Join Seattle Opt Out on Wednesday, September 27th @ 7 PM for a brief presentation and discussion around standardized testing and its impact on our public schools. The event will be held at Moonpaper Tent ( 8503 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 ) and is free and welcome to all.
Original Title: Why Aren’t We Talking About This? Reposted with permission from Save Maine Schools – Helping You Navigate Next-Gen Ed Reform.
Everyone in the nation is talking about our racist history, but do people know what type of racism is happening today, beneath our noses, under the banner of education reform?
When I was twenty-five, I interviewed at a charter school in Brooklyn.
Before I sat down to talk to the dean, I observed a kindergarten class that looked nothing like any kindergarten class I had ever seen: just shy of thirty children sitting in rows on a carpet, each with legs crossed and hands folded, all completely and utterly silent.
In my interview, the dean asked me what I noticed about the class.
“They were very well behaved,” I said.
“Yes, they were. But they sure don’t come in like that,” he answered. With icy pride in his voice, he said: “It’s only because of the hard work of our staff that they act like that.”
I took the job – foolishly – and soon found out what this “hard work” meant: scholars, as we called them, were expected to be 100% compliant at all times. Every part of the nine-hour school day was structured to prevent any opportunity for deviance; even recess, ten-minutes long and only indoors, consisted of one game chosen for the week on Monday.
We were overseers, really. Our lessons were scripted according to the needs of the upcoming state test, and so we spent our days “catching” scholars when they misbehaved, marking their misdeeds (talking, laughing, wiggling) on charts, and sending them to the dean when they acted their age too many times in one day.
There weren’t any white children at the school, but there I was – a white teacher, snapping at a room full of black children to get them to respond, in unison, to my demands.
…
Everyone in the nation is talking about our racist history, but do people know what type of racism is happening today, beneath our noses, under the banner of education reform?
With useless, commercial junk-tests as justification, we have been told, for years now, that we must serve up our low-income schools – those schools filled mostly with children of color – to profiteers, who are then free to experiment on children in whatever ways they see fit.
Have you ever seen this video? Watch as the parents – parents who love and value their school – are told that they need a charter network to rescue them:
“Why come here and discombobulate our home?” one parent asks.
They are discombobulating homes everywhere, of course, but communities of color are almost always hit first – and hardest.
But who, aside from a few bloggers and academics, are talking about this?
Why aren’t more people demanding that these racist institutions and policies be taken down?
…
Things are about to get much worse, as profiteers are now turning their attention to the measurement and manipulation of the non-academic parts of schooling – how much “grit” a child has, or how compliant he or she is – with computers taking the place of teachers to conduct remediation.
It’s modern eugenics: the molding of children’s personalities, starting from preschool, to suit the needs of our Wall Street masters.
If you aren’t sure what I mean, it’s because it isn’t happening yet in your community. Maybe, if you’re lucky, it never will.
You can be sure, however, that it is happening to other people’s children.
When will we demand that this stops too?
I am writing to encourage everyone who values the 13 years of hard work completed by students as they reach their senior year to call their state legislators. My request is simple: ask your legislator to pass HB 1046. This bill will serve to delink all high stakes testing requirements in all subjects from high school graduation.
While this bill does not eliminate the state tests, it DOES eliminate the high stakes attached to these tests, which is a big step forward in supporting students whose futures have been severely damaged by high stakes testing.
In 2013, Seattle Times writer Donna Blankenship notified her readers about some stark facts tied to the state’s End of Course Math tests:
“But that doesn’t make life any easier for the nearly 7,000 students in the Class of 2013 who have yet to pass the newly required math test and didn’t get their diplomas last month.”
2013 was the first year the state required students to pass an end of course math test in order to graduate and earn their diploma.
This got me thinking. Since 2013, how many students in Washington State have been denied a diploma for failing a high stakes tests required for graduation? I don’t see the numbers posted clearly anywhere, despite the state’s creation of these high stakes.
It gets worst. In 2017-18, students will be required to pass three high stakes tests in order to receive their diplomas, per OSPI:
I wrote OSPI and asked them about the number of students who will be denied a diploma because of end of course tests required by the state. After all, we know approximately 7,000 students were denied graduation in 2013 because of one math test. What will happen when three tests are required?
