsh looks at readability levels of the PARCC reading selections, using several of the standard readability measures. That's no small chunk of extra homework to self-assign, but the results are revealing. Walsh finds that most of the selections are significantly above the stated grade level, the very definition of frustration level. Not a good way to scare up useful or legitimate data.

In Part 2, Walsh looks at readability levels of PARCC questions, looking at the types of tasks they involve and what extra challenges they may contain. Again, some serious homework and analysis here. Walsh finds the PARCC questions wanting in this area as well.

In Part 3, Walsh goes looking into PARCC from the standpoint of the reader. Does the test show a cultural bias, or favor students with a particular body of prior knowledge? That would be a big fat yes on both. Plus, the test involves some odd choices that add extra roadblocks for readers.

Walsh followed this series up with a post looking at the SBA. In some ways this was the most surprising post, because Walsh finds the SBA test.... not so bad. While we may think of PARCC (by Pearson) and SBA (by AIR) as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, it appears that what we actually have is Tweedledee and Bob.

These posts are literate, rational, and professional (everything that my feisty but personal reading of PARCC was not) and consequently hugely useful. This is hard, solid analysis presented clearly and objectively, which makes these posts perfect for answering the questions of civilians and administrators alike. I have been reading Russ Walsh for a while, and he never disappoints, but these four posts belong in some sort of edublogger hall of fame. Read them!

No National Test

As fans of test-driven accountability (as well as test-generated profits) continue to argue vigorously for the continued repeated use of Big Standardized Testing, there is one argument you won't hear much any more.

Today, there is no easy and rigorous way to compare the performance of individual students or schools in different states....If students take the same assessment under the same conditions, a given score in one place has the same meaning as it does in all others.

That's a from a joint paper issued by ETS, Pearson, and the College Board back in 2010. Back in 2011, USED's National Center for Educational Statistics released a report complaining that fifty different states had fifty different measures of student achievement.

The dream of Common Core was that every state would be studying the same thing. A student in Idaho could move to Alabama and pick up math class right where he left off, and the only way to insure that was going to be that Idaho and Alabama would be measuring their students with the same yardstick. Schools and students would be comparable within and across state boundaries.

That is not going to happen.

The attempt to create a national assessment is a failure. States continue to abandon the SBA and the PARCC; SBA is down to twenty-ish states and PARCC is under a dozen. The situation is messy that I have to give you approximations because it depends on who's counting and when-- Mississippi just pulled out and several other states are eagerly eying the exits and I can't find any listing of in's and out's that is reliable and up-to-date. (And that is before we even talk about how many students within testings states will opt out of their test.)

But what's important is this-- whether the number of states participating is a little over thirty or a little under, it is not fifty. It is not close to fifty. And to the extent that the number is changing, it is not moving toward fifty.

Now, granted, the number is also a bit of a lie. As with the Common Core standards, several states have abandoned the national assessments in name only. Utah, for instance, dropped out of the SBAC, and then promptly hired the same company to produce their new non-SBA test as was producing the SBA test itself. Pennsylvania dropped out of the PARCC, and yet our new tests are very, very PARCC-like.

So many states are, in fact, quietly sticking close to the beloved national assessment-- but because they are politically unlikely to ever admit it, the damage is the same for the lovers of national assessment, because the anti-nationalist states won't allow themselves to become part of the national testing.

Of course, if we wanted a national testing program, we could always go back to paying attention to the NAEP, but it's due for an upgrade and in today's climate, it's hard to imagine how such a job could be done. And it's a pre-existing product, so it certainly doesn't represent a new opening into the testing market. The current test-driven accountability wave has driven billions (with a b) of dollars into test corporation coffers. But the dream of one simple open market has fallen apart. Pearson and AIR and the rest have been forced to do business the old, messy way.

So we can't compare the students of Idaho to the students of Florida. We can't stack-rank the schools of Pennsylvania against the schools of Texas. We cannot measure how the Common Core is doing in every corner of the nation. There is no national, common assessment, and there never will be. On this point, at least, the reformsters have failed.

Utah Does Not Love Test It Sold To Florida

A hat tip to Jeffrey S. Solochek of the Tampa Bay Times for spotting this story.

Utah has been at the forefront of Common Core adoption, and they have been at the forefront of backing the hell away from the standards as well. They backed out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium back in the summer of 2012, citing concerns about federal intrusion, and they tried hard to keep arguing for the Core. But Utah had been playing with adaptive testing since 2009, adopting a legislative requirement to develop such a shiny test in 2012.

