A truly weird little You Tube video, Education And Accountability, was posted on February 7, 2013 in an attempt to arouse support for a resurgent Canadian anti -student testing movement. Inspired by the appeal of the polished RSA animated videos, the amateurish Canadian version is a thinly veiled effort to discredit Ontario’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) and its well-established system of standardized student testing. The broadside did not come from out-of-the-blue but rather sprang from the team of Action Canada researchers who produced the 2012 policy paper, Real Accountability or Illusion of Success?, a call to review standardized testing in Ontario.
Asking ‘How Much Testing is Too Much Testing?‘ is a very legitimate and reasonable question to ask. Since 1995, and the creation of EQAO, student testing has expanded in direct response to growing public demand for accountability in Canadian K-12 public education. What the Action Canada team of Sebastien Despres, Steven Kuhn, Pauline Ngirumpatse, and Marie Josee Parent have done is to call for a review of the entire public accountability structure in the system. That video lays bare their hidden agenda which is to undermine hard-won public accountability in a system with a chronic aversion to responding to parent, student, or citizen concerns.
Reviewing the Action Canada report is painful for those familiar with the struggle in the early 1990s to bring back a semblance of public accountability to a runaway public education system. The Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, for example, is identified as the point of origin of student testing, completely ignoring the public advocacy of the Coalition for Education Reform (1992-1995). That’s a forgivable sin, but to ignore the rising public demand, even the role of Dr. Dennis Raphael in the Ministry of Education and Paul Cappon at the Council of Ministers of Education(CMEC) is truly amazing. It is clear that the authors have no idea whatsoever about how alien the concept of accountability for student performance was in the Ontario public system.
The Action Canada author’s research is not only narrowly circumscribed, it’s incredibly selective. Studying student assessment policies and considering only the work of anti-testers is what gives “education research” a bad name. It’s actually entertaining to see the OISE “progressive” faction. most notably David Livingston and Kari Delhi, cited approvingly, while the true assessment experts, Mark Holmes and Stephen Lawton, warrant not a mention. In places, the report shows that the young authors have not done their homework. Even the spin that the report puts on the Commission on Learning’s recommendation sounds like the later repentant thoughts of Co-Chair Gerald Caplan.
The Action Canada team has taken a run at the entire public accountability system in Ontario public education. Their “Task Force” recommendations call upon the Ontario government to review: A. The Structure of the Tests relative to Objectives; B. The Impact of Testing within the Classroom; C. The Validity of Test Results; and D. Public Reporting and Use of Test Results. Simply put, the little band of neo-progressives are asking whether, not how much, testing is good for student learning.
The report bears the unmistakable fingerprints of Canada’s leading foe of standardized testing, New York-born University of Ottawa education professor Dr. Joel Westheimer. While the young researchers did hold a panel and hear other viewpoints, it’s obvious that they have swallowed whole Dr. Westheimer’s lively commentaries and inspirational talks. Westheimer’s take on the excesses of No Child Left Behind, entitled “No Child Left Thinking,” should have been referenced because it definitely contributed significantly to their thinking.
The Action Canada report is clearly aimed at bringing Ontario’s public accountability system to the ground. It’s a clumsy, ill-considered attempt to turn-back-the-clock to a time when no one had to be accountable for much of anything in or out of the classroom. The Canadian Education Association and the Ontario Principals’ Council were, of course, among the first to “like” the report on Facebook. Thoughtful critics of standardized testing, like Dr. Diane Ravitch and the American Common Core research group are rightly concerned about two impacts: the steady erosion of Social Sciences teaching time and the potential for misuse in teacher evaluation. It’s a little too obvious that the young researchers are out to “kill testing” instead of simply stopping student test results from being factored into value-added teacher evaluation programs.
What’s driving the recent move to review and limit standardized student testing in Canadian schools? Does the Action Canada research report hold any water, let alone suggest a way forward? Why did the organized voices of Canadian teachers and principals jump so quickly in endorsing this thin little policy paper? What in the world makes educators so afraid of testing when they spend much of their careers testing and grading kids?
Parents in Texas have come out strongly against testing. It is led by some prominent Latinos but the blsck community wants it as well. They both feel it seruously limits their future by demoralizing the students far too early. This has cauaed Republucan politicians to scramble. They can,see if they stick with testing, they will give up almost all of the Latin,vote and as such lose Texas. Texas is the last big state Republicans have as a keystone for national elections.
They csn count. Latino Republicans are telling their own party, abandon testing or start losing all elections.. It was Texas research that accused testing as the primary factor in the high Latino dropout rate. Kids who receive low scores, even if it is their second language, want to quit school.
Educators across America have finally seen that test scores, local, NAEP, PISA, whatever are overwhelmingly SES based. In the USA this has a strong racial element but poor white kids also do very badly. Recent research from the PPI shows USA does very badly on PISA not because ofits education system but due to its extreme poverty that is just not on in the Finlands of the world.
One of my very schrewd left pals, and U of T dean, when EQAO began testing told friends, ” why fight this? It will prove we are right about SES”.
A Washington Post Blog story provides the essential background on the mounting resistance in Texas. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/in-texas-a-revolt-brews-against-standardized-testing/2012/03/15/gIQAI5N0VS_blog.html
Read it and weep. There is no proven relationship between testing and school improvement. The poor do badly because they are poor. If they were not poor, they would not do badly. Read David Berliner U of Arizona for a full explanation of why the poor do badly.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/12/us-usa-education-testing-idUSBRE85B0EO20120612
Parents are in open revolt across the USA because they now understand that not only does testing have no effect in making things better, it actually plays a critical role in making things worse.
While the video we’ve created is indeed “truly weird,” it is such for a purpose. Unlike the didactic RSA Animate videos, ours does not offer facile answers to difficult questions. Instead, it is meant to inspire and generate a dialogue (a ‘real’ dialogue) on the question of accountability in education systems. It can be interpreted in myriad ways, and the hundreds of details it playfully features are hoped to serve as springboards for discussions. It is for this same reason that artworks accompany our report.
It’s true that asking ‘How Much Testing is Too Much Testing?‘ is a legitimate and reasonable question. In the spirit of accountability, however, ALL questions should be considered legitimate and reasonable – even when the answers to which we must give them may be unpopular or unfashionable at a given time. Our call for a review of the public accountability structure is not a new one, and not one to which we give a “different spin” – in the 1995 report of the Ontario Royal Commission on Learning (which ultimately recommended the establishment of the EQAO – R#150,151,152), Recommendation #166 very clearly reads: “We would not want any structure we recommend to exist beyond its actual usefulness. It is not impossible that the EQAO might one day prove redundant, and it is entirely plausible that its responsibilities might need to be revised. We therefore recommend that the work and mandate of the EQAO be reviewed in five years.” Almost two decades later, this five-year review is yet to be conducted.
Tests, in their multiple forms, can potentially serve to encourage learning and to edify students. They can also challenge and even inspire. However, tests can just as easily demoralize and demotivate, oversimplify and trivialize, threaten and equivocate, misinform and mislead. Education and accountability are about a whole lot more than test results from a handful of topics, and their planning horizon should be a lot longer than given snapshots.
We recognize that reviewing our report might be “painful” for those familiar with the struggle in the early 1990s. This is well-trodden ground, since the concept of accountability for student performance truly WAS an alien concept in the Ontario public system (and the great majority of other systems, education or otherwise) prior to the 1990s, and since much ink was shed in its inception and establishment. However, avoiding the question altogether would be a grave mistake – it is not until we are ready to assess where lies the balance between the various considerations at stake that we can hope to take our education systems “from great to excellent.”
We begin with the premise that education and accountability are about a whole lot more than test results from a handful of topics, and that their planning horizon should be a lot longer than given snapshots. Tests, in their multiple forms, can potentially serve to encourage learning and to edify students. They can also inform, challenge, and even inspire. However, tests can just as easily demoralize and demotivate, oversimplify and trivialize, threaten and equivocate, misinform and mislead. It’s true that asking ‘How Much Testing is Too Much Testing?‘ is a legitimate and reasonable question. In the spirit of accountability, however, ALL questions should be considered legitimate and reasonable – even when the answers to which we must give them may be unpopular or unfashionable at a given time. We recognize that reviewing our report might be “painful” for those familiar with the struggle in the early 1990s. This is well-trodden ground, since the concept of accountability for student performance truly WAS an alien concept in the Ontario public system (and the great majority of other systems, education or otherwise) prior to the 1990s, and since much ink was shed in its inception and establishment. However, avoiding the question altogether would be a grave mistake.
Our call for a review of the public accountability structure is not a new one, and not one to which we give a “different spin” – in the 1995 report of the Ontario Royal Commission on Learning (which ultimately recommended the establishment of the EQAO – R#150,151,152), Recommendation #166 very clearly reads: “We would not want any structure we recommend to exist beyond its actual usefulness. It is not impossible that the EQAO might one day prove redundant, and it is entirely plausible that its responsibilities might need to be revised. We therefore recommend that the work and mandate of the EQAO be reviewed in five years.” Almost two decades later, this five-year review is yet to be conducted. It is not until we assess where lies the balance between the various considerations at stake that we can hope to take our education systems “from great to excellent.”
Until the problems of poor achievement are addressed, EQAO or any other testing will never be ‘redundant.’
Assessments experts such as Jim Popham, Dylan Wiliam, and Robert Lynn who worked for decades on designing large-scale assessments for accountability purposes, have each admitted that their efforts have largely been in vain. Their work has been supported by Robert Marzano and John Hattie, among others. One book I would recommend, because of its clarity for those who are not versed in statistics would be Embedded Formative Assessment, by Dylan Wiliam. One thing he notes that i have thought for some time is that while schools have improved in many ways, the changes in western societies are outpacing such improvements. For example, in the old days when i was a student, anyone with any disability was not supported at all. While that has changed, it has not changed fast enough in classrooms. Home schooling every disabled child is not feasible. I know that one from my own background and from the grad school teachers I had who shared their experiences working in school with some students.
In the old days when i was a child most kids dropped out and had careers waiting for them. Those days are gone. Schools have to catch up. Supporters of the “good old days” need to remember that while those days may have been old, they are gone.
Interesting that when you look at two high performing systems one of them (Singapore) has a system of large scale assessments while the other system (Finland) has very little of these.
I conclude that there are many other variables that are better promoters of achievement such as quality teaching.
So if large-scale standardized tests are limited why have them?
– they can, if done well, provide a window into some level of accountability; the Ontario stress on literacy and numeracy is better than most and goes beyond the trivial pursuit level,
– parents want them because they do not trust teacher grading,
– teachers have much work to do to convince parents (and students) that their grading practices are valid and reliable.
While a number of efforts are being done by teachers (including me) to improve this situation such as
– moderated or collaborative grading
– alternative forms of assessment and scoring; e.g., rubrics
we have a long way to go.
I would ask bloggers to support our efforts rather than dump on us. The latter is bad classroom management and causes learners to act out.
Or to put it in an historic way
“On y soit qui mal y pense.”
One place we MUST test is grade 3-we know that 70 percent of students who are not succeeding by grade 3 in reading will never succeed without intervention-the part that’s missing in the picture is true remediation.The fact that they think things improve by grade 6 and 10 without intervention leaves me very suspicious,it’s whole language rearing its ugly head.If learning to read is developmental the way the teachers are taught at University it will just “kick in”.How many parents have been led down that garden path?
What fascinates me further is the lack of understanding of what causes the reading lag,teachers don’t know because they were never taught.They were also never taught that it is 95 percent curable,only children with the double deficit don’t achieve fluency.
Finally,if public education’s main goal is not to achieve proficient literacy and it doesn’t feel it should be accountable to it’s taxpayers-God help us!
The study from the University of Texas (at Austin) recorded the fact that when Bush instituted widespread testing in Texas, the Latino shot up, When interviewed the Latino Latina students basically told the interviewers “testing showed me that school is not for me so I dropped out.”
