Why Are We Still Testing

It's the season of testing again, a season that has no come so many times that lots of folks don't even question it any more? But it's a question that needs to be asked about the Big Standardized Test-- why, exactly, are we still doing this? We've had a variety of answers over the years-- let's see how they hold up.

The Bathroom Scales

Take the test! It's just like weighing yourself on the bathroom scales! Early on many reformsters suggested that weighing the pig would make it gain weight, but that's stupid. So we weigh the school-- then what? That "then what" is a huge part of the problem, but the other part of the problem is trying to use the read-out on the bathroom scales to determine how tall, how healthy, and how well-adjusted the weigh-ee is. This was always a really dumb analogy.

Compare and Contrast

The BS Tests would let us compare a rural school in Idaho with an urban school in Michigan. It would let us compare every third grader to every other third grader. This is no longer possible-- different states have different sets of standards, and there are a wide variety of BS Tests being given, so we're back to comparing apples to watermelons.

Evaluating Educators

By soaking BS Test results in magical VAM sauce, we were supposed to get data that would let us tell the difference between good teachers and bad teachers. To begin with, that assumes that your definition of "good teacher" is "one who gts students to score well on a single math and reading test," which is not very helpful in sorting out, say, science or music teachers. And that's before we get to the insanity of using BS Test scores to "evaluate" teachers who have never even met the students whose scores are being used. Plus, VAM has problems. So many problems that there's a long list of folks who don't think it should be used for this purpose.

Informing Staffing Decisions

It was a fond dream that test-based evaluation would lead to evaluation based hiring, firing and compensation policies. This balloon never lifted off the ground, perhaps because the teacher pipeline has dried up so badly that schools are in no hurry to inflict a staffing shortage on themselves, and because some states are already paying teachers so little that they don't need a ginned-up excuse to pay teachers even less. Also, as noted, test-based evaluation of teachers doesn't work. If you're a principal, who are you going to believe-- test data, or your own eyes, ears, and brain?

Scaling Excellence

The failed evaluation piece means that another dream is also dead. That's the dream in which BS Test results are used to identify super-duper teachers, who are then tasked with spreading their super-duper teacherly wisdom to other less super-duper teachers. In fact, states were supposed to have a plan for moving good teachers to low-achieving schools, but that never happened because it turns out rendering educators is illegal in the US.

Helping Schools in Trouble

The BS Tests were going to help us identify schools that were "troubled" or "failing" or "sucky." One might argue that we can already find these schools without any trouble, but I suppose a case can be made that numbers you can wave at politicians might give some heft to that identification. The problem here is what hasn't happened. "Look, this school is clearly having trouble, so let's get them additional resources and help," said no legislature ever. Instead, the low-achievement label is used to justify targeting that school for destruction. Low scores can be used to justify the launch of charter businesses, or even the gentrification of entire sectors of a community. Low-scoring schools are not targeted for assistance; they are targeted for dismantling.

Address Inequity

We would find where non-wealthy non-white student populations were being ill-served. Anyone who can't figure that out without the BS Test is a dope. And as with the last point, the problem has been that the data hasn't so much been used to find schools that need help as it has been used to find schools that are vulnerable and ready to be turned into somebody's business opportunity. Instead of focusing our will to address educational inequity, test-based accountability has highlighted our lack of will (and wasted the good intentions of some folks).

Informing Instruction

Teachers were going to get their data spreadsheets and figure out, with laser-like precision, how they needed to change their instruction. But right off the bat it became clear that data about students in your class would only arrive long after the students had departed for their next classroom. Then the security issue reared its stupid head-- I can see student scores, but I am forbidden to see the test itself. (For that matter, students who are so inclined are unable to see their specific results to ask "What exactly did I get wrong here?") This means I can tell that Pat only got an okayish score, based on some questions that might have asked about something about reading that Pat apparently answered incorrectly. How can that inform my instruction? It can't. It doesn't. The BS Tests "inform instruction" mostly by encouraging teachers to spend more time on test prep. That's not a good thing.