Of course, "develop" actually means "hire somebody to develop a test,' and Utah went with AIR (American Institutes for Research). AIR has been the ugly step-sister in the Race To Make Lots of Money from Testing. In 2014 they tried to sue the PARCC folks for creating a "bidding" process that declared that you could only win the contract if your company's name started with "P" and ended with "earson," but back in 2012 they did have one big score-- they landed the contract to develop the SBAC test. So Utah dropped out of the group that had hired SBAC to write a computer-based test of The Standards so that they could hire the exact same company to write a computer-based test of The Standards.

The test was to be called the SAGE, and in its rollout it bore a striking resemblance to all the other CCSS-ish tests, particularly in the way that it showed that Utah's students were actually way dumber than anyone expected so OMGZZ we'd better get some reformy action in here right now to fix it, because failing schools!

Meanwhile, in other States That Decided Maybe Common Core Was Very Bad Politics, Florida also dumped the SBAC. In 2013, Governor Rick Scott took a break from harvesting money to decree that SBAC was out the door. But what would they do about the federally required test-of-some-sort?

So maybe Florida made a phone call. Or maybe AIR said, "Well, if you want a Common Core test with all those nasty federal overreach barnacles scraped off it, we already have such a product." And lo and behold, the state of Utah suddenly found itself about to make a cool $5.4 million by renting out the SAGE to Florida. And that, boys and girls, is one example of how we end up NOT having the cool national assessments we were promised as part of the Core, even though we simultaneously end up with the same basic test everywhere (but can never say so, because federalism and commies and Obamacore). It's the worst of all worlds! Yay.

But wait-- there's more. Even as Florida was borrowing a cup of SAGE, Utah-ians (what do we call people who live there?) were not done hating all things Core. Turns out lots of Utah-vites aren't stupid, and when you show them a test that walks and talks and quacks like a duck, and comes from the same parents as all the ducks, they do not believe you when you tell them it's an aardvark.

You can measure the desperate thrashing of Utah's educational thought leaders by this "fact sheet" about the SAGE in which they make such points as "SAGE test students' knowledge and skills, not what they believe" and "SAGE tests are not part of the Common Core but they do-- in part-- measure whether students know and understand the Core standards."

Apparently that's not enough. Benjamin Wood in the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Utah's lawmakers are not feeling the high-tech SAGE love. Rep. Justin Fawson didn't like the state board's plan to use the leasing income to beef up the test (or, in other words, take the $5.4 million and just funnel it straight back to AIR). Rep. LaVar Christensen doesn't think the SAGE data is trustworthy.

"The data comes out low and it's treated as an accurate assessment of where we are, when in reality it's inherently flawed," Christensen said. "If you're going in the wrong direction, you don't step on the gas pedal."

Additionally, SAGE has the usual problems, including a shortage of computers to plunk every student in front of, so that according to Wood, some schools start their end-of-the-year testing in, well, now. Wood quotes Senator Howard Stephenson, a lawmaker who, back in 2008, thought Utah's computer adaptive testing was the bee's knees:

"There will be legislation this year to create a task force to look at doing away with the SAGE test entirely," Stephenson said during a Public Education Appropriation Subcommittee hearing. "I think we need to be looking at the whole issue of whether we should be having end-of-level tests."

So why did I find this story in the Tampa bay Times? Because now we have the prospect of Florida buying a product from folks who don't want to use the damn thing themselves. "Try this," says the salesman, who when asked about his own use, replies, "Oh, God, no. I would never use this stuff myself. But I will totally sell it to you." Congratulations, Florida, on buying material that has been field tested in Utah (which is a place very much like Florida in that they are both south of the Arctic Circle) but which the Utahvistas don't want themselves. It sounds like an excellent bargain.

Sorting the Tests

Since the beginnings of the current wave of test-driven accountability, reformsters have been excited about stack ranking-- the process of sorting out items from the very best to the very worst (and then taking a chainsaw to the very worst).

This has been one of the major supporting points for continued large-scale standardized testing-- if we didn't have test results, how would we compare students to other students, teachers to other teachers, schools to other schools. The devotion to sorting has been foundational, rarely explained but generally presented as an article of faith, a self-evident value-- well, of course, we want to compare and sort schools and teachers and students!

But you know what we still aren't sorting?

The Big Standardized Tests.