Think about it for one minute. A young marginal, poor, minority student gets a poor result in grade 3, again in grade 6, again in 9 (math) 10 (reading) what are they going to conclude?
Testing demoralizes the very students that could go either way. If is was just neutal in effect it would be a waste of money. It is actually a serious destructive force in education.
The Fraser Institute reported in the Toronto Sun again today. Total grbage. The column devolved into teacher and union bashing.
Good teachers have zero to do with this question. First of all some of the best teachers in education anywhere are teaching in poor schools and achieving mediocre results. If you move the “successful” teachers from the “successful” schools (read middle class) to the poor schools it would have ne effect whatsoever,
It is a form of teacher bashing to blame the teachers of schools with weak results. They are no different than the teachers in successful schools. It is the students that are different.
All conservative solutions, testing, charters, vouchers, teacher testing (almost all eachers are passing even in the VA systems.) phonics, all of these systems hve been tried and tried again and again both across time and space. They have little or no effect on results.
The Sun FI piece keeps talking about a “stubborn 28%” of students and schools without identifying the 800lb gorilla in the room, THEY ARE POOR KIDS IN POOR SCHOOLS.
Hudak keeps identifying the students in applied classes without saying THEY ARE THE POOR KIDS.
The reform movement wants the solutions THEY SUPPORT for ideological reasons, to be chosen. They don’t work and they are a waste of money.
The reform movement is primarily conservatives so spending more money and raising taxes is out automaticly.
Fine ! Shift the money from highly successful middle class schools to poor schools. High spending on schools that would get high results is wasted money. The poor kids really need that money for smaller classes, ADK, breakfast programs, summer school, night supervised homework with help, trips, and so on.
What is the definition of insanity Doug-and by the way,remediation based on science is a far cry from just phonics,give me a break!
The real challenge is that standardized testing as a (albeit limited) diagnostic tool for educators to analyze student achievement levels and modify approaches to meet their needs, has been hijacked by the external accountability agenda.
We all recognize (except maybe the Fraser Institute) that test results only represent a small fraction of the complex outcomes that schools are expected to achieve. In a macro sense, results are skewed by socio-economic demographics; exemption and exclusion policies by schools and boards; and the ability levels of any given group of students.
On a micro level, they can be a powerful tool to build on what John observed to be powerful, collaborative efforts to ensure consistency in classroom assessment.
The students at my school are all designated as having Learning Differences. We use a number of standardized measures to “dipstick” for tracking progress. This is the most successful school for meeting the needs of individual learners that I have ever seen, but we would never score very high in any “ranking” that measured our quality based on test scores. Let’s get assessment back to where it belongs, as a tool to help kids learn.
The definition of insanity is trying the same conservative reforms that have failed in the past and continue to fail all over America and whereever else they are being tried. No conservative reforms work, they are fuddy duddy octogenarian warmed over stuff. How many times must the same reforms fail and liberal-left reforms succeed.
My last comment-there has never ever been a commitment to helping those that struggle,they are statistics at best.Your agenda,they’re poor so they fail.
Ask Pathways to Education what they think of your research.PATHETIC and heartless.
I support pathway 100% except i believe it should be publicly funded. I believe in radical measures to help the poor.
In the bottom 20%of schools I Would
1) reduce class size to 12
2) implement all day school with child care from age 2
3) ask the very best teachers in the system if they would work in the worst schools for an extra $20 000 per year.
4) put a health nurse full time in,each poor school and provide free optical and dental care
5) privide free nutricious breakfast and lunch programs
6) institute super pre and post natal care for the moms
7) arrange free summer camp that is half academic and half activity based
8) yes support pathways with 100% public money
9) provide free transportation for all poor students
10) choose principals very carefully and give a $20 000 bonus
This is how much contempt i have for the poir.
This is what works
This is what is necessary
Bonus it is totally free based on the savings in the criminal justice system, welfare system, EI system, productivity gains, and so on.
Lets put phonmic awareness in half the poor schools and my program in the other half and see who succeeds.
Real accountability still lives in Ontario public education. Today the latest Fraser Institute Ontario School Rankings were posted at:
Click to access ontario-elementary-school-rankings-2013.pdf
If the Action Canada Task Force had their way, School Rankings would again remain hidden from the public. Up until 1995, it was impossible to get a straight answer from anyone in the system about who was performing better on student tests or even among schools. We have, indeed, come a long way in terms of accepting the public’s RIGHT TO KNOW how each of their schools is performing on externally validated, fair, objective measures of performance.
You can question whether there is now Too Much Testing or whether the measures are valid indicators, but who really wants to go back into the “dark age” of public accountability?
Paul,
Testing amounts to taking the systems temperature. We have done it over and over and it tells us one thing and one thing only. The por do badly again this year. Even Hudak says we have a problem in 300 schools. He ought to say we have a problem in,300 POOR schools.
Testing solves nothing. You actually have to do something with the results. There seems to be some belief amongst reformers that naming and shaming schools has some effect in and of itself. It doesnt.
I have outlined above the proven reforms that work. Nothing else works.
Testing proves that progressives are correct and reformersaee wrong both in their diagnosis and in their prescriptions.
Nothing at all wrong with temperature taking sir. Very glad for the rankings of Fraser Institute and similar listings. Why not? Within the system we regularly rank and compare students. We also lavish them with awards and scholarships. The anti-testing mania is usually ramped up by those with blinders on who continue to try to impress upon the public that all schools and all educators are created equal and are of equal competence. That is just simply not true.
In our Action Canada Task Force report, we DO NOT recommend that school rankings should be hidden from the public. We call for a review of the current system’s ways of doing things and invite the review panel to look into the issue and assess whether the intended benefits are worth the investment in terms of money and time, as well as the risk of misuse. Partial measures used out of the context for which they are intended do not equate “accountability.” Even the EQAO and the 2009 report of the Attorney General recognize such misuse of test results as a clear and present danger…
The public does have a right to know how the system is performing, but as “Doug” also argues in his posts, there are bona fide issues worth considering and reconsidering.
What we are calling for is a REVIEW of standardized testing in Ontario.
An examination into.
A look at.
An analysis of.
A evaluation, and, possibly, a revision of, the system and its current mode of functioning.
Abolishing public disclosure of Test Results and comparing schools would impoverish public accountability in Ontario education.
The Action Canada Task Force group has recommended reviewing whether this kind of meaningful discussion should be in the public domain.
http://www.torontosun.com/2013/02/16/fraser-report-begs-the-question-why-are-some-schools-outperforming-others
With the changes they have proposed, such discussions would be impossible. How would this serve the goal of school improvement and providing the best schooling for our children?
Publishing results causes flight of highly motivated parents towards schools with high results. This causes schools with weak results to lose their sparkplugs and do even worse in the future. It sets off widespeead “cheating” to get into high scoring schools. The high scoring schools of course, only exist in leafy middle class and affluent enclaves.
Publishing results makes good schools better and weak schools worse. It lowers the property values of the poor and inflates the property values of the affluent.
We are not going to open more schools in affluent areas so it sets off school wars in larger cities.
Testing demoralizes the very students the testers say they want to help. It polarizes rwsults, polarizes society and will eventually lead to gated communities and more crime.
Testing is one of the roots of the evil tree. It leads to a bitter fruit.
If what you say is true Doug, then the issue is with those in the system who have yet to learn how to use the results for improvement.
What happened to public education as the great equalizer for all communities?
I see no down side to parents being given all of the information and moving to the school they think best meets their child’s needs.
You are correct Paul. In my school community the nixing of testing and measurement would simply not fly. Not any more.
JohnnyC: the issue is NOT with those in the system who have yet to learn how to use the results for improvement. The issue is that not all those in the system are ABLE to use the results to help “best meet their child’s needs.” Not all parents are wealthy enough to move to communities with “better-performing” schools, since these schools also tend to be located in the wealthiest areas (for reasons too obvious to detail)…
Public education SHOULD be a great equalizer for all communities, as you say. This is even prescribed by the Ontario Education Act, which highlights the importance of “closing gaps.” When, however, only the wealthiest of Canadians have options available to them, the result is exactly what can be expected.
You also take for granted that the results of standardized tests represent “all the information.” These tests are focussed on academic achievement only, and represent only a very small proportion the prescribed curriculum. Teachers’ assessments are much better indicators of students’ achievements. They are also much better indicators of students’ needs…
The Achievement Gap analysis sparked by OECD’s PISA tests is another example of why testing is critical to effective educational policy-making. We can argue about the use made of test results, but it’s “game over” for those who deny the validity of system-wide testing initiatives.
This Australian infographic provides vitally important strategic information for policy makers:
We will never find answers to education’s most stubborn questions without a valid, fair, and reasonably objective battery of student tests. This is a prime example of what we can all learn about what works for students.
Let’s recognize that this info has both power and limits. While large scale assessments can help policy makers. the Fraser Institute’s individual school rankings are not useful, given the role SES plays as seen in global data.
Tests are not objective, even standardized ones since they are biased in the questions used.
“Don’t matter how much you weigh the pig, without a decent diet, still ain’t gonna grow.”
The battery of testing have not helped children in US schools. Even many of those who spent decades designing such tests (see earlier post) recognized this.
The “official voices” of the Canadian educational establishment seem to have lapped up the Action Canada Task Force report. Of the 44 “likes” on Facebook, eight out of 10 are members of the “Teachers Trust.”
The Action Canada team of Joel Westheimer students have reassembled the Trust of “anti-testers” from the early 1990s.
Nice to see Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, and Sir Ken along for the ride. I guess TVO Parents and People for Education do fit the description of “parents” even though they are the main proponents of more funding for every conceivable new initiative, except testing and accountability..
“I guess TVO Parents and People for Education do fit the description of “parents” even though they are the main proponents of more funding for every conceivable new initiative, except testing and accountability..”
Only in their insular world Paul. Not too many parents way up here who relate to the Person for Education.
When I attend a People for Education event at York U or U of T I see hundreds of parents from parent councils across Ontario. I think I counted 500 at one event. How many people attend a SQE conference?
Parents have many political opinions but parents of children ALL want much more spending on public education and will severly punish politicians who argue against it. Hudak is going nowhere since he badmouths increased spending.
Parents are just as diverse in their opinions as educators — and it’s time we all came to accept that. You know as well as I do that Annie Kidder and the People for Education lobby group are considered “teacher’s pets” by serious education reformers. Just as you disparage the New York City group Educators for Excellence for having “turned”, we tend to see P4E in a similar light.
Some two-thirds of Ontarians favour standardized tests, so groups like SQE have exercised enormous political influence, far greater than their actual numbers.
A study conducted by OISE students for Dr. Ben Levin actually argued that “crossover groups” like the CD Howe Institute, Fraser Institute, AIMS, and SQE, exert the most influence on education policy. I asked Ben Levin why, if that is the case, the OISE crowd routinely ignores their papers and publications. Still waiting for that answer.
Standardized testing is rapidly losing support across America. NCLB is a national joke. Testing in Ontario is losing popularity. At one time testing was supported by 75%. Two thirds also support ADK which reformers oppose, almost 80% support smaller classes.
Polling every year, I used to work for Vector Polling, shows support for spending on public education is the most popular area of spending only outdone by health spending.
At one time we had departmentals but the public gradually clued in to the fact that it was a wasteful joke.
It will be the same with EQAO. Check the testing wars in Oregon. Testing is past its “best before” date. Once people notice that you get nothing of value from it they turn on it.
As Andy Hargraves points out, random sampling is every bit as useful to educators but useless to the Fraser Institute. This is the direction we need to go if we must test.
Reading First got killed before it could help-human greed and corporate lobbying by the publishing houses didn’t give it a chance,it would have made a significant difference.