Letting Parents Know How Their Children Are Doing

Under this theory, parents have no idea how their children are doing in school until the BS Test results appear. Assuming for the moment that the parents are that disconnected, the information provided is minimal, scoring a few categories on a 1-3 or 1-4 scale. A BS Test provides very non-granular data, less nuanced than a report card-- and based on just one test. There is nothing for parents to learn here.

Unmask the Lies

Of course, guys like Arne Duncan were sure that once the BS Test revealed the Truth-- that US schools are super-stinky-- folks like the fabled suburban white moms would have to face the Truth that their children were actually doing terribly. And then we tried talking about the honesty gap. Basically, a whole bunch of folks started with the premise that schools and the teachers who work in them largely suck and the BS Test would be a tool for revealing the Awful Truth (for some folks, you can also insert a screed about a vast union scam and conspiracy here). Somehow, that never happened. It's almost as if the vast majority of teachers don't actually suck.

Redefine What It Means To Be Educated

I don't know that this was a very widespread goal, but it was certainly near and dear to the hearts of guys like David Coleman, who had a good idea of what he did and didn't approve of in education, and dreamed of using standards hard-wired to high-stakes tests to force people to see things his way. Very few hearts and minds have been won at this point.

As a Backdoor Method of Imposing State and Federal Amateur Top-Down Control of Curriculum in Local Schools

Okay, this goal has kind of worked out. Many school districts have redesigned their curriculum to "align" with the BS Test (not the standards, but the "anchor" standards, or standards that will be tested). Heck, some school districts have restructured the district itself to accommodate the test (what's the best to handle the fact that 8th graders tend to do poorly on these tests? either fold them into your high school, or lower your "middle school" years so that they include elementary tests.) Test-centered curriculum affects students scheduling, with students who come up short on the practice tests may find they have to schedule around double math or double reading (no art, music, or history for you, kid). Within math and English classes, teachers are directed to use "data" from practice tests to "inform" their instruction, which fo course necessitates dropping content that is not On The Test.

So yes-- this particular goal of the BS Test is being achieved. It's just a very bad thing.

Bonus Paranoid Goal

You may believe that one of the goals of the testing regime is to destabilize, dismantle, and destroy public schools. I think some reformsters really thought this was going to help, and you can spot them because they are acknowledging that they failed. I think other reformsters weren't necessarily scheming, but when this came down the pike, they smelled an opportunity. And some reformsters absolutely want to see public education dismantled and the pieces sold off. BS Tests have been a useful tool in selling the narrative that public schools are "failing," that students are "trapped" in terrible public schools. In fact, BS Testing has been a kind of two-fer, because if you want to claim that public schools are failing, you can argue that they are now tied up in testing and following stupid government rules. Hey-- it's even a three-fer, because reformsters who want to move on to the Next Big Thing can say, "Yes, this test-centered reform is awful-- what we really need is Personalized Competency Based Learning Education Stuff!"

But How Else Will We Know How Schools Are Doing?

It's a fake question, because it assumes that BS Tests are now telling us how schools are doing, and they aren't. Nobody's definition of a Good School is "one in which students score well on a once-a-year math and reading test." There are so many things that matter in deciding if a school is a good one or not, and the vast majority (perhaps all) of them are not measured by the BS Tests.

So, Back To The Main Question

The Big Standardized Test was launched into schools with big goals, big plans, big dreams-- and none of them have come true. We've been doing this for oh so many years now, and if we were going to reap benefits, we would be awash in those benefits right now. We are not. Not by the measure of the supposedly "gold standard" NAEP test, not by college success, not by an economic and cultural renaissance caused by an influx of super5-educated young people.

Some of the goals associated with the test were not worthwhile goals to begin with. Some of the results have proven to be hugely undesirable. I don't believe that anyone associated with test-centered accountability said, "Oh, and let's try to make young children really stressed out to the point that they are crying and pulling hair-- that would be cool!" And yet, here we are.

Here we are spending a buttload of tax money on a product that has not delivered on any of its promises-- a buttload of money that could be spent to make schools better. Here we are shortening the school year so that even less instruction can take place.

Here we are continuing with the testing regimen even though, after two decades, we don't have a shred of evidence that it is doing any good, and a ton of evidence that it is doing harm.

So why are we still doing this?