Since last summer the rhetoric to pre-empt the assault on testing has focused on "unnecessary" or "redundant" or even "bad" tests, but we have done nothing to find these tests.

Where is our stack ranking for the tests?

We have two major BSTs-- the PARCC and the SBA. In order to better know how my child is doing (isn't that one of our repeated reasons for testing), I'd like to know which one of these is a better test. There are other state-level BSTs that we're flinging at our students willy-nilly. Which one of these is the best? Which one is the worst?

I mean, we've worked tirelessly to sort and rank teachers in our efforts to root out the bed ones, because apparently "everybody" knows some teachers are bad. Well, apparently everybody knows some tests are bad, so why aren't we tracking them down, sorting them out, and publishing their low test ratings in the local paper?

We've argued relentlessly that I need to be able to compare my student's reading ability with the reading ability of Chris McNoname in Iowa, so why can't I compare the tests that each one is taking?

I realize that coming up with a metric would be really hard, but so what? We use VAM to sort out teachers and it has been debunked by everyone except people who work for the USED. I think we've established that the sorting instrument doesn't have to be good or even valid-- it just has to generate some sort of rating.

So let's get on this. Let's come up with a stack-ranking method for sorting out the SBA and the PARCC and the Keystones and the Indiana Test of Essential Student Swellness and whatever else is out there. If we're going to rate every student and teacher and school, why would we not also rate the raters? And then once we've got the tests rated, we can throw out the bottom ten percent of them. We can offer a "merit bonus" to the company that made the best one (and peanuts to everyone else) because that will reward their excellence and encourage them to do a good job! And for the bottom twenty-five percent of the bad tests, we can call in turnaround experts to take over the company.

In fact-- why not test choice? If my student wants to take the PARCC instead of the ITESS because the PARCC is rated higher, why shouldn't my student be able to do that. And if I don't like any of them, why shouldn't I be able to create a charter test of my own in order to look out for my child's best interests? We can give every student a little testing voucher and let the money follow them t whatever test they would prefer to take from whatever vendors pop up.

Let's get on this quickly, because I think I've just figured out to make a few million dollars, and it's going to take at least a weekend to whip up my charter test company product. Let the sorting and comparing and ranking begin!

Maine's SBA Loaded With Glitches

Lewsiton Middle School teacher Brian Banton took training, complete with practice for the Maine assessments that will be take on iPads. According to the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal, his report on that experience was direct and to the point.

"I was shocked to discover it doesn't work," Banton said. “As our training went on this morning, teachers in the room looked at each other and said, 'We can't do this.'”

He offered specific examples. When a point is entered on the iPad, it can't be removed. So no correcting mistakes. Multiplication symbols do not appear as multiplication symbols. The test should allow students to see both a graph and questions about it at the same time-- but they can't.

Maine schools do have the option of offering the paper version of the test, but for those just discovering that the computer version is a mess, it's too late-- the final date for choosing the paper version was February 4.

Parents (including some who are teachers) are making noise about opting out, and the school committee chair is right with them:

"The state can say 'it's all fixed,' but show me it is fixed,” Handy said. Or, “we opt out altogether.”

Handy said he can be “a stick in the mud and say, 'We're not going to administer it because you have given us a faulty product.' When an entire school district does that, it puts the state on notice. I have no problem doing that.”

However the school superintendent cautioned that the state has made it clear that giving any aid and comfort to the opt out movement would be "playing with fire."

The school district is pursuing options with the state, but it appears to be one more example of Not Ready for Prime Time testing.

Setting Cut Scores

Benchmark is originally a surveying term. Benchmarks are slots cut into the side of stone (read "permanent") structures into which a bench (basically a little shelf) can be inserted for surveying purposes. We know they're at a certain level because they've been measured in relation to another marker which has been measured in relation to another marker and so on retrogressively until we arrive at a Mean Sea Level marker (everything in surveying is ultimately measured in relation to one of those).

Surveying markers, including benchmarks, are literally set in stone. Anybody with the necessary training can find them always in the same place and measure any other point in relation to them.

This metaphorical sense of unwavering objective measure is what many folks carry with them to their consideration of testing and cut scores. Passing, failing, and excellence, they figure, are all measured against some scholarly Mean Sea Level marker by way of benchmarks that have been carefully measured against MSL and set in stone.

Sorry, no. Instead, cut scores represent an ideal somewhere between a blindfolded dart player with his fingers duct-taped together, and the guy playing against the blindfolded dart player who sets the darts exactly where he wants them.