As Dr.Stanovich and Jamie Metsala have noted,verifiable results done through science and research are the only way to know if something works but in the education sector opinion rules,no one wants to hear about eFfectiveness or take it under consideration.We live in a Dougs know best world.
The reason groups like FI, CDH, AIMS etc are influential is because they are the corporate voice in Canadian education. The corporate agenda in education is antithetical to the parents agenda.
The corporate agenda is privatization, tax cuts, deregulation no minimum wage, slash welfare, slash EI, bring universities under corporate control,
In schools they want less literature more reading skills, more math and science, less history and geography. This corporate dystopia is a Brave New World, 1984 variety school system. Schools as described by corporations send parents screaming out of the room. Parents saw what corporations want under Mike Harris. They hate it.
The corporate agenda is about greed and the enrichment of the 1% at the expense of the 99%. Sadly when they get their way it looks like 1929 and 2007.
I think some Canadian reform groups are legitimate but as soon as corporate funding moves beyond say 10% people begin to look for “astro-turf” groups as the Americans call them. The Tea party for example is overwhelmingly funded by the Koch brothers, but they are instructed to bring “hand made signs” to rallies or people ask “who is funding this?” American conservative education reform groups like Michelle Rhee Students First, and hundred of others are astro-turf groups funded by those who hope to really cash in on education privatization.
Some are Wall Stree hedge fund types, the Waltons of Wal Mart, The Broad group, Gates Foundation, Olin Foundation……
I suspect that the kneejerk and very oddly political comments inserted in to an otherwise good discussion is a clear sign that Doug’s desperate for something. Just not too sure what.
Glad to read Joanne’s comments. She sounds more like the educators I am familiar with who are growing as tired as most parents of the excuses.
Oddly political? As if these issues are not the essence of politics.
The “no excuses” language is so 1990s. The debate has moved on. A sophisticated understanding of the system brings everything into focus.
The education debate at it’s core is conservatives vs liberals vs socialists. Anybody who does not get that needs to pay more attention.
Education Politics Is Split In TWO — Liberal or Marxist
An interesting book by long time educator, Kenneth A Strike, says there are two contending forces in public education today — liberal or Marxist — and their differing views of the nature of the good life. (Liberal Justice, Marxist Critique of Education)
There is an ethical conflict between Marxism and liberalism. Core values determine means and methods. Liberals depend more on persuasion while Marxists use less open strategies.
The only measure or evaluation Marxists care about is whether a society is getting more equal.
I wrote about the Finnish egalitarian model and yet another push toward that end by the Alberta Teachers Association. From an earlier post on Paul’s PISA article:
What Happened In Alberta?
When Alison Redford became premier of Alberta some say it was because the teacher union — wink, wink — encouraged last minute sign-ups of teachers to the party to swing the vote in the leadership contest. She promised $107m to the education budget within 10 days of victory. Delivered.
It was understood that standardized testing would be eliminated. Not done yet.
The teacher union really despised, I am told, the ”parent veto” by which parents could still remove their children from school programs that offended their family values. No word. Guess the veto is still in.
Paul Bennett, on this his website, reported 2012 year end summaries with this about Alberta:
“Alberta . . . Finnish Dalliance” “When the plan got a chilly reception in Alberta conservative circles, a new Education Minister, Jeff Johnson, distanced himself from the Finland-inspired reform plan.”
A number of us on that blog topic were very worried — that Alberta, a high education achiever because of parent choices — would be cut down as a “tall poppy” by these levelers in the teacher union and political circles.
Apparently that “dalliance” continues with Pasi Salsberg in town (Calgary) spreading his egalitarian, equalitarian message. What happened last time the “Finnish Way” was turned back? Aren’t red flags up again? Who’s watching out for the children’s and parents’ interests now?
Paul: You’re not exaggerating. The “leveler” pressures remain. There’s another kick at the can in the works.
We should remember that part of the reason Finland adopted such extreme (yes, even exaggerated) measures — free education including university, teachers with Masters degrees all trained in mental health & early diagnostic assessment, lots & lots of play, LOTS of attention on well-being and happiness — are because of its shameful early reputation. It bent over backwards to remedy a dismal, joyless situation.
Finland was considered one of the world’s suicide capitals!
“Finland no longer suicide capital of the world. Finland has finally shed a bleak record as one of the world’s suicide capitals after the number of people taking their own lives in this Nordic state has dropped by 40 percent in the past 15 years.” (2007)
http://www.finlandforthought.net/2007/09/19/finland-no-longer-suicide-capital-of-the-world/
60 Minutes did a story on Finnish male depression.
On a blog someone said 4 mo ago : “Finland still has a high level of suicide, certainly nothing to be proud of. Could it be its so called brilliant education system the world wants to follow?”
Pasi says these education measures are not socialist or communist.
But, as I said before on this topic, this is the “Marxist Way”. This renewal of interest in Alberta foreshadows a totalitarian plan for “the masses” with vanguards of reliable trained teacher unionists being the leaders as ATA papers champion. Go back to their ATA literature. Standardized testing and parental school choice are to be diminished in favor of equity, and teacher leaders are to “elevate public spiritedness.”
Alberta: Wake up and smell the coffee! Are you ready to have your public spiritedness cranked up by teachers?
You dont have to be paranoid to believe this but it helps. Egaliterianism is the primary goal of progressives but not by dumbing down . Progressives want everybody to go as far in school ss they possibly can.
There is a difference however. Liberals measure opportunity, real progressives measure tesults. The basic progressive goal is to destroy the relatioship between money and education. That is ehy we want ALL education to be free.
In 1956 Adlai Stevenson was running againsy Eisenhower for president. Stevenson kept touting Sweden as a progressive Utopia and Ike was getting steamed. One day he announced that Sweden had the worlds highest suicide rate and therefore the USA had nothing to learn from Sweden. Two days later the Swedish delegation was at the White House to explain a few things. First, Sweden did not have the highest rate in the world, it had the highest rate in Europe. Secondly, catholic Europe seldom recorded suicide on death certificates since it was a sin. Thirdly, of the northern Protestant nation, the Swedish suicide rate was statisticly insignificantly different from almost all northern European nation. Forthly, if the suicide rate in Sweden tells us something about Swedish social democracy, what does the worlds highest murder rate tell us about American capitalism?
We heard very little about this argument since then when Tunya revived it regarding Finland.
gotta support Doug on this one
+
how many traffic fatalities are disguised suicides?
and
the thought that any event (suicide, climate change, learning, health, wealth, criminality, etc.) is based on a single cause is plain wrong although such an idea was popular in the European Middle Ages
+
Ken Strike’s position in the last century is a false dichotomy, as most dichotomies are.
When blogs are reduced to ideological talking points they get boring and fail to influence those who are looking for answers or at least directions for improvement.
I just glanced at the Fraser Report,they do a very explicit job,some schools have a score of 1 at the end of grade 3 as an average.
Why are those schools not obliged to improve?Why is the Literacy Secretariat in Ontario recommending instruction that is not grounded in what we know works?I know the answers of course,OISE cronyism.
Is that more important than the well being of children?The L.S. costs the province a great deal of money for newsletters and teachers flying across the country to do power point presentations,I know,let`s save money and disband that organization.After all,with the advent of the internet,why do we need a myopic organization telling us how to proceed?
All fair questions Joanne that both educators and parents are asking themselves.
What fails to dawn on the anti-testing and excuses crowd is that proof of achievement is something most parents request and for those teaches confident in themselves and their abilities unafraid of.
The system likes to assume there is no difference in teacher quality between schools. Parents know that’s false. Teachers know that’s false and I’m pretty sure that by experience students learn that that’s false too.
For the money Ontario spends on education we should be doing much better for our students.
The success or failure of children has virtually nothing to do with teachers. It is overwhelmingly connected to SES. One csn put all the best teachers in the worst school, call it school A. Then put all of the so called worst teachers in the best school, call it school B.
Next year there will be the same gap between the schools. Sending the best teachers to the poorest schools helps but it id like trying to put out a 3 alarm fire with a water gun. Massive and expensive reform both educational and social is needed to raise the bottom kids up. The best single reform is a well paid job for their parents.
It hilarious if it were not so sad to listen to reformers “command” school improvement. It looks like King Knute turning away tides. ALL, not some ALL of the weak schools are poor and do badly because they are poor. If their parents had good jobs their scores would rocket ahead overnight.
Nobody in any position of authority in education, academic or bureaucratic believes in such solutions.
“with the advent of the internet,why do we need a myopic organization telling us how to proceed?”
because whatever one may think of the quality of the work of EQAO we at least have people to write to, yell at, or congratulate.
The internet has great stuff but as a “universe” of ideas it lacks quality control and accountability. As a history teacher I have to help students and teachers deal with the various erroneous websites masquerading as scholarship; e.g., holocaust deniers and other racist entries that often disguise themselves as experts.
It is rather like democracy to paraphrase Churchill; whatever its faults,it’s still better than the alternative. EQAO is likely in a similar category, especially when i compare it to many of the state assessment bodies in the US.
Parent Empowerment — Ambiguities, Paradoxes, Contradictions
#1 Lip service says parents are important. But experience reveals more ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions than genuine commitment.
#2 UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) says parents have the right to choose their child’s school.
#3 Who disempowered parents, and why?
#4 Why were two teacher unions — one in BC, one in Ontario — so keen on withholding and limiting information on student progress report cards to parents during their “job actions” in the last two years? Robbing parents, illegally according to the School Acts, of tools by which to monitor and decide whether to stay or go in their school. This was not taken to court but it should have been.
#5 Why are Parent Empowerment Acts an important movement in the United States?
#6 Under California’s Parent Empowerment Act 2010 a Parent Trigger provision has now enabled poor parents to force a turn-around in their low-performing school (a “restart model”). http://hechingerreport.org/content/for-first-time-a-parent-trigger-without-a-hitch_11164/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HechingerReport+%28Hechinger+Report%29
This is what I wrote in the comments to this story:
Parent Duty In Education Of Their Children
For too long many parents have suffered because of unresponsive public schools.
Ultimately, it’s the parents who are responsible for their children’s education. If a school fails to serve their children well, they have every right and duty to remove them from a negative situation.
Or, as Parent Trigger has demonstrated, parents can force a change to restart a school for the better.
Parents must now safeguard their hard-fought gains by ensuring that their voice becomes part of the governing structure of the school.
There is a lot of literature about what makes a good school and how parents should be meaningfully involved.
Two items to consider are Parent Rights http://genuine-education-reform-today.org/2010/04/06/parent-rights-and-their-childrens-education/
And Effective Schools Checklist http://education-advisory.org/2007/08/effective-schools-checklist/
This second item shows the 8 essentials Dr. Edmonds identified, one being active parent involvement in effective schools. Prophetically, in 1978, he said:
“We can, whenever, and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us.
“We already know more than we need, in order to do this.
“Whether we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.”
#7 The established monopoly public education system is deathly afraid of parents. That is why any accountability measures are fiercely opposed — from report cards, to tests of basic skills, to school evaluations, to state and national and international scores.
#8 The same BLOB (Bloated Learning Organized Bureaucracy) keeps burying the knowledge of what makes for effective schools. One of the ingredients is genuine parent involvement and the other is regular assessment. This has been codified and known since 1978 at least. Please revisit Dr. Edmonds’ 8 point checklist as linked above.
#9 If effective schools is not the goal of public schools, then what is? Following Pasi Sahlberg’s juggernaut and the growth of the FL Family (Finnish Lessons) we see another agenda for universal public schools — producing happy, playful, egalitarian children — emerging.
#10 For those parents who don’t want to be swept into the FL Family and the egalitarian world-view, options and alternatives will be very important. We need more choices than the home education route, which is very demanding but successful or private schools, which are beyond the means of most poor and middle-class parents.
