Blogs and Badges: My view on testing

My view:

Standardized testing is like taking your blood pressure and testing for cholesterol. It is no fun and does not tell the whole story of a person’s health, but is important nonetheless. Extremes cannot be ignored. Students scoring at the lowest levels in MCAS have learning needs that must be addressed. Doing this is the greatest civil rights priority of our time.
Growth measures on MCAS controls for student previous performance and wealth. Last year, Somerville did very well by this metric compared to almost any community across the state. If we can continue high growth it indicates the kids are learning here at high rates.
Public education is going through a transformation simultaneously re-focusing on core instruction particularly to students previously left behind and opening the doors to flipped classrooms and personalized learning.

From: somerville-4-schools@yahoogroups.com [mailto:somerville-4-schools@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Michele Biscoe
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 6:09 AM
To: UnidosSchool; escs-pta@googlegroups.com; unidos2021@yahoogroups.com; somerville-4-schools@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [somerville-4-schools] Re: [UnidosSchool] interesting article on opting out of testing

Dear Renée,

Thank you for sharing this very interesting article about parents and schools in New York City and across the region who are opting out of standardized testing. This is especially interesting to think about in a district like ours, where most of us agree that standardized testing does not reflect the best that we have to offer as a district--in terms of both opportunities and performance. At worst standardized testing not only reflects us and our children unfairly as "underperforming" but also takes resources away from educating our children.

Standardized testing may well be the law, and I don't know what the penalty is for breaking this particular law, but I do know that laws are ultimately made to serve people and our society. The place for change to start is with sharing and discussing the issue among ourselves and with our district administrators--if they are willing to participate in a discussion about what may well be a broken law ("broken" in the sense of not functioning for the best interest of all our children), and with our legislators.

With apologies to list members for filling up your inboxes and screens with the full (interesting and short!) article, I have pasted it below Renée's original post.

Best,

Michele

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Hatch, Holly <hhatch@k12.somerville.ma.us> wrote:

Massachusetts State Law requires that all students take the MCAS. There is no “opt-out” option.

Thanks, Holly

Holly Hatch, Ed. D. , principal

East Somerville Community School

50 Cross Street

Somerville, MA 02145

617-625-6600 x 3710

617-629-5400

At East Somerville Community School Every Student Can Succeed. Our instructional focus is a school and community-wide effort to increase students' ability to write to express their thinking and learning across the content areas as measured by the MCAS and school-based common assessments.

From: UnidosSchool@yahoogroups.com [mailto:UnidosSchool@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Renee Scott
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2014 5:59 PM
To: escs-pta@googlegroups.com; unidos2021@yahoogroups.com; UnidosSchool@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [UnidosSchool] interesting article on opting out of testing

A quick and interesting read:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/01/the-defiant-parents-testings-discontents.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook

JANUARY 23, 2014

THE DEFIANT PARENTS: TESTING’S DISCONTENTS

POSTED BY REBECCA MEAD

Anna Allanbrook, the principal of the Brooklyn New School, a public elementary school in Carroll Gardens, has long considered the period of standardized testing that arrives every spring to be a necessary, if unwelcome, phase of the school year. Teachers and kids would spend limited time preparing for the tests. Children would gain familiarity with “bubbling in,” a skill not stressed in the school’s progressive, project-based curriculum. They would become accustomed to sitting quietly and working alone—a practice quite distinct from the collaboration that is typically encouraged in the school’s classrooms, where learners of differing abilities and strengths work side by side. (My son is a third grader at the school.) Come the test days, kids and teachers would get through them, and then, once the tests were over, they would get on with the real work of education.

Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities. One teacher remarked that, if a tester needs three days to tell if a child can read “you are either incompetent or cruel. I feel angry and compromised for going along with this.” Another teacher said that during each day of testing, at least one of her children was reduced to tears. A paraprofessional—a classroom aide who works with children with special needs—called the process “state-sanctioned child abuse.” One child with a learning disability, after the second hour of the third day, had had enough. “He only had two questions left, but he couldn’t keep going,” a teacher reported. “He banged his head on the desk so hard that everyone in the room jumped.”

As a result, Allanbrook has changed her approach to testing. This year, while tests will be still administered at B.N.S., and children in the third and fourth grades will have as much practice taking them as they ever have, the school is actively and vocally preparing to support families who decide to opt children out of the testing. Alternative activities will be provided on those days, as will alternative ways of measuring children’s progress. (Among other methods, kids who opt out of state tests will be given alternative tests produced by the Department of Education, one in English language arts and one in math, each lasting just forty-five minutes.) Allanbrook says that her decision to speak out was motivated in part by thinking about the fifth-grade social-justice curriculum at the school, in which children who are about to graduate are asked to consider the question “What are we willing to stand up for?” “As parents and educators, this is the very question that we could be asking ourselves,” Allanbrook wrote in a letter to parents this week.