Inertia? Affection for the status quo (which test-centered schooling now is)? Corporate lobbying to keep the tax dollars flowing? Policy leaders unwilling to confess they screwed up? Because legislators understand education as well as they understand the internet?

I don't know the answer. But I do know what we should do next.

Stop.

Just stop.

Cancel the BS Tests. Throw them out. Have an honest conversation about which of the above goals are worth pursuing and how best to pursue them. That will take time; it won't be easy. Maybe there will be a place for the right tests, used correctly, in the future. Maybe. But what we have now continues to do serious damage to US public education. It's costing us so much, both in terms of money and human toll and opportunity costs, and it is giving us nothing in return

Stop. Stop the testing. Stop it completely. Stop it now.

Just stop.

It's NAEP Day. Here's What To Remember As You Peruse All the Various PIeces Offering Reactions and Analysis of the So-Called Nation's Report Card. Really.

Even if you disagree with the valu the NAEP, it is the yardstick by which many folks, including many reformsters, choose to use in measuring educational achievement.

The 2017 tests were taken by students who have, for the most part, received an entire education shaped by ed reform.

The scores were not good.

Ed reform has failed.

Everything else is just details and noise.

Fight for Scraps (The Real Causes of the Strikes)

In today's Washington Post, economist Robert Samuelson, lays out his vision of why states like West Virginia and Oklahoma and Kentucky (and Arizona etc etc) are squeezing their teachers economically.

The deeper cause is that teachers — and schools — are competing with the elderly for scarce funds.

As the Boomers age, grandparents and grandchildren will vie for scarce funds.

Spending on the elderly is squeezing K-12 schools, police, parks, libraries, roads and other infrastructure (water projects, sewers), mainly through two programs: (a) Medicaid, a joint state-federal program of health insurance for the poor, which pays about half of nursing-home and long-term-care costs for the aged and disabled (on average, states pay about 37% of Medicaid’s costs); and (b) contributions to underfunded pensions for state and local workers.

If nothing else, this may help clarify for some of us why lately there is so much right-tilted thinky tank interest in "fixing" pensions.

But for me it raises another question. If the underlying problem behind all these issues is competition for funding, couldn't we also say that the underlying issue is the lack of funding?

Could we not say that the underlying problem is that too few people are collecting too much of the wealth generated by the economy and paying too little tax on it?

I'm not an economist, but I continue to be mystified at how the country can get richer and richer, and yet states and communities seem to get poorer and poorer. I mean, we've seen some states run their own experiments. Minnesota increased taxes. California increased taxes. Kansas slashed taxes. It has turned out well for Minnesota and California; it has turned out poorly for Kansas. Could it be that taxing done well is helpful?

So maybe it's not necessary to have a cage match between Grampaw and Junior. Maybe it's possible to fund stuff for the aging boomers and also fund stuff for children (like, you know, education) just by collecting more funds.

A sensible society would direct its governmental programs and investments toward preparing for the future. Instead, our emphasis is backward-looking, with more and more support going to the aged. On the other hand, a compassionate and caring society — a civilized society — doesn’t discard its older members just because their self-reliance and social utility have declined.

Teachers and others will continue to battle the demographics. Until we muster the courage to be candid about the choices, we will be stuck in a place we don’t want to be.

Samuelson isn't wrong. But that candid conversation could include one other choice-- we could tax folks a bit more so that we could afford to be both sensible and civilized. We could decide that providing health care for the aged and education for the young are both more important than making sure the 1% keep their vast wealth undisturbed. I'm not a hard-core socialist, nor do I think the government needs to strip every last dollar from every rich person's hand.

But by Samuelson's own framing, doesn't the fact that some states have to choose between being sensible and being civilized-- isn't that a sign that we may have veered a bit too far in the direction of using government primarily to service the desires corporations and the rich folks who run them? Because I don't think there's anything sensible or civilized about a country that makes Grampaw and Junior fight over table scraps while the rich are grabbing more food than they know what to do with.

Striking, Choice and Unions

No real surprise here. It was only a matter of time (minutes) before someone used the teacher strikes in West Virginia et. al. as an argument for school choice.