#11 Can’t people see the logic of breaking-up this monopoly, one-size-fits-all, model of education for the young? Parents need choices and tools for making informed decisions about the best education for their children.
It is just so easy to refute this above list point by point but who has the time. One point Paul points out however. Anyone who claims to speak for parents has a lot of explaining to do.
I DO love the way Tunya gives herself away by raging against “egalitarianism” for heaven’s sake. This is like raging against democracy, good weather, mom and apple pie. It only makes sense in the context of the Libertairian cult. The Libertarians are a political group so small and extreme that they can’t get 1% of the vote in Canada. Tunya is an active member and some time candidate.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. It gives up a reference point for her views on education. From her perch, everybody looks like a Marxist.
As a parent that has been through 12 years of sheer hell dealing with a public education system that still thinks they are in the 19th century, still think only SES variables affect achievement of students, and where the definition globally that defines education is based on education opportunities. In the Testing Illusion report – “The objectives of Ontario’s public education system are enshrined in the first sentences of the province’s Education Act. As “the foundation of a prosperous, caring and civil society,” the role of the public education system is “to provide students with the opportunity to realize their potential and develop into highly skilled, knowledgeable, caring citizens
who contribute to their society.”
Click to access illusion_of_success_EN.pdf
The Testing Illusion advocate says – “We call for a review of the current system’s ways of doing things and invite the review panel to look into the issue and assess whether the intended benefits are worth the investment in terms of money and time, as well as the risk of misuse. Partial measures used out of the context for which they are intended do not equate “accountability.” Even the EQAO and the 2009 report of the Attorney General recognize such misuse of test results as a clear and present danger…”
The authors of the Testing Illusion report want a review based on a (skewed) definition of an education system, to put an end to standardized testing. After all, one look at the definition and for that matter across the globe, its all about providing and delivering education services to the masses to produced prosperous, caring citizens within society, by providing opportunities to to reached their potential and developed students skills and knowledge at high levels to become productive contributors in society. The ultimate goal of the authors, and likewise for the majority of the stakeholders within the public education model is to get rid of standardized testing. Why? It exposes what the public education is not doing developing the skills and abilities of students to become contributing members of society.
The majority of the education stakeholders within the education model, want standardized testing off the map because it exposes what they have never been accountable for, the outcomes of students extending into their adulthood. Tunya, mentions the high suicide in Finland, and one could now add the high numbers of drug use in Finland’s society. Or another troubling stat, is the creeping climb of adults having low literacy and numeracy skills in Finland that is now at the 37 % mark. Finland is not alone in climbing rate of low literacy and numeracy skills in the developed countries but that is not a stat that the public education system is concerned with, nor the percentage of students taking remediation at the post-secondary in literacy and numeracy and nor with a host of economic indicators reflecting in part, if not entirely the outcomes of students in either the K to 12 and post-secondary. How about the declining voting participation in elections? In part, it reflects the low literacy and numeracy skills of the voters that are unable to sort out the information and knowledge of the candidates that allows the motivation to go to the ballot box. In turned it drives the political system and its players to dumb down the discourse of politics to one-liners and simplified talking points to a level that a 10 year can understand. Having an entire education system based on equality of opportunities is a recipe to have the main focus on the processes of the inputs, and outcomes on the global, national, provincial, school districts, schools, classrooms to the individual students no longer matter.
Ergo, it results in statistical data streams being only seen in partial pictures. The analogy of the forest to the single trees could be used here. If the entire forest is at risked, but the only data that is being collected hails from one section of the forest, that data only reveals a partial picture of the overall health of the forest. In the end, it leads to poor policy formulation, wasteful expenditures of monies, and mediocre outcomes. Standardize testing is a reflection of partial pictures that gives an illusion of healthy education system. But far from being healthy, its a very sick puppy because the measures being measured are the input measures based on equality of education opportunities matrix. The equality of education opportunities matrix cannot and never will be able to account for the education levels, skills and abilities of students and for that matter if after 12 years of schooling, the students have the literacy and numeracy skills needed to navigate in their adulthood. The illusion of the standardized testing at the global, national, provincial/state, school districts and individual schools is hitting the default button of SES variables as the reasons to explain mediocre outcomes of students.
Its why the eggheads that authored the report Testing Illusion is pushing for randomized limited testing, and concluded – “In summarizing these
reservations, the Commission cautioned that standardized testing “is easier to carry out poorly than well, easier to mislead than to inform with
statistics, and easier to spend a great deal of money in assessing what students know than to improve teaching or learning effectively.”, wants a discussion to ensure that standardized testing remains focus on the inputs within the parameters of equality of education opportunities. What frightens the eggheads and as well as the other education stakeholders, the trend of society, governments shifting their values to equality of education outcomes and for that matter in all aspects of government and private entities providing services for the public. As well as the new mathematical models that has displayed the services being delivered, the vast majority receiving services cannot avail of the opportunities, because the access gates have been locked down to them. In a public education model, one would probably see in a scattered plot, close to 70 to 75 percent of students are just above or below or on the line of just barely passing at 50 %. It leaves 25 to 30 % of the students in two clusters. The one cluster are the high achievers and the other cluster are the lowest achievers, and not anywhere near the 50 % passing line.
In Wikipedia – a short summary on both outcome and opportunity equality.
” Equality of outcome, equality of condition, or equality of results is a political concept which is central to some political ideologies and is used regularly in political discourse, often in contrast to the term equality of opportunity.[1] Although it is not always clearly defined, it usually describes a state in which people have approximately the same material wealth or, more generally, in which the general economic conditions of their lives are similar. Achieving this requires reducing or eliminating material inequalities between individuals or households in a society. This could involve a transfer of income and/or wealth from wealthier to poorer individuals, or adopting other institutions designed to promote equality of condition from the start. A related way of defining equality of outcome is to think of it as “equality in the central and valuable things in life.”[2]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_outcome
“Equal opportunity is a stipulation that all people should be treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers or prejudices or preferences, except when particular “distinctions can be explicitly justified.”[1] The aim according to this often “complex and contested concept”[2] is that important jobs should go to those “most qualified” – persons most likely to perform ably in a given task – and not go to persons for arbitrary or irrelevant reasons, such as circumstances of birth, upbringing, friendship ties to whoever is in power,[3] religion, sex,[4] ethnicity,[4] race, caste,[5] or “involuntary personal attributes” such as disability, age, or sexual orientation.[5][6] Chances for advancement should be open to everybody interested[7] such that they have “an equal chance to compete within the framework of goals and the structure of rules established.”[8]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_opportunity
A 2003 report authored by Ben Levin himself – On page 8, “Historically there have been two main approaches to addressing equity in education. One focuses on what is called ‘equality of opportunity’. In this view, it is
access to education that is critical. The responsibility of the state is to provide opportunities to participate; whether people choose to take advantage of that access or are successful in doing so should not be a
primary focus of public policy. The second view is more concerned with equity in the results of education, such as graduation and access to employment. From this perspective, providing the same opportunity is
not enough because different people will need different kinds of opportunities and some people will need more support in order to be successful. We should therefore be concerned when the outcomes of education are inequitable, whatever the official opportunities are.”
Click to access 38692676.pdf
My own personal view based on my experiences of the last 12 years, my child was only offered education based on equality of opportunities. All access gates to remediation in reading, writing and numeracy was locked to her. What access gates were offered to her? The gates of dumbing it down education opportunities, of two grade levels below. Likewise, in the education data streams of student outcomes, anywhere between 94 to 96 percent of LD students are condemned and sentenced to a lifetime of low levels of literacy and numeracy skills. The access gates that are locked regarding LD students, are the gates that leads to the tools and instruction to be able to access the education resources that is provided. The tools and instruction that leads to average or above literacy and numeracy skills are permanently locked to the LD students in a public education model. Further damning, is the Moore court ruling calling equality of educaiton opportunities as a form of discrimination. As all nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada agreed upon, the access gates that leads to the educational opportunities are locked to the LD students, and in fact effectively kicking them off the ramp that leads to the access gates of educational opportunities. The LD students cannot effectively take advantage of the educational opportunities when they are not provided the effective tools and skills to access the educational opportunities.
Its so bizarre from a LD parent’s viewpoint when standardized testing, or for that matter a classroom test, skills that a student must have and are prerequisites to have to expressed one’s knowledge – are the fundamental skills of reading, writing and numeracy. The results of the testing, leads to decisions by the school, and sometimes by the orders of the school district, to dumb-it-down by modifying the curriculum outcomes and the provision of accommodations to be able to access the educational opportunities. By doing so, the future academic doors of the LD students are are also locked to them by default, since the original remediation access gates at the primary grades has always been under permanent locked down. The small percentage of LD students of 4 to 6 % of the LD student population has escaped the trap of equality of opportunities by receiving the timely private services and determine parents who have the means and the skills to help their children.
Now, since the LD student population comprises a small minority to the marco student population set, but what is important they share a characteristic of the majority of students and that is the literacy and numeracy skill levels of students. Another data stream that is not measured, nor tracked in the public education system, and if it is, its only done on an individual level providing the students have been formally identified as having low literacy and numeracy skills. Its why the new mathematical models in the areas of education when using standardized testing scores displays the vast majority that constitutes approximately anywhere between 60 to 75 % of students are sitting at the line of passing, either on the line, just below the line or just above the line. The conclusion can only be one thing – the literacy and numeracy levels of the students are at play, and not the SES variables as it is constantly being portrayed within the public education system.
So back to my original premise, standardized testing as it is today is just measuring and accounts for the delivery of education services within the parameters of equality of educational opportunities. EQAO and the other testing regimes have virtually aided and abetted into reducing the grade 12 diploma to having no value whatsoever. None, zilch, nada – no value and have rendered the grade 12 diploma as the one and only requirement to entered post-secondary and the work force. The inequalities that are occurring at the access gates of post-secondary and the work force are cause once again by the focus being on equality of opportunities that allows the access gates to be locked in adult learning and the labour market. This in turn causes a cascading effect across the span of the economy and society producing a negative ripple effect that pushes back the positive gains of the economy and society. Or one can think of it as a black hole, sucking whatever good out of the economy and society, and leaving in its wake a disturbing picture of inequalities and outcomes across the span of society.
The eggheads of the report Testing Illusion, have an entrenched belief value that equality of education opportunities is the best and only way to achieved equality. In the same way a Liberal candidate for the leadership in Saturday’s debate attacked Trudeau on his ‘middle-class’ campaign focus. For both the eggheads and the Liberal candidate, equality of opportunities has worked very well for them. The trouble is the eggheads and the Liberal candidate cannot see the inequalities and the locked access gates to get to the opportunities. All the doors were opened to them in the education system model, and they had no need to access the doors of remediation, or other doors because the educational opportunities were build specifically for them. One can call them the round pegs of society, and the vast majority are the odd shaped pegs other than round.
As you can see, equality of outcomes and opportunities is complex and undergoing changes that makes discussions about standardized testing divisive and dividing people into their individual camps. I am all for standardized testing because its the only measurement that forces accountability in the public education system. It forces the public education system to discussed the outcomes of students, even if it is only around the parameters of the outcomes. Its why the hard copies of the standardized testing is not released to the parents. Parents would quickly discovered why Little Suzie are receiving 1 and 2 levels, the low levels and skills in reading and writing that prevents the ability to expressed their knowledge. Another set of parents would discovered what passes for levels 3 and 4 and become alarmed over the content or the coherence of the content. Parents will focus on the outcomes, and have poorer outcomes address much to the dismay of the educators who know the access doors are closed and locked to most students. They are restricted to learned only in the inclusive classroom, that is apparently supposed to remedy some of the inequities of outcomes of students.