Hello OSPI Communications and Community Outreach,
I have a question about SHB1046. Does OSPI have an estimate of how many students will fail to graduate if testing is not delinked from graduation, please? How many failed to graduate last year due to testing?
Thank you kindly, Susan DuFresne
OSPI’s response:
“As of late April, there were 15,645 students in the Class of 2017 who had not met the assessment graduation requirements. Students are required to pass an assessment – or a graduation alternative – in each of the three subject areas ELA, math, and science. The 15,645 number includes students who may have passed 0, 1, or 2 of the requirements, but haven’t met all 3. Also note that these numbers only reflect their status with respect to the assessment grad requirements; it does not include information about whether the student has met other graduation requirements such as credits.”
15,645 students in Washington State are at risk of being denied graduation after investing 13 years of their lives in school. In years past, a child attended 13 years of school, received passing or failing grades by their professional educators, earned their credits, and graduated with their diploma.
Shannon Ergun, ESL 9-12 Mt Tahoma High School, Tacoma Public Schools is highly concerned about the undue stress level these high stakes create for students and she states:
“I estimate based on there being 1.1 million students in WA that there are 70K-75K seniors that means that about 20% of current seniors are waiting on test scores to know if they can walk at graduation in 4-5 weeks. That is an inappropriate level of stress for a 17 or 28 year old to carry while still faced with AP exams, final exams, and final plans for beyond high school.
Until large numbers of kids are actually impacted everyone will continue to believe it will all be ok.”
I think Shannon makes a great point: What about the ordeal our kids experience just by taking these high stakes tests, knowing graduation is on the line? As adults, it’s sometimes easier to ignore rather than face the pressure these tests place on our kids.
For instance, did you know some students find these tests so stressful there’s an actual protocol for what to do should a student vomit on a test? That’s a lot of pressure. When was the last time you vomited at work over the pressure you felt to perform? I’m guessing this would be a highly unusual occurrence, not likely covered by a particular protocol in the employee handbook.
And what’s the message we’re sending to those kids born without the very particular gift of being a good test takers? You only have value if you can score high on a standardized test?
The State Board of Education is offering a compromise solution: delinking the biology end of course exam, while continuing to use the other end of year course exams as graduation requirements.
Why would it be acceptable to offer a deal to 3,302 students but leave 12,343 behind?
As an educator, I want ALL students who have otherwise completed their graduation requirements based on grades and credits earned to receive their diplomas – despite failing one or more of any of the three high stakes tests imposed by the state.
High school exit exams contribute greatly to the school-to-prison pipeline as noted here by FairTest:
“High school exit exams (FairTest, 2008) push many thousands of students out of school. As a result of these factors, urban graduation rates decreased. Some students see no realistic option other than dropping out; some are deliberately pushed out or fail the tests. Either way, these young people are much more likely to end up in trouble or in prison. One study found that high school exit exams increase incarceration rates by 12.5 percent (Baker & Lang, 2013).”
Sadly, youth who are unable to acquire a diploma are often relegated to minimum wage employment, live with state support through DSHS, or become homeless. In 2012, for example, DSHS reported that 69% of their “Opportunity Youth” did not have a high school diploma.
And what about earnings for youth who do not receive a high school diploma?
“The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF). That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,424 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree.
PBS Frontline reports in Dropout Nation by Jason Breslow and per the 2012 US Census here:
“The challenges hardly end there, particularly among young dropouts. Among those between the ages of 18 and 24, dropouts were more than twice as likely as college graduates to live in poverty according to the Department of Education. Dropouts experienced a poverty rate of 30.8 percent, while those with at least a bachelor’s degree had a poverty rate of 13.5 percent.
Among dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, incarceration rates were a whopping 63 times higher than among college graduates, according to a study (PDF) by researchers at Northeastern University. “
Are we OK with throwing away the futures of kids who are unable to perform on high stakes tests – after they’ve devoted 13 years of hard work to their education? What message does this send to kids about hard work when it doesn’t payoff and they end up rejected by the system.