The dismay felt in the corridors of B.N.S. has not been a singular response. Throughout the city and beyond, there is a burgeoning opt-out movement, with parents, teachers, and administrators questioning the efficacy of the tests as they are currently administered, in measuring both the performance of teachers and the progress of students. More than five hundred New York State principals have signed a letter of protest, which cites the encroachment of test prep on teaching time, and the expense of test materials, which come out of stretched school budgets. Educators are also questioning the methodology of the tests, which are graded on a bell curve, with the results closely associated with socioeconomic status. Only three per cent of English-language learners in New York State passed the state tests last year, and only five per cent of students with disabilities did so. Among African-American and Hispanic students, fewer than twenty per cent passed. As Diane Ravitch has noted on her blog and elsewhere, the demoralizing effect is being visited upon those who can least afford the discouragement.

The regime of testing has expanded in recent years, in the wake of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and a belief that what goes on in a classroom can most accurately be divined by data. Defenders of the Common Core curriculum, which seeks to insure that students nationwide are being taught according to the same standards and are meeting federally defined expectations, argue that testing is an effective means of determining whether standards have been reached, thus protecting the interests of children most at risk of being failed by the educational system. Among the interests that standardized testing certainly does appear to be serving are corporate interests. Pearson, the largest educational publishing company in the United States, not only provides the standardized tests but also sells curricular materials for teachers to use in tailoring their teaching to the tests, test-prep materials for children to study in advance of taking those tests, and remedial materials for children to use after they’ve failed them. (It also inserts so-called field tests—questions for possible use in future tests—into its exams, turning public-school children into unwitting guinea pigs for procedures to be administered to other children.) In 2012, the most recent year for which it has made data available, Pearson reported that its educational-publishing revenues for North America were up two per cent, compared with an industry decline of ten per cent.

There is questionable wisdom in entrusting a for-profit corporation with measuring how well kids learn to read, write, compute, and think, the last of which is especially unlikely to be accurately gauged by industrial-scale metrics. The skepticism about Pearson was reinforced last month, when the company’s charitable arm, the Pearson Foundation, was obliged to pay $7.7 million to settle accusations that it had funded the development of educational software to be used by its for-profit parent, in violation of the law. That came after the revelation, last spring, that Pearson had flunked its own scoring of the city’s gifted-and-talented tests. Almost five thousand children were given the wrong score and were initially denied places in schools for which they were eligible.

In pockets of the city and of the region, principals and teachers and parents are refusing to go along with the program—igniting an Occupy Education movement in all but name. In one high-profile act of defiance, the Castle Bridge elementary school, in Washington Heights opted out en masse of tests for kindergarteners that were what educators call developmentally inappropriate and parents call completely insane. Groups like Change the Stakes and Teachers Talk Testing are agitating for reform through the holding of town meetings, the gathering of petitions, and the making of video protests featuring despondent children and frustrated parents. In a recent poll of New York City voters, twenty per cent said that education should be the top priority of Mayor Bill de Blasio—a higher proportion than for any other single issue. There is guarded optimism about de Blasio, a public-school parent who, on the campaign trail, spoke disparagingly of the Bloomberg Administration’s investment in standardized testing, and has appointed as schools chancellor Carmen Fariña, a former teacher and principal who has spoken about her opposition to teaching to the test.

Parents who complain about testing—particularly affluent, educated ones—are easily derided, as they were by Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Education Secretary, a few months ago, when he described critics of the Common Core as “white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—[find] their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” But parents who challenge the status quo on testing are not motivated by a deluded pride in their children’s unrecognized accomplishments, or by a fear that their property values will diminish if their schools’ scores’ drop. They are, in many cases, driven by a conviction that a child’s performance on a standardized test is an inadequate, unreliable measure of that child’s knowledge, intelligence, aptitude, diligence, and character—and a still more unreliable measure of his teachers’ effort, skill, perseverance, competence, and kindness.

They are also motivated by the belief that those parents who are least equipped to speak out are the mothers and fathers of the children who are most vulnerable—the most likely to have their educations diminished by months of repetitive test prep, most likely to find themselves reduced to the statistical data at the wrong end of the bell curve. Parents in this year’s opt-out movement are standing up for something larger than their own child’s test-day happiness: the conviction that all children have better things to do with their days than fill in bubbles on a multiple-choice sheet, and that all children have better things to do with their heads than bang them against a table in despair.

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