The eggheads of the education system, want to discussed standardized testing on their terms, that best suits their belief systems and follows the legal requirements of providing an education that meets the minimum basic levels, based on equality of education opportunities. I think its time to up the ante and force the eggheads and the education stakeholders to discussed equality of outcomes and opportunities – the one topic that the education stakeholders do not want to talk about, and not even to the parent who has just discovered the access doors to remediation are locked for their child. And educators are too busy to unlock the access doors and far too busy to explained why their child does not have access. The educators have standardized testing, and reams of curriculum outcomes that have not been covered to spend worrying about inequities of locked access gates at the school level. The question is, I wonder if the educators actually are aware of the locked access gates, and how many of their students are being kicked off the ramp that leads to the access gates of education opportunities and standardized testing? .
Nancy: Firstly, the “eggheads” who wrote the report in question are not all “round pegs,” as you call us, and most certainly not all academics. If you read our bios (www.testingillusion.ca/about-us/), you will see that some of us are academics, some of us are artists, some of us are pedagogues, and some are civil servants. We come from a wide-ranging variety of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, and we all attended different K-12 systems in different jurisdictions. We also hail from a diversity of socio-economic backgrounds (representing extremes from both ends of this spectrum). We came together through a program aimed at broadening our understanding of Canada’s policy choices, and chose to focus on the question of standardized testing for the reasons outlined in our report.
What we DO have in common is our emphasis on BOTH equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. If, instead of depending on Paul’s limited and polarizing discussion of our report, you read the document in its entirety, you would see that our report, and the recommendations that flow from it, are both very much invested in providing opportunity so that there is a better equality of outcome. Our last (but-far-from-least) recommendation, for instance, is aimed at inviting education ministries to look into the possibility of focusing on longer-term measures (instead of the current focus on “snapshots” like those offered by standardized tests). This is aimed at helping ensure that the system better works towards equality of outcome. Here is this recommendation:
“The panel could examine supplemental and alternative methods of achieving accountability, including what precedents exist for measuring and reporting on system outcomes. For example, measuring outcomes might include examining:
• The degree of representation of students from all backgrounds and contexts across all school programs and achievement levels, as an indicator of how well the system reflects the local population it serves;
• Attendance rates and completion rates as an indicator of how well students of all backgrounds persist and succeed;
• Student, parent and teacher surveys as an indicator of how responsive the system is to the needs of the users and the local community; and,
• Achievement of acceptable standards of school safety for both students and teachers.
The measurement and public reporting of system outcomes may help to more directly assess the effectiveness of and reinforce confidence in the
public education system.”
We are dedicated to helping create a prosperous, caring and civil society by inviting the provincial Governments to assess the best ways to provide students with “the opportunity to realize their potential and develop into highly skilled, knowledgeable, caring citizens who contribute to their society.” We are calling for a review of the accountability practices currently used so that the best ways of achieving this laudable goal are identified and adopted.
Back to Fraser report,Doug,your reporting on SES and why children fail,pardon me but as a reading specialist,I have made readers out of failures in as few as 12 hours of reading instruction,it`s a methodology problem,your premise is ludicrous,Amen.
Withholding On Reading Skills Should Be A Crime
I said earlier that the deliberate withholding of information from parents about their children’s school progress should be a matter to go to court. For heavy damages. Harm is done when parents cannot fulfill their duty in education. Twice in the last two years this has happened because of teacher union collective bargaining tactics during job actions.
Information to parents should never be a bargaining chip in collective bargaining.
Unchecked bullying, as a foreseeable harm, will similarly need to come before the courts in suing schools and school boards for negligence and malpractice.
Now, coming to reading.
Judging from my information about Finland I conclude that their Masters degreed teachers are all so highly trained in diagnostics and on-the-job-testing that individual children are automatically targeted for special services if not reading to expectation. Pasi Sahlberg says that a full 1/3 of students in Finland will get special education attention in their 9 years of schooling. That may be one reason Finland scores so well on international tests.
We in Canada do not have that degree of professional dedication. But there are indicators that will tell both parents and teachers early in primary years if the student is acquiring reading attack skills. Interventions can be put into place. There are at least five evidence-based approaches to reading that should be available to suit the special needs of the students. No approach should be withheld in seeking methods that will eventually work.
Benchmarks around Grade 3, into Grade 4, are critical and it is these standardized tests that teacher unions are so opposed to. It is at this critical period, as the movie, Won’t Back Down, demonstrates, that the Matthew Effects takes serious hold. http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/26/why-third-grade-is-so-important-the-matthew-effect/ The mother in the movie was desperate to get her child with reading problems into a good school for Grade 4.
The Matthew Effect is worth researching. Academic harm done by not addressing educable needs early only gets incrementally worse, with added psychological harms on top.
It was through proving harm done to his dyslexic son that Rick Moore was able to obtain, through a unanimous 9-judge ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, some remedy ($100,000 for private school fees, plus other costs and damages). There is another similar case in BC just starting its course now. (It took the Moore’s 15 years to get some modest relief.)
DEEP POCKETS is the predictable criteria for future law cases in public education. The forecast goes like this: Only when school systems, the school boards and Ministries of Education are sued for big bucks are the taxpayers going to get sufficiently infuriated about this misuse of their taxes to insist on proper responsiveness from the education system. Only then will the public system LEARN to be responsive!
Some say that’s the only way the system will learn to pay attention to parents. A few parents will have to sue the pants off a few deep pockets so that all parents can get the schools they and their children deserve.
Unfortunately, it also takes good finances for parents to go to court. This is where private foundations or corporations may need to be approached.
Dear Standardized Testing,I assure you the public is fed up and needs transparency,there is sooo little of it in your smoke and mirrors world.Please don`t package your anti testing agenda as a “what`s good for children” propaganda,it`s reprehensible.
When a grade 3 child can`t read and a parent is given a run around that makes it A)The parent`s fault,B)The child`s fault,I say for 95% of children,it`s the system`s fault.
The system is a circle in my view,the university that trains them(teachers),the Union that enrolls them and the schools that employ them.It`s a very rare teacher that ever learns to teach 30-60% of the class who will struggle to learn to read by grade 3 depending on the neighbourhood.That`s a lot of people to throw under the rug!
Are the universities too lazy to teach teachers how to do this,after all,we all know what works,it`s all over the internet! Easier to make blanket statements like “they`re poor” or MOE who hire people to direct language instruction shooting from the hip rather than honour the empirical research.
For all of us who watch,it`s preposterous and I agree with Tunya,it`s a crime!
While Paul’s initial blog post certainly made it sound like we are calling for an end to transparency, this could hardly be further from the truth. What we are calling for is a review of the accountability measures currently in use, and inviting the provincial governments to assess whether these measures are indeed helping to ensure the transparency that parents, the public, and taxpayers in general expect and need in order to have confidence in the system. We invite the review panel to examine supplemental and alternative methods of achieving accountability, including what precedents exist for measuring and reporting on system outcomes, and give the following as examples of such measures:
• The degree of representation of students from all backgrounds and contexts across all school programs and achievement levels, as an indicator of how well the system reflects the local population it serves;
• Attendance rates and completion rates as an indicator of how well students of all backgrounds persist and succeed;
• Student, parent and teacher surveys as an indicator of how responsive the system is to the needs of the users and the local community; and,
• Achievement of acceptable standards of school safety for both students and teachers.
Partial measures like the results of standardized tests are often used out of the context for which they are intended. These misuses are not synonyms for “accountability.” As implemented in Ontario, standardized testing is intended to demonstrate how students are performing on literacy and numeracy at a given point in time in order to inform and develop education policies and to allocate resources to shore up deficiencies in these areas. IT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE USED TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE OVERALL PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS OR THEIR SCHOOLS. However, commentators and the media often publish results in a format that ranks schools, sometimes without necessary contextualization, a practice that can have an impact on behaviours such as how some teachers choose schools and how some parents decide in what neighbourhoods to live. The Auditor General of Ontario recognizes this tendency, noting that real estate agents use the results of these tests to attract parents to areas with high performing schools. This kind of application is inconsistent with the objectives of Ontario’s public education system, which aims to close gaps in student achievement.
I guess you know how that sounds Jo Anna, the universities, the union, the boards, everybody is wrong but I am right!!!!!
Must be difficult being the only person who understands and nobody will listen.
Thing for even one minute about how that sounds.
While I agreed with Doug on a previous post, in this case there is much evidence that teachers can and do make a difference. Research into schools going back decades with millions of students (Hattie et al) shows that teaching counts. A recent article in the NY Times about a school that turned around is a clear piece on this.
I came from a poor immigrant family with a physical disability and got a quality education in my high school. When we have reunions many of many peers from similar backgrounds noted how we became successful and “moved up” the social class ladder.
Does it erase all SES differences? No. Certainly not in a single generation in most cases.
Does it erase enough of them together real hope and genuine progress? Yes.
Do good teachers make a difference? Yes: otherwise they are not very good.
Do many teachers meet this criteria? Yes
Can more meet it? Yes with good, systematic, quality professional development.
There will always be a need to improve since that is the nature of life.
Major troubles with too many blogs, even with skilled moderators include
– too much talking PAST and not enough talking WITH to solve problems and come up with possible solutions: need much more listening
– a simplistic belief in magic bullets (Finland, testing, vouchers- to name three of many
It is why some of us, me included, think of blogs as encouraging hate speech
– not only do we hate unions, corporations, the rich, the poor, but just as sad, those who disagree with us
– too much name-calling and stereotyping of different viewpoints
There is a biblical passage that asks if we learn more from those with whom with agree or from those with whom we disagree.
There is another aphorism about choosing to live hope rather than with doubt.
Gotta go teach now.
Finland = no standardized testing regime, no school choice, almost no private schools.
A formula to lead the world. Concentrate on what actually matters 5% child poverty.
I agree with John M that teaching does matter but I believe Coleman had it right when he originally said the factors are 80% external (SES, family, ….) and 20% internal to the school (mainly teaching but including admin, program, ….)
The problem with some is that they begin by saying “nothing can be done about external factors so we concentrate on the school….”
Even Geoffrey Canada for all the hype nd manipulation of that experiment, new that he had to deal with external factors, health, glasses, dental etc or he would get nowhere.
While we all remember Coleman’s original 1966 study he revised it in the mid 1970s to say he overstated the effects of SES- still important, mind you, but not a 100% sentence for poor learning
I think he was right the first time 🙂
He thought his revisions were more accurate.
Evidence since then has proven this.
I also suggest folks read accounts of schools in poor areas that improve. Union City NJ is one example as reported a week or two in the New York Times
The main enemy of creativity is standardization…
http://pasisahlberg.com/
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/03/why-do-rich-kids-do-better-in-school-than-poor-kids.html
Doug,we are not a fringe group,we are the knowledge based people,you are simply theorists.You lack specificity and you`re comfortable letting children fail,especially the poor.
http://www.childrenofthecode.org-more people on the fringe.
I am motivate ONLY by reducing the failure rate of the poor. Your methods don’t work. My position is mainstream, your position Jo Anne is fringe and you know it. That is why very few academics, reading associations, reading experts, school boards or provincial ministries support your approach. Why would that be?
http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2170433
Let’s look at what’s actually happening while we focus on winning debating points online – the Canadian province of Saskatchewan is now introducing more standardized tests. Here is the initial Global Saskatchwan (12 February 2013) report:
What does this suggest? Provincial education policy is all over the map when it comes to student testing and accountability. Will Manitoba be next?
The Testing Illusion report may not have arrived in Regina yet, judging from the policy being announced by Canada’s most popular premier, Brad Wall. Over the past month, Education Minister Russ Marchuk has announced plans to extend the school year and now to INTRODUCE more provincial testiing:
http://www.cbc.ca/morningedition/episode/2013/02/14/standardizing-schools—with-the-education-minister/
The Education Minister does his best in this CBC Radio interview to fend off the critics, which ( once again) seem to include CBC Radio producers. Is a pattern emerging here?