What if OSPI was required to report how many students have been denied graduation due to high stakes testing each year? What if our US Department of Education had to file a yearly report which focused on the living conditions of each state’s youth denied a diploma due to high stakes tests?
Perhaps outraged parents, educators, and students would rise up and stop the high stakes testing; the state’s means to punish children, educators, and schools would be lost forever.
By delinking ALL high stakes tests from graduation we can protect thousands of students in Washington from being denied their rightfully earned diploma for simply missing a few questions on a test.
Also by delinking these tests from graduation requirements, we will also save our state between $9-$11 million dollars. Money that could be better spent on actual teaching vs testing.
Call 1-800-562-6000 and ask your legislators to protect our students by delinking high stakes testing from graduation – vote YES on SHB1046! Delink them all! Give our youth the bright futures they deserve!
-Susan DuFresne – Integrated Kindergarten Teacher with General Education and Special Education endorsements – 7 years in the Renton School District, Teacher of Professional Conscience, Co-Owner of the Opt Out Bus, Social Equality Educator, Artist, progressive and social justice education activist, unionist, mother and grandmother – The views I express are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer. #FreeSpeech
How far are we from the day we’ll be forced to rely on online education modules to inspire and excite the minds of young people; where badge collections replace diplomas; and virtual reality games substitute for Friday night dances, track meets, spelling bees, and school plays?
Editor’s note: Original post written for Wrench in the Gears and re-published with permission. Visit Wrench in the Gears for more information on the danger of “learning eco-systems.” -Carolyn Leith
How far are we from the day we’ll be forced to rely on online education modules to inspire and excite the minds of young people; where badge collections replace diplomas; and virtual reality games substitute for Friday night dances, track meets, spelling bees, and school plays? How much time do we have before certified human teachers are replaced by “Task Rabbit” pathway designers and AI personal “tutors?” Before we lose all expectations for privacy surrounding how and when we access our educations? Before the entirety of our educational lives becomes consolidated under a unique ID number and its associated digital shadow?
Online learning is claiming ever-larger blocks of instructional time in bricks and mortar schools. Budgets prioritize technology purchases over investments in human staff and facilities. Increasingly responsibility for assessment is being taken away from teachers and placed under the purview of data dashboards and black boxes that monitor in minute detail our children’s academic and social-emotional “progress” towards standards we had no part in setting.
For all of these reasons, we need to take a critical look at school redesign programs that are showing up in communities across the nation. Our government is rolling these initiatives out right now in coordination with think tanks, philanthropies, and the education technology sector. If thousands of superintendents nationwide are signing on to “Future Ready Schools” it is imperative that as citizens we start considering the far reaching consequences a data-driven, technology-mediated system of public education will have for the health and wellbeing of our children and our democracy.
As we move into the era of the quantified self. I find myself worrying. I worry a lot. I worry that we should be asking questions, a lot of questions, and that our window for questioning is shrinking by the day.
Many who spend their days in our nation’s schools have been put into positions where they are almost compelled to welcome the concept of “school redesign.” They have been living for years in the test-and-punish nightmare that No Child Left Behind created. They’ve been coping with austerity budgets, toxic buildings, staff shortages, lack of respect, frozen wages, and the ongoing challenge of meeting the needs of students living in poverty with far too few resources at their disposal.
Current conditions in many of our nation’s schools are appalling, and that is by design. It is through this dissatisfaction with our current situation that they hope to accomplish a shift away from a “standardized” education based on a single high-stakes test given at the end of the year to a “personalized” digital education that employs ongoing online data collection as children progress through the curriculum year round.
So with that in mind, I invite you to consider the questions below. Hopefully they will give you some ideas you can use to start your own conversations with parents, teachers, and school board members in your own community. In my heart I believe the 21st century schools parents and human teachers desire for their children are very different from the version being pushed, behind closed doors, by the educational technology sector.
Technology-mediated education is considered to be a disruptive force. Many “innovative” 21st century education approaches seek to undermine traditional concepts like “seat time,” the Carnegie Unit, age-based grade levels, the centrality of teachers in classrooms, report cards, diplomas and to extend credit-based learning beyond the school building itself. Before moving forward with these ideas, shouldn’t there be a wider public discussion about which aspects of traditional schooling we want to retain moving forward? Disruption for the sake of creating new markets for businesses is an insufficient reason to dismantle neighborhood schools.