Here's Tillie Elvrum at Campbell Brown's The74. Elvrum has been a school choice advocate for a while, serving as the president of PublicSchoolOptions, a group that doesn't just support school choice, but is all in for cyber schooling. They run a Bootcamp for parent advocacy. They are also unusual in the choice arena in that they advocate for the removal of "access barriers" that keep some students from being able to choose charters. That seems linked to Elvrum's own story, which is that her child with special needs got the help he wanted at an on-line school; it's hard to predict how many other charters would have found a way to push him out.

At any rate, she has made it clear why public schools are awful-- that damn teachers union. And she is consistent in her blaming. The strike in West Virginia is not a teacher strike- it's a "teachers union strike." When his son was kept out of school by a strike, "the demands of the union kept him from his most basic need" also described as "when the unions in Pennsylvania walked out on my son." The ugly tug-of-war that happens at these times? That occurs "when unions force teachers to walk out of classrooms."

This is the classic argument-- teachers and the teachers unions are entirely different things, with teachers somehow at the mercy of union decisions that are made by....? I don't know. Evil union officials who all have some secret power over the rank and file?

Elvrum is painting a picture that is not particularly representative of reality. Teachers don't like to strike, and when they do strike, it's because they feel they're out of options. Teachers certainly don't strike because the union says they have to. In fact, if you think teachers meekly follow union orders, check out the number of NEA and AFT members who voted for Donald Trump. I can assure you-- all fifty five counties of WV don't walk out on strike because the union says to-- they walk out because the individual teachers have had it. [That's why it's called a wildcat strike-- because they walked out in spite of the union, not because of it.]

But some reformsters find the Evil Union narrative useful because it supports one of the charter/choice selling points-- come to our school, where there is no evil union and teachers just do as they're told. The Evil Union narrative also goes along with the idea that real rank-and-file teachers feel a special sacred calling to their work and never trouble themselves with vulgar concerns like how much they get paid or whether they have insurance or the conditions in their building. It's the union that puts those thoughts into our teachers' heads. Those nice ladies would be happy to work for a baloney sandwich and a pat on the head if some Evil Union guy wasn't whispering in their ears with indecent suggestions about decent pay.

Like many anti-strike arguments, it allows some folks to pretend that everything is okee-dokee in teacher land and that nothing needs to be addressed, which when you think about it is a really ironic argument for an ed reformster to adopt since it boils down to-- our schools are a terrible mess and don't serve our students well and need to be completely overhauled, except for the parts having to do with teachers, because those parts are perfectly perfect. Lots of reformsters are smarter than that, but those that aren't at being flushed out of the brush by the new wave of strikes. They don't have a lot to contribute to the current conversation, but it is useful to see their argument fully revealed.

Strangled by Bootstraps

This was one of the more depressing poll results to appear recently--

Forty percent of white Americans think black people would be just as well off as white people if they worked harder, according to a new poll from YouGov on Wednesday.

Bootstraps, baby. We just assume everyone has the same boots and the same straps and all differences between outcomes are strictly the result of differences in how hard you yanked on those bootstraps.

It's difficult to know exactly, how hard it would be to track your way back through US history using the bootstrap theory. Despite red lining, black folks would have been able to buy decent housing if they'd just tried harder? If black folks had just tried harder, they wouldn't have been beaten down by Jim Crow laws? If black folks had just tried harder, segregation wouldn't have kept them out of white schools? If black folks had just tried harder, they wouldn't have been lynched? If black folks had tried harder, they wouldn't have been bought and sold as slaves?

Well, that was all in the past, declare the bootstrap enthusiasts. In this country you always get a clean fresh start, and the past doesn't have to hold you back. Which is true, I suppose, if there is nothing in your past or your family's past to hold you back. If your bootstraps are flopping free and not attached to anything. If nobody took your bootstraps away because they were afraid you might get too high and mighty.

Privilege is so often blind to itself; we are a nation of people who were born on third base and grow up thinking we hit a triple. To be fair, this is not simply arrogance and entitlement. There's an element to self-protection in blind privilege-- if I believe that what I have is earned and not luck, the result of merit and not circumstances, then I don't have to live in fear that some morning it will all just disappear as mysteriously as it appeared in the first place.

But forty percent! Forty freakin' percent!!