Naturally testing is very conservative and acts as an excuse for not actually dealing with Aboriginal failure in Sask.
Anyone want to bet that more testing “discovers” that poor kids especially Aboriginal kids in Regina, Saskatoon, and northern reserves are doing badly, ……anybody……. Crickets churping
John,
Read the critique by Gary Kirp of the Union City situation. More hype than progress.
Sorry, Gary Rubenstein of Gary Kirp. Union City results not that impressive even though they are using progressive methods.
There are no miracles or silver bullets in education. There is only hard work, smaller classes ECE, teacher PD, to go with.
Reforms based on testing, charters, vouchers, teacher bsshing and the like have failed in the past, are failing now and will fail in the future. You cannot do education “on the cheap”.
John,
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/02/13/the-status-quo-miracle-district/
I read the reports from Saskatchewan,it appears they will be trying to get their education sector more effective by putting more transparency in the system and thus try to be more accountable to their constituents.
I am blind because I have done pre post testing with all my students as do those that do remediation with kids who struggle.Why isn`t it just logic that you do that and work on improving things till you get better outcomes?
I just don`t understand the resistance,do educators actually want carte blanche?
It has been said one hundred times but once more never hurts. Educators believe that the act of testing and reporting damages students and damages the education system It is not neutral. The University of Texas (at Austin) has documented the radical increase in the hispanic dropout rate in Texas that accompanied the “Texas Miracle”. Educators see every day of the week, the demoralized results of students who receive bad results. In elementary school they quit working as hard, after grade 10 they drop out.
The reporting of the results by cruel organizations like the Fraser Institute drives up property values in affluent communities and drives them down in poorer communities. Highly motivated parents in Toronto start cheating to get kids into higher ranked schools and when they are successful, they remove the sparkplugs from schools with weak results driving their scores down and creating a vicious downward cycle in poor schools.
Testing narroes the curriculum, killing the arts, social science as schools are turned into mindless test prep centres.
Everything of quality is squeezed out of schools and replaced with garbage.
Testing, the more of it that is done causes beautiful schools to become mindless dystopias that kids hate attending.
It testing worked the USA would be #1 and Finland would be #17.
As it is test mad America is #17 and test free Finland is #1.
http://www.fairtest.org/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/18/1171507/-What-s-wrong-with-standardized-tests
http://www.fairtest.org/how-standardized-testing-damages-education-pdf
Doug,naturally,I feel that if a kid can`t read,it has to be dealt with.If we test vacuously without interventions for those that are not succeeding,then I must agree with you.
We can improve things dramatically and in a very short time.
A grade 10 non reader or with grade 2-3 skills can`t keep up,he`ll have to drop out,it`s emotionally impossible for him to continue other than in art and gym.
If a weak student and their family requested a test and the student wrote the test and the results were shared with the teacher, the parents and perhaps the pribcipal and the parents decided what would be shared with the young person I would have no problem with it. With FOI, testing on a mass basis must be shared with the public and irresponsible heartless organizations publish it and similarly motivated newspapers publish it and the massive damage done by the process leaves The FI and the Toronto Sun shrugging their shoulders saying “what…what…”?
Once again, while schools CAN improve student achievement even with low SES (Doug, not talking about miracles but about improvement at many places like union City NJ- a community like many that needs much more help)Doug is spot on about the lack of +ve impact the stuff from the FI and the Toronto Sun. His last post above is both more ethical but the evidence is that it is far more likely to aid school, parents, and teacher work together to help the student improve.
If you are labeled a loser kid and a loser school by the FI and the media, guess what?
I to believe John that schools can and often do improve when the right combination of leadership, resources empathy and expertese are employed.
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/02/13/the-status-quo-miracle-district/
Gary puts some of the movement in perspective.
I actually think I just had a eureka moment. Some parents want testing some don’t and some don’t care. When Rogers cable in Ontario came out with ‘negative option billing’ that everyone was going to get a cable package whether they wanted it or not all hell broke loose.
I propose that the EQOA tests be created and revised. Parents can request their child be tested in grade 3 grade 6 9, 10 and an appointment will be made for them in the guidance dept and the results given to parents, the teacher and the principal.
Only 2-3 students would be scheduled per day and the results would only be shared with specific parents and teachers.
There would be no mass testing on specific days so nothing for the media to write about.
Everybody would be happy.
What’s Coming After FINNISH LESSONS ?
While Pasi Sahlberg’s book, Finnish Lessons, provides the background to his country’s success in international tests scores he does little to denounce competition, school choice, and test-based accountability. These demons are more inferred than frontally attacked. Maybe that’s why he is such a favorite on the education speech circuit — calm, reassuring, demonstrating a real model of success.
Critics of the Finnish style — leery of one-size-fits-all socialized education — are easily sidelined.
Wait till the next, highly anticipated book hits the market. Pasi said his book climbed to #2 on Amazon bestseller list the day after the CBC interview. This new eagerly awaited book is already garnering a waiting list — publication not till Sept 03, 2013 !
Diane Ravitch’s new book is entitled: Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger for America’s Public Schools.
It follows her last book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2011)
Her themes, replete on her website, are: anti parental choice, anti standardized testing, anti charters, anti vouchers, anti competition, anti teacher assessments tied to student achievements, anti common core, anti individualism, anti teacher union criticism, anti . . .
A former conservative education critic in her earlier writings, saying she regrets sending her own children to private schools, has embraced the progressive, left wing positions of teacher unions and constructivist teacher education professors.
Just a heads up on another mammoth surge of anti standardized testing (etc.) renewed efforts come early Fall 2013.
And the great thing is Diane is correct about everything. She was a conservative in the Bush era but before that was what she described as a “tough liberal” being a liberal who thinks the other liberals are wimps.
She had faith is conservative reforms but soon saw that they were a disaster.
What happens when you demoralize the police force, the army, the firefighters? It is exactly the same when you demoralize teachers. Outsiders need to butt out. Otherwise they will destroy the system.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/21/u-s-teachers-job-satisfaction-craters-report/
Illusion Testing writes – “Firstly, the “eggheads” who wrote the report in question are not all “round pegs,” as you call us, and most certainly not all academics. If you read our bios (www.testingillusion.ca/about-us/), you will see that some of us are academics, some of us are artists, some of us are pedagogues, and some are civil servants. We come from a wide-ranging variety of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, and we all attended different K-12 systems in different jurisdictions. We also hail from a diversity of socio-economic backgrounds (representing extremes from both ends of this spectrum).”
I see I need to defined what exactly are eggheads from a parent’s perspective. Although many parents would understand the phrase without explanation. The public education system is designed and built for the egghead students with excellent cognitive processes. Everything is built around the egghead students in the classroom, to education policies to awards to the favourite teachers’ pets. They are the ones who learned no matter how badly the instruction is, and they are the students who are A students from the beginning of grade 1, They processed excellent cognitive memory processes, that enables them to become good learners and good test takers. Everything is built around the egghead students, that represents 30 % of any students in a typical classroom. The remaining 70 % of students are forced to adapt to the agenda of living and learning in a school environment meant for round-pegged students. You see, the odd-shaped pegged students are the ones not blessed with excellent cognitive processes like the round-pegged students. Leading to diverse consequences among the 70 % of the student population, such as one student having a grade 7 reading level at the age of 16, or the other student whose handwriting is at the level of a grade 5 student, or the student sitting in advance English class, tripping over the words, skipping words as he is reading out loud the reading passage in the classroom, or the many students who are in danger of failing grade 11 math because mastery of math concepts is not on the agenda or the minds of the education system. I only mentioned mastery, because its a concept alien to most education faculties and that it leads to improved cognitive processes for all students and eventually higher achievement. And of course it does lead to improved results on standardized testing.
After all in a public education system that is built for egghead students and their near-perfect cognitive processes, this set of students do not have any problems making the grade on any type of tests. One of the reasons why there is so many educators against standardized testing is because they see no need for testing, because of their belief systems and training. Beliefs that the 30 % of the egghead students in a classroom will help rise the other 70 % of the odd-shaped students to higher achievement. Or the pep talks given by educators to parents, of the need for little Suzie to focus and work harder by providing advice that works best for the egghead students but not for the odd-shaped students.
When the cognitive and learning sciences are absent and has been missing in action since the 1950s, and education policies and practices, there is bound to be the siren call of standardized testing for students. The Testing Illusion authors should be aware of it, but are lost in the illusions of the public education system that has been shaped by the education stakeholders that the public education was built for the egg-head students with excellent cognitive processes. The authors are lost in the forest of the public education system, and cannot see the whole forest. Just part of the forest, and as such does not see why standardized testing is an important accountability tool, and a way to seek changes to transformed the public education system to the 21st century model based on the cognitive and learning sciences for all students, and NOT just for the egghead students who thrive no matter what the environment is and across the social-income levels. Standardized testing gives direction as to where the problems lies, and exposes the education practices and policies built and designed for the 30 % of the student population – the egghead students.
As for adult eggheads, well they certainly do exist but not as Testing Illusion claims they are describing them under the SES variables. So don’t flatter yourself, you are bonafide eggheads of the adult kind. The term of eggheads has been around for a long time, morphing itself into various ways centering around intelligence. In the Urban dictionary – ” A person who is considered intellectually gifted in the field of academics. “Egghead” is usually used as college-speak to describe a brainiac. ”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=egghead
There is the dictionaries and even blogs by teachers proud to be eggheads. However since the 21st century, the meaning of egghead has taken on a new meaning. In a chat forum at Using English, a question was asked to the teachers about eggheads. “”The recent election ‘Bloomfield remarked,”demonstrated a number of things, not the least of them being the extreme remoteness of the “egghead” from the thought and feeling of the whole of the people.”
http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/53783-egghead.html
The 21st century definition of adult eggheads is in reference to how out of touch the eggheads are to the people. How out of touch eggheads are to the needs of the people. Many of a politician has been accused of being out of touch, and as well the adult eggheads in the public education system. But can they be blamed when the world indeed operates for the round pegs of the world, and the odd-shaped pegs must adapt to the world of round pegs found plentiful in the public sector dictating and putting forth edicts directed at the odd-shaped pegs. Ignoring the concerns of the odd-shaped pegs and in the same way as Testing Illusion has ignored my central premise of my last post – equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes. You see eggheads in the adult world have a common trait – they don’t think equality of outcomes are important, because they personally do not see the locked access doors to the education door. As I stated earlier in my first post, “The eggheads of the education system, want to discussed standardized testing on their terms, that best suits their belief systems and follows the legal requirements of providing an education that meets the minimum basic levels, based on equality of education opportunities.”
Ergo, Testing Illusion don’t see the many inequities of education policies, practices, the over-riding belief system of the 19th century matrix that is embedded in the 2013 education system model and are deaf to the slamming of the future doors of students, that starts in grade 1 when the round and odd-shaped students are sorted and labeled.
Parents Told To “Butt Out”
From the earliest days of organized mass state education parents have been seen as either nuisances or outright enemies.
In 1977 the main magazine of educators, Phi Delta Kappan, had this article “Parents as the Natural Enemy of the School System”. Low-income parents were criticized for “sloth, negligence, and lack of interest in educational advancement for their children . . . middle-class parents for encouraging high achievement and ambition in their children . . . Parents were more than a convenient whipping post for professional educators . . . As early as 1846 . . . the primary defect of the Connecticut schools [was] the ‘apathy of the parents and the public generally.’” (PDK, Dec’77)
For parents to now be blamed for demoralizing teachers — told to “butt out” — is completely out in left field. Left field, YES, in two ways: 1) this diktat is totally eccentric and bizarre, and 2) it comes from the extreme left of the political spectrum.
This new level of humiliation of parents deserves thorough analysis, which I will work on for later. I will deal with factors, which are economic, political, psychological and sociological. I’m no expert in any of these fields, but I can certainly pose questions for further examination in those areas.