Why should we allow our children to be human subjects in this grand data science experiment? This is particularly troublesome given the fact that ethics codes for data scientists are not nearly as well developed as codes of conduct for bio-medical research.
What are the implications of expanded 1:1 device use and screen time on children’s health and emotional states?
How does the use of embedded “stealth” assessments contribute to the normalization of a surveillance society in the United States?
What overlap exists between data analysis used to monitor national security interests and data analysis used to assess educational content and activities in our nation’s schools? How does the Office of Educational Technology interface with the Department of Defense and how comfortable are the American people with those relationships? See xAPI or Tin Can or Douglas Noble’s 1991 extensively-researched book “Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology, and Public Education” for additional background information.
As nano-technology advances make wearable devices more commonplace, shouldn’t parents have the right to refuse the collection of live data streams on behalf of their children? What types of monitoring (bio-metric and otherwise) have been enabled through the expanded presence of devices in our schools? Cameras, microphones, touch screens, and fit bits for example?
While personalized learning platforms tout their “individualization,” to what extent do these programs recognize our children’s humanity? As systems thinking becomes embedded within public education policy, are our children being valued as unique human beings possessed of free will, or merely as data points to be controlled and managed?
Feedback loops influence human behavior. In what ways could large-scale implementation of adaptive education programs and online educational gaming platforms contribute to the collective brainwashing of our children?
Personalized education means that algorithms decide what educational content your child CAN see, and what content they won’t see. Is it the duty of education to expose children to a wide range of content that will broaden their view of the world? Or is it the role of an adaptive learning program to feed the child information for which they have already expressed a preference? Consider the implications of a “Facebook” model of education.
How much data is too much? Data is never neutral. Who is collecting the data and to what end? Data is always a reflection of the ideology in which it is collected. Why should we trust data more than the professional expertise of human teachers?
We caution children about their online presence, but through the imposition of digital curriculum we are forcing them to create virtual educational identities at very young ages. Should that worry us? What are the implications of our children having digital surrogates/avatars that are linked to comprehensive data sets of academic and social-emotional information? Do we really understand the risks?
Who owns the intellectual property that students create on school-managed cloud-based servers? Do they have the right to extract their work at will?
What roles do teacher education programs and certification policies play in furthering a technology-mediated approach to public education?
Will students enrolled in private schools have their data collected at the same level as public school students? Is privacy something that will become ultimately be available only to the rich and elite? Will we allow that to happen?
Should it be the basic human right of all children to have access, if they choose, to a public education model in which humans teach one another in (non-digital) community in an actual school building?
-Wrench in the Gears
Some state departments of education have threatened to withhold a high school diploma if a student doesn’t take and pass a so-called college readiness test in grade 11. However, no state legislature has passed a statute linking the award of a high school diploma to passing a state or federal mandated college readiness test in grade 11 (and it’s highly unlikely any legislature would).
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was replaced in December, 2015 with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
This new Federal mandate was written to replace the No Child Left Behind Act. The main concerns that Carolyn and I have with ESSA are:
For greater detail on the ESSA, Mercedes Schneider has done a brilliant job of combing through the law and commenting on each aspect of the Federal Act.
About opting out of the Common Core testing, the state of New York in the spring increased their opt out numbers from 20% to 22%. There have been threats and pushback since the opt out numbers came out with the Federal government pressuring New York to come up with forms of punishment for districts who do not adhere to the 95% participation rate but as Sandra Stotsky points out, no state has been penalized by withholding Title I money and passing a mandated standardized test to graduate from high school needs to be put into law by the state legislature to be legitimate.
We also need to keep in mind that the Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) has yet to be determined to be reliable and valid as an assessment of students’ understanding of subjects taught.
To follow is a repost of the article in full:
Opting out: A civic duty, not civil disobedience
The writers who crafted the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 bill co-sponsored by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) re-authorizing the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA), thought they had worded an airtight case to prevent parents from removing their children from federal mandated testing.