I keep worrying that the exact number translates into teaching staffs. How many teachers are bootstrap enthusiasts?

How many teachers figure that any student who's doing poorly is doing so because they just aren't trying? How many teachers apply that reasoning disproportionately to students of color? How much does this dynamic feed the other dynamic that we know about-- that students of color are disproportionately punished for disciplinary infractions? How many teachers and administrators look at a black kid who has screwed up and think, "This kid is not even trying to do better. Throw the book at 'em."

Sure, everyone can do "better" if they work harder with whatever bootage they have in life. Hard work matters. But then, it has to be the right amount of the right kind of work-- black folks worked hard to make their lives better during the Civil Rights movement, and plenty of white folks got mighty bent out of shape that the black folks were making too much fuss, being too uppity. Working too hard at it. Nor do I hear a lot of bootstrappers praising the Black Lives Matter movement saying, "Good for them-- they really grabbed their bootstraps and started to try to lift up their communities with whatever tools they could grasp." And don't even talk about brown folks walking their bootstraps to the USA to work their way to a better life. Those bootstraps can't be tolerated.

I've done okay for myself in life, but if we have to talk bootstraps-- well, I've had a lot of help. My parents pulled my bootstraps up and my schools pulled them up and some important people who decided to reach down and adjust my footwear a few times. It's a complicated dance; if you are fortunate, blessed, privileged, people open doors for you, but you have to walk through on your own two booted feet. I don't really get people who insist they not only pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but they built the door and hung the frame and installed the hardware using their bootstraps as a kind of swiss army knife toolkit. Nobody does it himself or herself. Nobody. Nobody. Some people get a million dollar loan from their parents, and some have parents whose struggle is passed down to their children. Where some people have huge advantages, some have huge disadvantages. How can we still be debating this.

And that's before we even get to this part-- that advantages are more advantageous for some folks than for others. White children of the rich tend to stay rich; rich children of color do not. Look at some of the children of the rich and tell me that they kept their family's advantage through grit and hard work.

Sigh. Forty percent.

All this time, and we've still got all these white folks thinking that poor white folks are victims of circumstances, but poor black folks got there by being lazy.

There are so many bad ways for this to play out in education. Charter schools founded on the whole idea that what These People need to learn is how to work hard and grab their bootstraps. Public schools with teachers who make judgments about effort and ability based on race. If you're a white person teaching next door to a white person who thinks like this, talk to them about it. If you're a white person who thinks like this, go read some history and smarten yourself up.

Forty percent. Damn.

ICYMI: Endless Winter Edition (4/8)

It's normal to have one last snow storm after Easter, then move on to spring. Apparently that's not what we're doing this year.

At any rate, here's a short batch of items to read from last week. Remember-- if you like it, amplify it by tweeting, sharing and otherwise pushing the voices you value out into the world.

A School Board Member Says Let's Call the State's Bluff 

A notoriously contentious Florida school board members says he's tired of the state's destruction of local school board power; if they want to turn around local schools, let them come in and do the dirty work themselves.

Identifying Effective Teacher Preparation Programs Using VAMS Does Not Work

God bless researchers who take the time and trouble to prove what any twelve-year-old can see what is true-- that using student test scores to evaluate the place where their teachers went to college is a fool's game. VAMboozled has the details.

What A Great Teacher Is Worth

Actually, a slightly different list of what qualities a great teacher must have.

Response to One More Teacher's-Havbe-It-Easy Letter

A NC teacher-of-the-year responds to that same old baloney about how teachers only work 180 days and get summers off, so stop complaining.

Black Student Punishment

We have the data; either black students are collectively more poorly behaved than white ones, or there's some systematic racism going on in school discipline work. (Spoiler alert: it's not that first one).

Okalhoma Governor's Obnoxious Quote

I may have paraphrased a bit. Of all the stupid things politicians have said in reaction to the teacher strikes going on, the "car" thing from Oklahoma's governor is right up there.

The Data Boyz

Another invaluable Have You Heard podcast looking at the rise of the Data Boys in education, and how their ideas of what can and should be measured have made a mess for the rest of us.

