The high stakes testing sham

From the Art of Teaching Science, by Jack Hassard

The authoritarian standards and high-stakes testing movement conjure up for me the use of power and privilege to create injustices for not only schools and teachers, but for students and their parents. Using invalid test scores, the government has cast a net around schools that have high poverty rates resulting in many of them being labeled as failures with teachers and administrators fired, and replaced by teachers, many of whom are un-certified, and lack the teaching experience needed for these schools.

And all of this is done with data that is not only invalid, but is not reliable. As Dr. Michael Marder says, “the masses of nationwide data do point to the primary cause of school failure, but it is poverty, not teacher quality.” So what do we do? We create a system in which life changing decisions are made about teachers and students based on data that is not examined in the context of power, privilege, and income. This leads to a corrupt system in which we predicate schools’ and teachers’ performance on false data, and use this data to embarrass and destroy careers of highly educated teachers, and bring havoc to families. Why are we doing this?

We’ve enabled a layer of the educational system (U.S. Department of Education and the state departments of education) to implement the NCLB act, and high-stakes tests, and use data from these tests to determine the fate of school districts, teachers and students. Collaborating with this layer of education are private family foundations, such as the Walton Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundations, private networks of schools such as KIPP, alternative teacher education organizations such as Teach for America, funded organizations such as Achieve, Inc. This collaboration promotes school choice and the privatization of schooling. Using the bluff that America’s schools are failing, and using data from international tests, the collaborators have conjured up a formula of reform that bases student progress on low level, bubble type “achievement” tests as the single factor in determining not only student success or failure in subject matter courses, but they also have figured out a way to use the invalid VAM modeling to penalize teachers, under the guise of getting rid of ”bad” teachers. There you have it.

The Next Generation
With this in mind, the draft version of the Next Generation of Science Standards will be available for public view very soon from Achieve, Inc., a company that stands to enrich itself with millions of dollars through the process of implementing the science standards, not to mention the Common Core State Standards.

Mind you, Achieve is a very large company with lots of corporate support and power, as well having the ear of the U.S. Department Education (ED). ED has insisted that states adopt the Common Core State Standards if they want to share in the billions of dollars of money being dispensed by the government. See for example the scoring rubric used to evaluate Race to the Top proposals. Not only are states to adopt common standards but also develop teacher and administrator evaluation based on measuring “student growth” using VAM modeling, which has been shown to be unreliable, and invalid.

Things are different now compared to 1996 when the first set of science standards was published. Back then, there was very little high-stakes testing. Now, because of the NCLB Act of 2002, high-stakes testing is required of every child’s progress in reading and math in each of grades 3 through 8, and at least once during grades 10 – 12. Since 2007, science assessments must be administered at once during grades 3 – 5, grades 6 – 9, and grades 10 – 12. And, this does not include the requirement set forth by each state. State tests are to be keyed to their own standards. And the high-stakes testing season which is getting underway, will consume the next 3-5 weeks of students’ and teachers’ lives.

The adoption by all states of Common Core State Standards in math and English/language arts, and soon, science has happened. Under development is a 24-state consortium working to develop the next-generation k-12 assessments in English and math. Guess who is heading up this effort? That’s right, Achieve, Inc. In the near future America’s schools will have the same standards, and the same set of high-stakes tests. And this in a democracy!

Over the next week or so, I am going to focus on the power, privilege, and injustice of the authoritarian standards & high-stakes movement with an eye toward providing ideas and data that question the policies of state and federal education agencies, and their collaborators.

Do you think power, privilege and injustice are concepts that help us understand the authoritarian standards and high-stakes testing scam?

http://www.artofteachingscience.org/2012/04/12/the-power-privilege-and-injustice-of-authoritarian-standards-high-stakes-testing-sham/