States are responsible for ensuring a 95 percent participation rate of all its K-12 students in exchange for ESSA funds. If the rate is less than 95 percent, the US Secretary of Education has several options. Most allow USED to help the state come up with a plan to address the matter. In effect, ESSA turns state departments of education into school bullies.
Indeed, many state departments of education have begun to rattle their sabers, trying to bluff parents into believing that parents who opt their kids out of a federally mandated test and reduce overall participation to less than 95 percent thereby place the state at risk of not getting the money coming to it for its low-income kids. It remains to be seen how effective this version of a guilt trip will be. In the meantime, some bureaucrats are busy trying to figure out how to make the punishment fit the crime.
Some state departments of education have threatened to withhold a high school diploma if a student doesn’t take and pass a so-called college readiness test in grade 11. However, no state legislature has passed a statute linking the award of a high school diploma to passing a state or federal mandated college readiness test in grade 11 (and it’s highly unlikely any legislature would).
Without such a statute in place, state departments of education cannot make local school boards withhold a high school diploma from students who have met other, legal requirements for a high school diploma. And if a grade 11 test is called a high school exit test, it raises serious questions about USED’s recent decision to let states use the SAT or ACT for an accountability purpose. These tests are known as only college admissions tests, NOT achievement tests or high school exit tests. Moreover, they cannot be constructed validly for more than one of these purposes.
In addition, USED itself sent 13 states a letter in November or December 2015 telling them that they needed to address high opt-out rates throughout the state or in specific school districts. The letter helpfully included possible examples of how states could act, such as lowering a school or district’s rating on state accountability systems, and counting non-participating students as not proficient for accountability purposes.
Opt-outs are the Achilles Heel of federal attempts via mandated Common Core-aligned testing to get very low-achieving students into college and to lower above-average student achievement in order to close demographic gaps. The more opt-outs there are, the less valid are any tests aligned to Common Core’s standards, and the less control federal and state policy makers have over the content of the school curriculum.
It has become difficult to remember that the central purpose of ESEA was to improve the education of low-income children. Civil Rights organizations immediately bought into the first authorization of ESEA in 1965, believing that targeting the education of low-income students with federal money would improve their education. But these organizations have steadfastly hewed to this position for over 50 years despite the fact that low-income kids’ scores have shown almost no improvement on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests since their inception in the early 1970s, and despite the research showing little relationship between student achievement and spending for schools or per/student.
Will making states responsible for reducing opt-outs be effective and, if so, improve the education of low-income kids? All USED could say in its warning letter to the 13 states with high opt-out rates was that full student participation in its mandated assessments would provide “better information” to parents and teachers. Better than what? Is it the case that our teachers are incapable of discerning students who can read and write from those who can’t? What kind of information did PARCC or SBAC provide in 2015 that was more useful for instruction than information teachers had already gleaned from their own observations and tests?
After 50 years and billions of dollars, it is clear that increased regulations and more testing for all students in K-12 isn’t the answer.
If Common Core’s standards and tests are, as it is claimed, so much better than whatever schools were using before, why not use them only for low-achieving, low-income kids and let them catch up? Why can’t Congress amend ESSA to exempt students already at or above grade level in reading and mathematics and target ESSA funds to curriculum materials, teachers, and tests for just the kids who need a boost? That’s just the beginning. Maybe a different use of federal money is also needed.
We have no explanation from USED of why earlier incarnations of ESEA have been so fruitless. Nor do we know why Congress has been unwilling to demand accountability from its own policy-making education agencies, or why governors haven’t demanded accountability from their own education policy-making boards and departments? That’s where accountability needs to begin, not with teachers.
********
Sandra Stotsky is a former Senior Associate Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education and is Professor of Education emerita at the University of Arkansas.
********
For more on the SBAC and its validity, rather, the lack thereof, see:
SBAC Tests Show No Validity or Reliability
Dr. Wayne Au is an Associate Professor of Education at the School of Educational Studies at University of Washington, Bothell, and an editor for Rethinking Schools, a magazine focused on issues of educational justice. He is a product of Seattle Public Schools (Garfield Class of ’90), and he earned his BA and MIT from The Evergreen State College. He also taught in Seattle Public Schools (including teaching at a program for drop outs) and in the Berkeley Unified School District before getting his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction with a minor in Education Policy Studies, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is published widely, including multiple articles in top-tier, peer-reviewed education journals, two solo-authored books, three edited books, and a long list of book chapters and magazine articles.