For now, I’m just going to go through some of the 60 plus comments to this important article which I believe will show where some of the problems lie in this matter of public teacher demoralization: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/21/u-s-teachers-job-satisfaction-craters-report/
1 the unions putting the squeeze on taxpayers to make employees so costly that we can’t hire enough of them
2 teachers as curriculum advisors are treated with disdain
3 the teaching profession has entered a period of rapid and overwhelming change . . . All this results in disorientation, frustration and disillusionment . . . change is good, but too much change too quickly can be disastrous.
4 reforms have been implemented with perverse incompetence, heightened hubris, insipid blanket requirements
5 many of us have been teaching “common core” for years
6 When good people stop wanting to go into a valuable profession because of poor conditions in the field, that hurts society and becomes a public policy problem
7 As a 37 year veteran, I can say that many of the magic bullets are ones we’ve seen before but with new names
8 Standardized testing was used to sort students but never as a part of a teacher’s evaluation
Coming back to the comment — “Outsiders need to butt out. Otherwise they will destroy the system.” — maybe “the system” should be destroyed !
There is a place for the parent voice. It is not running the show. As is apparent from many conments, the simply do not have the required knowledge and expperience.
There is a massive campaign in the USA to dump testing and rid the school system of reforms. Teachers just to not want to work in these nightmare dystopias created by reformers. Not “bad teachers” all teachers. Like any profession they need control of their workplace or forget it, they will do something else. We have a slow motion New Zealand on our hands. NZ implemented many conservative reforms and saw a massive teacher flight away from their remotr islands.
At the core of the issue is a political problem not an educational problem. There never was a real problem except that the USA seriously underfunds public schools in poor areas and allowing too much poverty which is 100% of the reason for low American scores on PISA.
The entire education reform movement is a political fraud dreamed up by far right ideologues and exploiting malcontent parents of weak students.
The entire thing is a political fraud. Luckily this is becoming clear.
http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
Thompson: The Line Separating Reformers from “Reformers”
A light went on while reading Alexander Russo’s Charter Advocates Denounce Reuters Reporting. It illuminates the fundamental difference between school reform and “reform.”
The dividing line is not evidence-based disagreements over charters, competition, collective bargaining or teachers’ due process. The issue is how do “reformers” deal with inconvenient truths.
Stephanie Simon’s Class Struggle – How Charter Schools Get Students They Want explains that “charters and traditional public schools are locked in fierce competition – for students, for funding and for their very survival, with outcomes often hinging on student test scores.” Simon then punches holes in the hype of “reformers” who claim that this is a “fair fight” and that charters get better results with the same types of students.
Conservative reformers like Mike Petrilli and Frederick Hess acknowledge that charter students come from more motivated families. Hess says that charters’ supposedly open access policies make for popular talking points, but “there’s just one problem: It’s not true.” He adds, “There’s a level of institutional hypocrisy here which is actually unhealthy.”
The real issue is not the fate of individual charters. A bigger problem is that the proliferation of charters has become a drain on traditional public schools. As Simon explains, even some staunch fans of charters agree that “the charter sector as a whole may be skimming the most motivated, disciplined students and leaving the hardest-to-reach behind.”
Public Education A Massive Consumer Fraud
In earlier writings I tried to show how parents — even though they are the primary consumers and ultimately most responsible for the education of their children — are feeling squeezed out of public education by being treated as nuisances or outright enemies. That’s been my personal experience of the last 50 years and historically this disdain of parents goes back much further.
It’s not just the parents who are taken for a ride. The general taxpayer is also being led around by a ring in the nose — a manipulative government and self-serving industry are not fulfilling the mandate we presume — to educate people to be self-supporting citizens.
In 1977 an astonishing article piled argument after argument about how public education was “The Greatest Consumer Fraud Of All” (1977). Written by Hat Hentoff (some of his books —Does Anybody Give a Damn?: On Education, Our Children Are Dying) these are some of his quotes from the article:
1 NEA president Harris in 1975, testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency said that “23 percent of all schoolchildren were failing to graduate high school . . . If 23 percent of the automobiles did not run, 23 percent of the buildings fell down, 23 percent of stuffed ham spoiled — we’d look at the producers. The schools, here, are not blameless.”
2 “Professor Benjamin Bloom of the University of Chicago . . . demonstrates that with competent teachers and principals, 80 percent of all students could achieve the same “A” grades now achieved by only 20 percent . . . A key problem is tenure . . . it is exceedingly rare for a teacher to be fired for incompetency.”
3 “Effective teaching, despite what the professionals claim, is not all that hard to measure . . . Once parents really do believe that they are the employers of the educational professionals, they will then recognize their right to demand competency.”
4 Hentoff quotes from a book by Ellen Lurie (How To Change The Schools – a parents’ action handbook on how to fight the system) “For us to begin to get the power that will finally make it possible for the schools to be ours, we must find out what actually goes on in our schools and compare them with other schools . . . If the reading scores in your school are lower than those in other schools why are they lower?”
5 “It might also help if politicians were to become knowledgeable and passionate about failing school systems. Hardly any do, either because of their own malignant ignorance about schooling or because they don’t want to antagonize powerful teachers’ unions.”
Why do I belabor old history? Because I want to show that we old-timers have been there before. Because I also want to demonstrate that “the system” has become even MORE closed than ever. Teacher unions want “control of their workplace” and in fact now do shape a lot of the agenda of schooling. The rest of the establishment — the expensive bureaucracy — is indeed happy when the teacher unions exert their muscle because then they have a convenient scapegoat “Our hands are tied.” This back and forth is part of the game played to keep “the system” relatively intact and resistant to outsider influence. “Labor Peace” is the mantra.
This is called “producer capture”. A public service at the mercy of the employees. Consumer be damned!
Without assessment we can’t force schools to be turned around. Parent Trigger in the US provides a tool whereby schools failing below certain scores can be changed to charters or other radical change.
Without meaningful assessments both parents and the taxpaying public lack the tools to keep this expensive public service accountable.
Yes and the same old reform solutions have been tried and failed over and over, Larry Cuban has documented how many times testing and teacher testing has been tried and failed, We had a phonics based system until the 50s, not much success there, provatization, let the people decide in a referrendum, public education would probably get only about 95%, testing? what a great success that is. NCLB is an embarrassing joke, those who created it want it off their resume, charters and vouchers have nothing to show. Rick Hess and other reformers now admit they choose their kids carefully and kick out the the low scorers, special ed kids, and don’t allow English learners in.
Once again test crazy USA #17 test averse Finland #1, so much for accountability. Poof.
There is no place for charters, vouchers, testing, phonics only, teacher bashing, privatization in the future of education. They are anachronistic throw backs that add no value and in fact are highly destructive of quality education.
I guess the fringe right wing Libertarians would not appreciate that but that is the future. The majority of Ontarians want the catholic system abandoned now.
There is not one single “parent trigger” example. A solution in search of a problem. Schools cannot be “turned around”. Duncan and others have tried turn arounds and closings. Closings are unpopular with the parents and the record of turnarounds is pathetic.
The unions represent the teachers, AKA the professionals who actually understand how education works.
Short blast posts seem to be competing with lengthy treatises as we drift off-course and miss the public debate over testing raging in Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan. Ontario-centric educators and reformers tend to be a little myopic and, at times, need to be reminded that Canada has a “provincialized” system of education.
An Opinion Column in the Star Phoenix might help to bring you up to speed on the Saskatchewan plan to introduce annual provincial tests and give you a sense of the panic spreading through the teacher ranks:
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/opinion/op-ed/pluses+standardized+tests/8000313/story.html
The Testing Illusion team is facing a new challenge — in Saskatchewan. A “testing-free zone” is on the verge of toppling. How could it be? Will Manitoba be next? Stay tuned.
Testing in a vacuum without providing more money to assist with the failures and struggles is ridiculous.However,without testing,there is no anxiety for the teacher or school board to produce results for the students.
That stress should improve performance over time.
That`s why the testing is important,transparency is required.
Methodology is a huge factor in getting better results in overall literacy results.
Grade 4 is too late to start testing,grade 3 is a crucial year.
Early intervention is so very very important!
If you believe that ANXIETY and STRESS are the best motivators for teachers and school boards and are the best answer to the “problem” of “performance,” it’s understandable that you perceive standardized testing as a promising avenue…
Jo-Anne makes a valid point, one that Paul made at our accountability conference. [http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/publications/category/sqe-sponsored-events/]
What one forgets is that transparency is only the beginning. When schools, boards, ministries, et al., including teacher training faculties, fail to react and do nothing, that’s when there is really NO accountability. We’re not even close yet.
Two issues that still need to be addressed.
The expense of provincial testing: this is one reason why some jurisdictions such as Ontario and BC have cut back or placed limits
and
Secondly, as an “accepter” and “mild supporter” of the current testing regime in Ontario,
(and considered a legal expert in law due to testimony in the past before the Supreme Court of Ontario over the Literacy Test case) the case both here and in the US, and the UK for testing as a LEARNING TOOL FOR STUDENTS is LACKING.
The case for testing as an AUDIT FOR LEARNING can be made, but it is a challenge, as we know in the Ontario and other examples, to demonstrate an audit of more than trivia that is too quickly forgotten.
A long term approach for learning improvement might learn from the US NAEP experiences.
The rapturous annual report of test scores mean nothing.
Back to marking.
While the case for testing an an AUDIT FOR LEARNING can indeed be made, the EQAO’s choice of census testing (i.e. testing every student) over sample testing (i.e. testing a random sample of students) is not compatible with this approach. Only if testing is approached as A LEARNING TOOL FOR STUDENTS does it make sense to administer census tests. However, the Ontario Ministry of Education does not make such a claim. In fact, in its “Public Policy Statement regarding EQAO,” the Ministry of Education very clearly makes this important distinction:
“Large-scale assessments such as those administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) differ from classroom assessments in that they are designed to provide quite different information. Classroom assessments are developed by teachers to gather evidence about their students’ learning on an ongoing basis. This information is used to provide feedback to students about next steps in learning and to inform parents of their children’s progress. Classroom assessment data is also used to provide teachers with the information they need to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all students. Large-scale assessments, on the other hand, are one-time measures with standardized content and administration procedures so that results for education systems can be compared over time. The results of large-scale assessments are used by governments and school boards to understand the strengths and weaknesses of education systems, to develop education policies, and to allocate resources.”
The Ontario Ministry of Education uses standardized test results to AUDIT LEARNING – not as a LEARNING TOOL. In this light, the scale and frequency of testing may be inconsistent with the Ontario Education Ministry’s objectives, and its scope may not be aiding in the facilitation of the objectives set out for the education system. It is for this reason, among others, that we are calling for a review. Testing regimes have been shown to be prone to a number of unintended effects, and the administration of census tests perhaps unduly overburdens students, educators, and the system as a whole. For instance, the classroom time that is devoted to test preparation and administration takes away from other types of learning, and can have an impact on the broader skills and knowledge acquisition of students. Potential misinterpretation and misuse of testing results data is also a clear and present danger.
Public accountability in our systems of education can be achieved in many ways. Standardized testing is definitely an option, but it is far from being the only option… and perhaps it is not best option available to us. As we argue in our just-released report (http://testingillusion.ca/), the key question should be whether the measures we put in place are the best ones to help us achieve the objectives of our education systems.
As long as we have some form of accountability built in for the public,I see your point.
In no way should there be no accountability,it`s too dangerous not to have it.
Thank You for clarifying!
I think my post mostly supports Jo-Anne’s, except that the assumption that stress improves performance is not supported, likely because of the nature of the stress- blaming and shaming over the short term rather than concentrated efforts on determining what to do to improve and how to assess such improvement. When test designers in the US like Linn, Wiliam, and Popham say this based on decades of experience, say this, and can demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the results….