Content Matters (or "Yet Another Reformster Has an Epiphany")

NAEP report time is just around the corner, and states are positioning themselves to withstand the hits they're about to take. This has led to even more special moments in reformster revelation.

Here's John White in The Hill, explaining why NAEP is not a good reading test. White, you will recall, is the Louisiana Superintendent of Education, arriving there as a Broad-trained TFA-produced reformster (you can see his timeline laid out here) and a big fan of Common Core. In short, he's always been completely unqualified for his job, but has the right friends in the right places. None of that prepared me for what he wrote in the Hill opinion piece.

He opens by setting the stakes high-- "A literate citizenry is a matter of national defense" -- and so, he reasons, we have to change every reading test in America.

Why? Well, he notes that while fourth grade scores have climbed, scores for older students have not. And the problem could be, he thinks, that the tests are not an accurate measure of reading.

As with children, a literate adult can read individual words and can connect them into sentences. But literate adults also have the background knowledge necessary to make sense of the words they encounter. When we read that a player rounded the bases, for example, we know that means more than just running around a baseball field — someone hit a home run. Or when we read there was a meeting at 10 Downing St., we know it wasn’t just tea time in London — something important happened in Great Britain at the home of the prime minister. We comprehend what we read because we have prior knowledge of the subject

Imagine, then, taking a reading test and encountering a passage on the Cuban Missile Crisis without knowing much about the Cold War or President Kennedy. Or, try it yourself by reading an academic study on a subject you know nothing about. You may be able to decipher the words, but making sense of the text will be tedious. And good luck with a test of how well you comprehended and retained the knowledge.

On today’s reading tests, students read articles and stories they’ve not encountered before on topics they don’t necessarily know anything about. This may explain why older students struggle more on these tests; there is simply more that older students have to know to be sure they will comprehend an article written for an older audience.

And I know that's a lot of quoting, but this next graph is crucial:

The trouble is that by not requiring knowledge of any specific book or facts, reading tests have contributed to the false impression that reading is mainly about having skills such as being able to summarize, and not about background knowledge. Walk into many English classrooms today and you will see students capably identifying an article’s main idea. But you’re less likely to find students learning the historical context for a novel or discussing the novel’s broader meaning. By not requiring knowledge, tests create no incentive for particular knowledge to be taught.

Emphasis mine. White is absolutely dead on correct here-- the attempt to reduce reading to a set of discrete content-free skills has been misguided and dopey. How did we arrive at such a place? White ignores that question, as well he might, as he's one of the people who worked hard to get us there. The content-starved skill-focused vision of reading was promoted by Common Core and backed up by Common Core testing. That would be the same Common Core that White encouraged Louisiana to embrace. And hey- remember that time that White openly defied the governor who hired him in order to keep the Core and the PARCC test in place? Fun times.

White apparently wants to pretend it's not so, but his Hill piece directly contradicts reformster orthodoxy. It was David Coleman, CCSS ELA architect who told us to boldly teach the Gettysburg Address without any historical context or discussion of the broader meaning. It's the Common Core linked Big Standardized Tests that have accustomed us to the notion that reading is always done in bits and pieces and excerpts, snatches of reading plucked loose from the context of the larger work. In fairness, not all reformsters have bought this idea-- the importance of content for reading is a point on which Robert Pondiscio and I are in complete agreement. But White has been toeing the Common Core content-free reading line all along.

So why the shift? Did something happen to make White realize that the Common Core approach to reading is baloney? That seems unlikely, as witnessed by the fact that his opinion piece nowhere mentions Common Core, nor does it include the words "I was wrong."

No, the more likely cause is the knowledge that NAEP scores are about to punch his state in the face, and as Mercedes Schneider correctly notes, these are not scores he fudge, delay, or hide. Instead, he has to scramble for a way to lessen the impact. When doing the wrong thing is about to bite you in the butt, one strategy is, surprisingly, to start advocating for the right thing.

So while I agree whole-heartedly with everything White said, I don't believe he believes it. His unwillingness to fess up for his own complicity in this mess is also not an encouraging sign. He's just the dog standing next to the broken tree saying, "Hey, somebody broke this. I don't know who it was, but you should really do something about it." He's not entirely wrong, but I'm not going to trust him around trees any time soon.