Dr. Au is also an advocate for public education.
This article was originally published at the Seattle Globalist:
How a whiter Seattle creates more education inequities
A recent Stanford study found that, of the nation’s biggest cities, Seattle has the fifth largest test score gap between black and white students in grades 3 through 8. According to the study, African American students in Seattle are 3.5 grade levels behind their white peers. Our city and state should be rightfully concerned.
However, in order to make sense of this achievement gap, it is important to understand the relationship between standardized tests, race, gentrification, and poverty in Seattle.
Economic and racial inequalities are intimately connected to standardized test scores. Such tests are notorious for reproducing race and class inequalities, and it has been well established that standardized test scores correlate most strongly with wealth and affluence. Indeed, factors outside of school — including food insecurity, housing insecurity, lack of adequate healthcare, exposure to environmental toxins and other issues associated directly with poverty — can explain most of a student’s test score.
This connection between socioeconomic class and standardized tests is important because Seattle has changed. Seattle has gotten Whiter and more affluent in recent years. In 2013 Seattle was 67 percent White, an almost 2 percent bump from 2010. In 2014 Seattle’s median household income was $71,000, almost 20 percent above the national average.
However, despite Seattle’s increasing wealth overall, Black families have gotten poorer. The Seattle median household income of Black Families in 2014 was only $25,700, down 13.5 percent from 2012. Black families are leaving the city too. The Central District was almost 80 percent African American in the 1970s, and it has decreased to 20 percent today. Many south suburbs now have a higher percentage of African American residents than Seattle’s 7.9 percent.
The decrease in Seattle’s African American population along with the sharp decrease in Black household income signals the likelihood that, in the face of rapid gentrification, Seattle’s Black middle class is leaving the city. One result is that the middle class Black children who would have scored somewhat better on the tests have left too. Another result is that the those African American children still in the city are even more disproportionately poor, where 42 percent of Black people in Seattle under the age of 18 live in poverty.
Given all of this, a significant Black/White test score gap in our city should not surprise anyone. Poverty and unequal access to resources are the one thing standardized tests are good at measuring.
I know from personal conversations that a lot of educators and parents are trying to make sense of Seattle’s test score gaps. Some say it is the fault of teachers. Some fault the state legislature for not meeting their constitutional mandate to fully fund education. Other culprits include district discipline policies and a curriculum that is alienating and not relevant to our kids.
All of these factors do have some responsibility. The recent destruction of alternative schools and programs with social justice, anti-racist curriculum demonstrate Seattle Public Schools’ resistance to materially support content aimed at connecting to the identities and lives of Black children. Teachers need to have a stronger and more critical racial consciousness. The state legislature has failed to fully fund public education funding for years now. Our district discipline policies and practices have consistently produced racist outcomes.
These are all issues we could and should take up if we are interested in improving Black student achievement in Seattle schools. We could implement culturally relevant curriculum and support it with well-funded training and resources, develop stronger and more critical racial awareness among teachers, staff, and administrators, increase the numbers of school counselors, psychologists, and family support workers, end punitive and racist disciplinary policies and practices, push the legislature for full funding, reduce class sizes, ensure access to more art, P.E., librarians, and recess and longer lunch periods.
All of these suggestions would go a long way to making schools more engaging and better places to learn, and they are all changes that can happen relatively quickly. However, if policymakers are interested in educational equity, instead of focusing on the Black/White test score gap , which is an overly-narrow and inherently flawed measure of achievement, they would do better to take issues like affordable housing, food security, access to quality healthcare, and living wages as seriously as any educational reforms they might propose.
Is the SBAC any different?
The PARCC tests have been criticized for being administered in high-stakes circumstances before they were validated. PARCC’s rejoinder is they had content validity, meaning that the test was built according to their committee reviewed specifications. But what is missing is predictive validity. That is, does the test validly measure the much vaunted touchstone criteria of “College and Career Ready?” After all, that is the entire rationale for the testing emphasis in schools.