Writing in the Stamford Advocate, Wendy Lecker notes that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium members (including Connecticut's own committed foe of public education Commissioner Stefan Pryor) set cut scores for the SBA tests based on stale fairy dust and the wishes of dying puppies.

People tend to assume that cut scores-- the borderline between Good Enough and Abject Failure-- mean something. If a student fails The Test, she must be unready for college or unemployable or illiterate or at the very least several grades behind where she's Supposed To Be (although even that opens up the question "Supposed by whom?")

In fact, SBAC declares that the achievement levels "do not equate directly to expectations for `on-grade' performance" and test scores should only be used with multiple other sources of information about schools and students. 

Furthermore, "SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college."

If you are imagining that cut scores for the high-stakes accountability tests are derived through some rigorous study of exactly what students need to know and what level of proficiency they should have achieved by a certain age-- well, first, take a look at what you're assuming. Did you really think we have some sort of master list, some scholastic Mean Sea Level that tells us exactly what a human being of a certain age should know and be able to do as agreed upon by some wise council of experty experts? Because if you do, you might as well imagine that those experts fly to their meetings on pink pegasi, a flock of winger horsies that dance on rainbows and take minutes of the Wise Expert meetings by dictating to secretarial armadillos clothed in shimmering mink stoles.

Anyway, it doesn't matter because there are no signs that any of these people associated with The Test are trying to work with a hypothetical set of academic standards anyway. Instead, what we see over and over (even back in the days of NCLB), is educational amateurs setting cut scores for political purposes. So SBAC sets a cut score so that almost two thirds of the students will fail. John King in New York famously predicted the percentage of test failure before the test was even out the door-- but the actual cut scores were set after the test was taken.

That is not how you measure a test result against a standard. That's how you set a test standard based on the results you want to see. It's how you make your failure predictions come true. According to Carol Burris, King also attempted to find some connection between SAT results and college success prediction, and then somehow graft that onto a cut score for the NY tests, while Kentucky and other CCSS states played similar games with the ACT.

Setting cut scores is not an easy process. Education Sector, a division of the thinky tank American Institutes for Research (they specialize in behavioral sciency thinking, and have a large pedigree in the NCLB era and beyond), issued an "explainer" in July of 2006 about how states set passing scores on standardized tests. It leads off its section on cut scores with this:

On a technical level, states set cut scores along one of two dimensions: The characteristics of the test items or the characteristics of the test takers.It is essential to understand that either way is an inescapably subjective process. Just as academic standards are ultimately the result of professional judgment rather than absolute truth, there is no “right” way to set cut scores, and different methods have various strengths and weaknesses.

The paper goes on to talk about setting cut scores, and some of it is pretty technical, but it returns repeatedly to the notion that at various critical junctures, some human being is going to make a judgment call.

Educational Testing Service (ETS) also has a nifty "Primer on Setting Cut Scores on Tests of Educational Achievement."  Again, from all the way back in 2006, this gives a quick compendium of various techniques for setting cut scores-- it lists eight different methods. And it also opens with some insights that would still be useful to consider today.

The first step is for policymakers to specify exactly why cut scores are being set in the first place. The policymakers should describe the benefits that are expected from the use of cut scores. What decisions will be made on the basis of the cut scores? How are those decisions being made now in the absence of cut scores? What reasons are there to believe that cut scores will result in better decisions? What are the expected benefits of the improved decisions? 

Yeah, those conversations have not been happening within anyone's earshot. Then there is this:

It is important to list the reasons why cut scores are being set and to obtain consensus among stakeholders that the reasons are appropriate. An extremely useful exercise is to attempt to describe exactly how the cut scores will bring about each of the desired outcomes. It may be the case that some of the expected benefits of cut scores are unlikely to be achieved unless major educational reforms are accomplished. It will become apparent that cut scores, by themselves, have very little power to improve education. Simply measuring a child and classifying the child’s growth as adequate or inadequate will not help the child grow. 

 Oh, those crazy folks of 2006. Little did they know that in a few years education reform and testing would be fully committed and devoted to the notion that you can make a pig gain weight by weighing it. All this excellent advice about setting cut scores, and none of it appears to be getting use these days.

I'm not going to go too much more into this document from a company that specializes in educational testing, except to note that once again, the paper frequently notes that personal and professional judgment is a factor at several critical junctures. I will note that they include this step--

The next step is for groups of educators familiar with students in the affected grades and familiar with the subject matter to describe what students should know and be able to do to reach the selected performance levels. 

