Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate
Standardized Testing Bad -- General
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- Tests won’t solve these root causes
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- Pearson generating billions in revenue with no privacy protections
- Pearson is the largest custodian of student data anywhere
- Pearson profits because of testing
Standardized Testing Bad -- GeneralWon’t Solve the Root CausePoverty and discrimination are the cause of education problemsDiane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, 2013, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education as such is not “broken.” Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it. The solutions proposed by the self-proclaimed reformers have not worked as promised. They have failed even by their own most highly valued measure, which is test scores. At the same time, the reformers’ solutions have had a destructive impact on education as a whole. Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 159-163). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Tests won’t solve these root causesDiane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, 2013, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card What began as a movement for testing and accountability has turned into a privatization movement. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, with its unrealistic goals, has fed the privatization frenzy. The overreliance on and misuse of testing and data have created a sense of crisis, lending credibility to claims that American public education is failing and in decline. Yes, we have problems, but those problems are concentrated where poverty and racial segregation are concentrated. The reformers say they care about poverty, but they do not address it other than to insist upon private management of the schools in urban districts; the reformers ignore racial segregation altogether, apparently accepting it as inevitable. Thus, they leave the root causes of low academic performance undisturbed. What began as a movement to “save minority children from failing schools” and narrow the achievement gap by privatizing their schools has not accomplished that goal, but the movement is undaunted. It is now intent on advancing into middle-income districts in the cities and suburbs as well. This is already happening. Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 202-205). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Private IndustryBillions goes to private industry, but no evidence testing is valuableQuinn Mulholland, May 14, 2015, Harvard Politics, The Case Against Standardized Testing, http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/case-standardized-testing/, DOA: 10-25-15 The law has come with a hefty price tag for taxpayers. A 2012 study by the Brookings Institution determined that states spend $1.7 billion per year on testing, an enormous increase over the $423 million states spent in 2001 before NCLB, according to the Pew Center on the States. All of this money has fueled a booming testing industry, with companies like Pearson racking up billions in sales. A POLITICO investigation published on February 10, 2015 revealed that Pearson receives tens of millions in taxpayer dollars even though there is “little proof its products and services are effective.” Pearson generating billions in revenue with no privacy protectionsStephanie Simon, 2-10-15, Politico, “No Profit Left Behind,” http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026 DOA: 10-26-15 The British publishing giant Pearson had made few inroads in the United States — aside from distributing the TV game show “Family Feud” — when it announced plans in the summer of 2000 to spend $2.5 billion on an American testing company. It turned out to be an exceptionally savvy move. The next year, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated millions of new standardized tests for millions of kids in public schools. Pearson was in a prime position to capitalize. From that perch, the company expanded rapidly, seizing on many subsequent reform trends, from online learning to the Common Core standards adopted in more than 40 states. The company has reaped the benefits: Half its $8 billion in annual global sales comes from its North American education division. But Pearson’s dominance does not always serve U.S. students or taxpayers well. A POLITICO investigation has found that Pearson stands to make tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and cuts in student tuition from deals arranged without competitive bids in states from Florida to Texas. The review also found Pearson’s contracts set forth specific performance targets — but don’t penalize the company when it fails to meet those standards. And in the higher ed realm, the contracts give Pearson extensive access to personal student data, with few constraints on how it is used. POLITICO examined hundreds of pages of contracts, business plans and email exchanges, as well as tax filings, lobbying reports and marketing materials, in the first comprehensive look at Pearson’s business practices in the United States. The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026#ixzz3pgcz4Vbx Pearson is the largest custodian of student data anywhereStephanie Simon, 2-10-15, Politico, “No Profit Left Behind,” http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026 DOA: 10-26-15 Pearson wields enormous influence over American education. It writes the textbooks and tests that drive instruction in public schools across the nation. Its software grades student essays, tracks student behavior and diagnoses — and treats — attention deficit disorder. The company administers teacher licensing exams and coaches teachers once they’re in the classroom. It advises principals. It operates a network of three dozen online public schools. It co-owns the for-profit company that now administers the GED. A top executive boasted in 2012 that Pearson is the largest custodian of student data anywhere. And that’s just its K-12 business
Stephanie Simon, 2-10-15, Politico, “No Profit Left Behind,” http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026 DOA: 10-26-15 Conspiracy theorists sometimes suggest that Pearson has a sinister hold on federal and state education policy. In peak years, it has spent about $1 million lobbying Congress and perhaps $1 million more on the state level, with a particular focus on Texas, according to state and federal records. But that’s not an outsize number for such a large company. By comparison, the National Education Association, the biggest teachers union in the U.S., spent $2.5 million lobbying Congress in 2013, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. “The policies that Pearson is benefiting from may be wrongheaded in a million ways, but it strikes me as deeply unfair to blame Pearson for them,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at New York University. “When the federal government starts doing things like requiring all states to test all kids, there’s going to be gold in those hills. The people we’ve elected have created a landscape that’s allowed Pearson to prosper.”