The following is an article posted in Wait! What? that breaks down the study.
The Common Core PARCC tests gets an “F” for Failure
By Wendy Lecker and Jonathan Pelto
The entire premise behind the Common Core and the related Common Core PARCC and SBAC testing programs was that it would provide a clear cut assessment of whether children were “college and career ready.”
In the most significant academic study to date, the answer appears to be that the PARCC version the massive and expensive test is that it is an utter failure.
William Mathis, Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and member of the Vermont State Board of Education, has just published an astonishing piece in the Washington Post. (Alice in PARCCland: Does ‘validity study’ really prove the Common Core test is valid? In it, Mathis demonstrates that the PARCC test, one of two national common core tests (the other being the SBAC), cannot predict college readiness; and that a study commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Education demonstrated the PARCC’s lack of validity.
This revelation is huge and needs to be repeated. PARCC, the common core standardized test sold as predicting college-readiness, cannot predict college readiness. The foundation upon which the Common Core and its standardized tests were imposed on this nation has just been revealed to be an artifice.
As Mathis wrote, the Massachusetts study found the following: the correlations between PARCC ELA tests and freshman GPA ranges from 0.13-0.26, and for PARCC Math tests, the range is between 0.37 and 0.40. Mathis explains that the correlation coefficients “run from zero (no relationship) to 1.0 (perfect relationship). How much one measure predicts another is the square of the correlation coefficient. For instance, taking the highest coefficient (0.40), and squaring it gives us .16. “
This means the variance in PARCC test scores, at their best, predicts only 16% of the variance in first year college GPA. SIXTEEN PERCENT! And that was the most highly correlated aspect of PARCC. PARCC’s ELA tests have a correlation coefficient of 0.17, which squared is .02. This number means that the variance in PARCC ELA scores can predict only 2% of the variance in freshman GPA!
Dr. Mathis notes that the PARCC test-takers in this study were college freshman, not high school students. As he observes, the correlations for high school students taking the test would no doubt be even lower. (Dr. Mathis’ entire piece is a must-read. Alice in PARCCland: Does ‘validity study’ really prove the Common Core test is valid?)
Dr. Mathis is not an anti-testing advocate. He was Deputy Assistant Commissioner for the state of New Jersey, Director of its Educational Assessment program, a design consultant for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and for six states. As managing director for NEPC, Dr. Mathis produces and reviews research on a wide variety of educational policy issues. Previously, he was Vermont Superintendent of the Year and a National Superintendent of the Year finalist before being appointed to the state board of education. He brings expertise to the topic.
As Mathis points out, these invalid tests have human costs:
“With such low predictability, you have huge numbers of false positives and false negatives. When connected to consequences, these misses have a human price. This goes further than being a validity question. It misleads young adults, wastes resources and misjudges schools. It’s not just a technical issue, it is a moral question. Until proven to be valid for the intended purpose, using these tests in a high stakes context should not be done.”
PARCC is used in New Jersey, Maryland and other states, not Connecticut. So why write about this here, where we use the SBAC?
The SBAC has yet to be subjected to a similar validity study. This raises several questions. First and most important, why has the SBAC not be subjected to a similar study? Why are our children being told to take an unvalidated test?
Second, do we have any doubt that the correlations between SBAC and freshman college GPA will be similarly low? No- it is more than likely that the SBAC is also a poor predictor of college readiness.
How do we know this? The authors of the PARCC study shrugged off the almost non-existent correlation between PARCC and college GPA by saying the literature shows that most standardized tests have low predictive validity.
This also bears repeating: it is common knowledge that most standardized tests cannot predict academic performance in college. Why , then, is our nation spending billions developing and administering new tests, replacing curricula, buying technology, text books and test materials, retraining teachers and administrators, and misleading the public by claiming that these changes will assure us that we are preparing our children for college?
And where is the accountability of these test makers, who have been raking in billions, knowing all the while that their “product” would never deliver what they promised, because they knew ahead of time that the tests would not be able to predict college-readiness?