They also are clear that selecting the judges who will set cut scores means making sure they are qualified, have experience, and reflect a demographic cross section. They suggest that policymakers consider fundamental questions such as is it better to pass a student who should fail, or fail a student who should pass? And they are also clear that the full process of setting the cut scores should be documented in painstaking detail, including the rationale for methodology and qualifications of the judges.

And they do refer uniformly to the score-setters as judges, because the whole process involves-- say it with me-- judgment.

People dealing with test scores and test results must remember that setting cut scores is not remotely like the process of surveying with benchmarks. Nothing is set in stone, nothing is judged based on its relationship to something set in stone, and everything is set by people using subjective judgment, not objective standards. We always need to be asking what a cut score is based on, and whether it is any better than a Wild Assed Guess. And when cut cores are set to serve a political purpose, we are right to question whether they have any validity at all.

Reality Impaired Assessment & Joyce Foundation

Over at Education Week: Teacher, Liana Heitin has rewritten a press release from the Joyce Foundation (if you don't know that name, more shortly) for general consumption. The lede is there in the title: Teachers May Need to Deepen Assessment Practices for Common Core.

The article spins off the work of Olivia Lozano and Gabriela Cardenas, two teachers at the UCLA Lab School in Los Angeles. This teaching team has spent ten years exploring the wonders of formative assessment. One of the handy specifics they have landed on include talking to the students one-on-one or in small groups, asking open-ended questions, and recording all the stuff they find out (copious notes) in a binder. Also, they like to call themselves "teacher researchers."

"More than just a buzzword among savvy educators, formative assessment is the ongoing process of collecting data on what students know or don't know, and changing instruction accordingly." First, hats off to the copywriter at Joyce, who has apparently stepped up from his previous job as a copywriter for JC Penneys. Second, who is the audience for this article? People who slept through all four years of teacher school? People whose teacher training only lasted five weeks? I read this sort of thing and think these people must believe that actual professional teachers are as ignorant of the teaching profession as these reformy types are. Sigh. Moving on...

Formative assessment used to be just quizzes and things, but now that Common Core has arrived to demand stronger thinky skills, we must formatively assess in stronger thinky ways.

The common standards are asking students to do that and more. They are aimed at "building childrens' capacity to think, and analyze, and communicate, and reason," said Margaret Heritage, the assistant director for professional development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA.

"Aimed at"? Yes, and when I was in college, I "aimed at" dating the hot girl in the flute section but I ended up getting pizza by myself. "Aiming at," is a wonderful phrase. I suggest that students taking math assessments indicate that they "aimed at" the correct answer and see if that gets them credit.

At any rate, what we seem to be advocating in the article is taking more time to assess more deeply. "A lot more talking, more focus, more discourse, more depth." Lots and lots of listening, high-quality listening, deep listening, creepy eaves-dropping on the kids listening. Because, again, no teacher has ever thought about listening to students.

In math, instead of "I do, you do, we do" lessons, teachers will need to have discussions about the answers, maybe spending twenty minutes to debate and discuss a single problem.

So, in short, all you need is a ten hour school day and a co-teacher in your classroom. Oh, and the kind of student population that a university lab school gets. Just take this proposal to your school board and suggest it for your entire elementary program; just double the length of the day and the size of the staff. How expensive could it be?

But Joyce--I mean, Heitin-- isn't done drifting through an alternate reality yet. The capper on the article is connecting all of this to the PARCC and SBA. But you will be relieved to know that both consortia will be making formative test materials available to your school! Yes!! Which is a relief because none of the stuff the whole rest of the article talks about will do a thing about preparing your students for the high stakes testing.

This kind of press release is about just one thing-- a credible cover story. It's the least the Joyce Foundation, a group that has its roots in Chicago schools corparateering and hangs out at the same reformy clubs as Gates and Broad, can do for us.

What are we actually going to do? We're going to get the practice tests ("formative assessments") and we're going to use them to teach to the test so that we can try to avoid the punishments threatened for students, teachers, schools, administrators and taxpayers if the students don't do well.

But we can't say we're teaching to the test. So we're offered this option-- pretend that we're doing all this cool stuff advocated by Joyce (if we aren't able to achieve the doubled school model, we can at least say we're "aiming at" it). Use this sparkly rhetoric to sell it to the public. Then send teachers back to their rooms to close the door and use their practice tests to drill students in preparation for the Big Test.