Next generation tests, such as Common Core tests, make everything even worse. The testing companies end up controlling all of the curriculum and the outcomesAnya Kamatez, journalist and education writer, 2015, The Test – Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing – But you don’t have to be, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card The Common Core State Standards, touted as “fewer, higher and deeper” and emphasizing ideas like critical thinking and logical reasoning in English Language Arts and math, were introduced in 2010 by Achieve, Inc., a nonprofit with considerable backing from the Gates Foundation. They have a growing chorus of detractors: Oklahoma, Indiana, and South Carolina dropped the standards in the spring of 2014, leaving them in place in forty-two states, and they have been the target of right-wing protests from Glenn Beck and others. Educators’ groups, teachers unions, parent groups, and others who oppose the Core tend to conflate it with the drift toward high-stakes testing. But what about the tests themselves? The federal government funded two state consortia to create the tests to the tune of $ 330 million. When the consortia, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced were announced in 2010, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, “I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education . . . many teachers will have the state assessments they have longed for— tests of critical thinking skills and complex student learning that are not just fill-in-the-bubble tests of basic skills but support good teaching in the classroom.” The consortium assessments were set to roll out in the 2014– 2015 school year. Joe Willhoft is the executive director of the Smarter Balanced assessment consortium. He says the Common Core tests will be more useful than older tests because they are given by computer, so teachers can see and apply the results more immediately. Still, the new tests will have most of the same problems as the old tests. They are still cheap. The Smarter Balanced assessment package, for example, is estimated at $ 27.30 per student. This is cheaper than what two-thirds of states in the consortium are currently paying. They’re cheap because they are still largely multiple choice and still cover limited subjects in limited ways. And because they are multiple choice and limited, they’ll still be error-prone, coachable, and likely to distort the curriculum. The Gordon Commission, an independent panel of experts, concluded in a 2013 review of the Common Core– aligned assessments: “The progress made by the PARCC and Smarter Balanced consortia in assessment development, while significant, will be far from what is ultimately needed for either accountability or classroom instructional improvement purposes.” Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford researcher and a member of the Gordon Commission, clarifies, “They are for most states a step in the right direction, but they are limited and still in the US testing paradigm, which is different than you see in most countries: a sit-down test with lots of selected-response, multiple-choice questions, and a few open-ended questions . . . they are not as robust as the standards themselves call for and as some other countries do.” And the worst part is that these tests are still, by current law, intended to be high stakes. The high stakes becomes a real problem when you realize one more consequence of Common Core aligned assessments: the so-called assessment cliff. These tests are harder by any measure than the ones they’re replacing. Two states got a head start by giving Common Core– aligned assessments produced by Pearson. New York saw a 24 percentage point drop in ELA proficiency and a 33.8 point drop in math in the first year. In Kentucky the drop in both subjects was around 25 points. Willhoft says the score drop-off is just a reality check that schools and districts need to face, stating, “Thirty to forty percent of our public school graduates must take remedial courses when they get to college.” This number is in dispute: the National Center for Education Statistics, the government clearinghouse, lists the remediation rate for all first-year college students at 20 percent. But even if the real number is half what Willhoft quotes, it’s too much. Still, the predictive validity of the Common Core tests is not proven because they haven’t yet been given to large numbers of students or correlated with the long-term success of those students. Just because they are harder doesn’t prove that they align well with what students need to know or be able to do in college. More important, there is no evidence that the effects of high-stakes tests— more teaching to the test, more cheating, more closing of schools and firing of teachers— will indeed prepare more students to succeed in college. In fact, we can be pretty sure it won’t because that’s what we’ve been trying with little success since No Child Left Behind was passed twelve years ago. The Common Core poses another dilemma: these tests are in some ways even more standardized than the ones that came before them. Instead of fifty different curricular standards and fifty different tests in fifty states, there is just one set of standards and will potentially be just three or four Common Core tests in use across the country. On the one hand, using fewer tests makes comparisons between states more valid. If the same tests are given to millions of students, states won’t be able to play so many games with the definition of “proficiency.” Even if each state sets its own cut scores, as McGraw Hill’s Jeff Livingston and Pearson’s Doug Kubach say they do, it will be easy to compare scores across state lines. This may be one of the reasons why a dozen states backed out of the test consortia in the spring and summer of 2014. As of June 2014 only 42 percent of the nation’s students were set to take these tests the following spring; other states would either purchase Common Core tests from vendors like Pearson or hadn’t yet decided. At the same time, the greater alignment between curriculum and test as well as the smaller number of tests overall and school districts’ need to swiftly adopt brand-new curricula and tests at the same time creates a major business opportunity. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has spoken about the Common Core creating a unified “marketplace.” Companies like Pearson, Apple, Microsoft, and Google can sell the same tests, materials, curricula, and devices to schools nationwide. Kamenetz, Anya (2015-01-06). The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be (pp. 36-38). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. The Common Core thus paves the way for education that is ever more test driven, that begins and ends with tests, where teaching to the test is the only option left because the textbook and the test were written and vetted by the same committees and published at the same time by the same company. Where did these things come from? How did they become the law of the land? And how can we do better? Kamenetz, Anya (2015-01-06). The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be (p. 38). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 0.62 Mb. Share with your friends:
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