When then-Secretary Arne Duncan was pushing the Common Core State Standards and their tests on the American public, he maligned our public schools by declaring: “For far too long,” our school systems lied to kids, to families, and to communities. They said the kids were all right — that they were on track to being successful — when in reality they were not even close.” He proclaimed that with Common Core and the accompanying standardized tests, “Finally, we are holding ourselves accountable to giving our children a true college and career-ready education.”
Mr. Duncan made this accusation even though there was a mountain of evidence proving that the best predictor of college success, before the Common Core, was an American high school GPA. In other words, high schools were already preparing kids for college quite well.
With the revelations in this PARCC study and the admissions of its authors, we know now that it was Mr. Duncan and his administration who were lying to parents, educators, children and taxpayers. Politicians shoved the Common Core down the throat of public schools with the false claim that this regime would improve education. They forced teachers and schools to be judged and punished based on these tests. They told millions of children they were academically unfit based on these tests. And now we have proof positive that these standardized tests are just as weak as their predecessors, and cannot in any way measure whether our children are “college-ready.”
The time is now for policymakers to stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands of school hours, on a useless standardized testing scheme; and to instead invest our scarce public dollars in programs that actually ensure that public schools are have the capacity to support and prepare students to have more fulfilling and successful lives.
It’s no secret that refusal forms provided by school districts are designed to shame and intimidate parents into second guessing their decision to keep their children from participating in high states testing.
One Seattle parent wasn’t impressed with Seattle Public Schools aggressive and threatening refusal form. Instead, she decided to write her own counter called the Decision to Support the Whole Child Form – The unofficial form for opting out of high stakes testing.
Check it out. (You can download your own copy at the end of the post).
Decision to Support the Whole Child Form
The unofficial form for opting out of high stakes testing*
Please clearly print the following information and return to your school’s principal.
Student’s Name _________________________________________________________
Parent/Guardian’s Name _________________________________________________________
School ____________________________________________________
Student’s Grade Level _____
As the parent/guardian of the above named student, I have made an educated decision to support my child by opting him/her out of participating in the following:
____ all portions of Smarter Balanced
____ end-of course exams in ___ Algebra ___ Geometry ____ Biology
____ certain subtests (please name subtest – ELA, MSP science)
____ MAP
My reason for this decision is: ______________________________________________________________
____ I have read and understand that:
This decision is a permanent record to document my decision about my child’s educational and emotional well-being without fear of harassment, intimidation, bullying and retaliation by Seattle Public Schools.
Students who do not participate will receive positive reinforcement in knowing they are more than a number and will not experience unnecessary anxiety.
Students who do not participate are free to engage in creative endeavors during the test time
Opting out may positively impact our school by relieving the pressure on staffing and physical space.
Teachers will not have to spend time reviewing test scores that are not reliable in measuring all student’s academic growth in the core academic areas of reading, writing, math and/or science. Instead, teachers will be able to rely on their training and professional judgment to evaluate each child as an individual with multiple strengths and challenges.
Families will not receive unreliable results and will be better able to chart their student’s growth over time by partnering with their teachers.
Smarter Balanced should not be used as the achievement for Highly Capable eligible as there is no proven correlation between achievement on this particular test and advanced learning abilities Smarter Balanced was not intended for this purpose and doing will likely to lead to more racial and socio-economic disparity to advanced learning opportunities.
Signature of Parent/Guardian___________________________Date_____________________
* This form is not published or approved by Seattle Public Schools. You are not required to use the District’s “Refusal to Participate in Assessments Form,” state the reasons for your decision, or agree to any of the assertions stated therein. Opting out is as simple as emailing your principal
-Carolyn Leith
Seattle NAACP and allies confront Seattle Public Schools over high-stakes testing requirements of students
Seattle, WA – On Wednesday, April 6th at 4:00pm the Seattle King County NAACP and Seattle Opt Out will meet to confront Seattle Public Schools over high-stakes testing for Seattle students. The NAACP will present the School District with a list of demands to address the intimidation of students and parents who choose to opt out of high-stakes testing.
What: Press Conference
When: April 6th at 4:00pm
Where: Seattle Public Schools: 2445 3rd Ave S, Seattle WA 98134
Who: Seattle NAACP leaders, parents, students, and education leaders