Hi John,I was referring to stress on the teacher and the board,not the student,I agree that doesn`t help kids but we have all had tests and in a way they are important preparation for life,stress is something we must learn to handle and even expect.
I am no fan of the self esteem movement,you`re doing well no matter what.
I certainly feel also that spending millions on testing without a plan on what to do with the information extracted borders on ridiculous,that`s the missing element.
If you have a 1 in grade 3 EQAO,what happens?
“f you have a 1 in grade 3 EQAO,what happens?”
Interesting that a “conservative” govt brought this in.
A couple of us did an informal experiment that shared with parents the generic descriptor of the level of performance but not the level designation.
They unanimously thought the descriptor should be a failing grade.
But more do the point.
Whatever the level designation, and any level designation is a distortion of what students may or may not be actually capable of doing, without a feedback and improvement plan it is useless.
In the Ontario case teachers and schools get the results back too late to help any individual student.
Some of us think it would be better if the tests took a sample- randomized 10%.
Then the stress goes where it belongs, school improvement (a rising tide lifts all boats).
Less stress on teachers and students, especially grade 3 where stress has been documented.
Less expensive.
And you don’t fret about school rankings since in small schools a few students up or down grossly distort the results.
Besides these do not work anyways. We have dat that goes back to the mid 1800s in the UK about failed efforts to tie teacher pay to test results.
Why the disappointment?
It is easier to see bad results in medicine (people die)
and in engineering (bridges fall down)
than the changes in a human mind, soul, or spirit.
And, in the case of civics and citizenship, any “test” will not generate results until we see decades later how learners act in a democracy.
Okay-I thought the tests were for literacy and numeracy-in my world,a 1 in Reading in grade 3 would say-weak phonemic awareness?-I`d test-in 90-95% of circumstances,that`s why he wouldn`t be able to read well.If you can`t read well,it often impacts on numeracy because there is so much language in math now.
I agree with you if the tests are general knowledge tests,but they are not.
I forgot to note
that large scale tests are not likely to tell teachers and students WHY a students get a poor response, only that it does: like taking a person’s temperature.
The literature on large scale testing is full of cases illustrating this.
Show to help specific students identify specific issues in reading etc.- the skills question?
Sit down with them when they show difficulty and work with them 1 on 1.
Tests per se cannot do that; i.e., reveal weak phonemic awareness.
the EQAO tests fit my argument about feedback and improvement due to delay to reporting scores to the schools.
I raise civics because Sask. want tests in all subjects
Jo Anne sure gives away the conservative argument when she talks about stress and anxiety. All stress on admin will be transferred to teachers, all stress on teachers will be transferred to students. Literature on all worksites shows stress is highly counterproductive.
Asked about testing Hargeaves said “if you are trying to diagnose each student, the literature says the teachrr is far better than,any test. If you want to sample a system, random sampling Gallup poll testing is every bit as accurate and far less expensive.
Standardized testing has no positive aspects of any kind. Teachers find it both useless and destructive making retention difficult and promoting dropping out. It distortes the curriculum. Overall it is not neutral it is highly destructive. It makes education worse.
USA mass testing = #17
Finland no testing = #1
Game, set, match.
In the article – “Standard tests need explaining (SP, Feb. 15) suggests, the provincial government has to make a better case for why it wants every student in Grades 4 to 12 to undergo this type of anxiety-creating assessment every year.”
Read more: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/pluses+standardized+tests/8000313/story.html#ixzz2Lj5ZhOxu
Anxiety-creating? But this isn’t anxiety-creating and as some bully experts have called bullying – http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/story/2013/02/21/ontario-windsor-graduation-class-trip-disney-world-orlando-florida.ht
Its funny how the education establishment cannot see their own actions as being the cause for much of the angst and anxiety of students, let along parents. Further down in the article, “Why should we listen to a Finnish educator? Because Finland is committed to what Sahlberg calls a “fear free” school system that eschews competition, failure, and yes, standardized testing. The one exception is when 16-year old Finns write the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams every three years.”
Conveniently omitted is the rigorous exams to sort out students in high school. Creaming its called, to extract the 25 % fit enough for university. Students who don’t, rarely gets second chances as an adult to go to university. No second chances there, which is one of the reasons cited in their high suicide rate, and has come down somewhat but still within the top 20 countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
Lots of reasons excluding blaming the suicide victims, but I found this one that appears to be a common reason cited by the everyday people. “In Finland it is more about the paucity of prevention of depression, where medication is usually the main treatment. Therefore, people only are treated for the symptoms, NOT the real reasons behind their problems. This all due to the paucity of psychiatrists and due to long queues/long waiting time so the problems become complicated. And at that stage it is usually way too late.”
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120823175608AAxXABg
I only mentioned the high suicide rate of Finland, because there is also high rates in number of other parts of society, such as higher addiction rates compared to other countries that leads to questions of the social institutions of which the public education system is one of them and their role based on their philosophies and practices that gives equal access to one and all, but that is where the equality ends. If so Sahlberg statement, ” Students are not taught how to think through complex social problems.”, then why does Finland have a high rate of suicide, and is sitting in the top 20, well known for their high-stakes testing of the extreme, and as well for a few countries, child labour and a host of other problems that Canada and United States does not have?
A link where the last activity took place in 2004, that the insiders within the public education system are against standardized testing, and as of today, the anti-testing crowd are still using the very same reasons as in 2003.
http://www.maritamoll.ca/webmom/news.html
But I have left the best to the end, with the new twist by The Institute for Critical Education Studies. It gets really scary now – ” The Institute for Critical Education Studies was formally established in October 2010 to support studies within a critical education or critical pedagogy tradition. ICES maintains a network that conducts and circulates cultural, educational, or social research and discourse that are critical in method, scope, tone, and content.” Scary, because they operate on belief systems, ideologies and dogma, that imposes values upon the users and forces one and all to operate in the pretend world, and not in the realities of the world. In this case, the students and schools become the lab rats and laboratories to carry out their social experiments upon a captive audience. Inside The Institute for Critical Education Studies, is an article highlighting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy
“Teaching is often said to be “the second most private act in which adults engage” (Dufour 1991) since it tends to take place behind closed doors, away from the view of many stakeholders. In its essence, however, teaching is a public and political act, and is fundamental to the continuing development of a citizenry that drives Canada’s global competitiveness and social and economic prosperity. ”
http://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/2013/02/19/a-call-to-review-standardized-testing-in-canada/
Private? I don’t think any stakeholders think of teaching as a private act, with 20 to 30 witnesses. Although up in the higher levels, they seem to think that teachers’ scribblings on the white board should be copyright protected, and perhaps that is the reason why students are not permitted to take a picture of the board, much less taking a picture of a teacher committing a wrong.
A political act? I wonder what the political lessons were for the Windsor grade 8 students? To teach the students, that educators have the political power to bully their students? It sure looks that way, when critical pedagogy is front and central to the operations of the school system that all students are welcome. But what no one in the critical pedagogy crowd will tell one and all, no one has equal access to the education opportunities, and in fact there is locked access gates inside the public education systems.
This pass week, my youngest the 17 year old dyslexic was faced with an inequality being imposed upon her. No other students were required to provided fax numbers and addresses of the universities/colleges applications for transcripts, nor were the students required to provide copies of their own transcripts. But my child was and I hit the roof…….and after chatting with the universities, I discovered the school should have all the fax numbers and addresses of colleges and universities, so they carry out their legal responsibilities concerning transcripts. Throughout the day, it reduced my 17 year old in tears, because she saw it and as I saw it too – an act of discrimination because she has dyslexia. In my child’s tears, she wanted to give up her dream of going to university, and just walked away. I don’t blame her, but she fortunately has a mother who knows the ropes. Its a form of discrimination usually directed at students who are not the top achievers or have a disability. In this case, it was not a locked access door, but a barrier that would have delayed her applications and would missed important deadlines and as well leading her down the garden path for disqualification concerning the transcripts.
A common occurrence in the public education system that is guided by critical theories and its cousin critical pedagogy. “Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an “educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.”[1]
Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements that strive for what they describe as social justice. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
“Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.” (Empowering Education, 129)
Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. Its proponents claim that it is a continuous process of what they call “unlearning”, “learning”, and “relearning”, “reflection”, “evaluation”, and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students whom they believe have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by what they call “traditional schooling”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy
Where the bullying act of grade 8 teachers pulling a mean and nasty prank on their students or the acts of what amounts to discrimination of individual students, the critical theories mostly under the heading of Marxism and its cousin critical pedagogy are deemed not only as political acts, but also allows the public education system to operate without being held accountable to the standards that lie outside of the public education system. It is done, by employing cultural tools and devices that allows the biases and belief systems of many, to mingled and formed alliances within the collective of the public education system and its stakeholders to control the processes of education by embedding the biases, belief systems and political ideologies into the structure of the public education model. In the end, it is embedded in the cultural of the education system, making it very difficult for change to occurred at any level of the education system.
Standardized testing is a natural enemy of the public education system, and in the same way as the American IDEA laws are a natural enemy of the public education system. One could add report cards, parents demanding a school to do something about the bully that keeps coming at their children, as is AIMS and the Fraser Institute who collects data streams that demonstrates questionable education quality hailing from the schools. And I supposed that special education children and the large percentages of low achievers must also represent a burden to critical pedagogy that is embedded in the public education system masked as progressive pedagogy, are a natural enemy to the public education system.
So as in the one article – “Sébastien Després, a lecturer in Anthropology and Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, explains that standardized testing regimes are costly and time-consuming enterprises that can have an important impact on the classroom experience. “We know that not all students are motivated by marks and academic achievement. We also know that when these things are prioritized over others, instruction can become boring, and kids become disengaged.” The report also explores how standardized testing can impact teaching as a profession, and echoes earlier studies that show how an over-emphasis on test scores can diminish teachers’ role in determining the content and methods of instruction, casting teachers as efficiency experts who carry out instruction determined by someone else.”
http://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/2013/02/19/a-call-to-review-standardized-testing-in-canada/
Despres, should be looking inside the NL public education system, the data streams, the discriminating acts of the employees, and who benefits from the NL CRTs. Certainly not the students who are sitting at level 1 and 2, but as Despres has stated, education is a political act: then why is he casting his net beyond NL, when he has a built-in lab of an island with a small population? Or is it a side hobby of his, because his belief systems approves of the inequities of the education system, because it protects the best interests of the educators at the expense of the students’ education?
Nancy, to compare the anxiety occasioned by standardized testing to an incidence of poor judgment on the part of a group of teachers is inappropriate, since standardized testing would do nothing to prevent this type of unfortunate incident. Many of the other comparisons you make in your long post are likewise out of order.
To disapprove of critical pedagogy because it seeks to teach students how to develop habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, received wisdom, and mere opinions is to wish for a world where children are taught to be mindless robots at the mercy of all sources of influence. This is especially dangerous because the sources of influence in modernity are far from excluding mass media. Student must be allowed to think for themselves, and be encouraged to develop the ability to understand deep meanings, root causes, and social contexts. This necessarily entails a process of “unlearning,” “learning,” “relearning,” “reflection,” “evaluation,” and a reflection on the impact that these actions have on the students.
To cast Newfoundland and Labrador as ” a built-in lab of an island with a small population” is distasteful. The Task Force on Standardized Testing was made up of members from all corners of our country, and chose to “cast its net,” as you say, beyond Newfoundland and Labrador, for a number of reasons (including the fact that only ONE of its members lives in this region). While our report did use Ontario as a case study, our research did not limit itself to this province, and our recommendations are applicable in many jurisdictions.
As a recent story in The Toronto Star argued, the future of our country depends on the teaching profession. The debasement of teaching, the author writes, “is not only an ethical perversion, but a self-destructive one.” The author cautions, “Whereas all of the world’s oldest and wisest societies rightly revere teachers above all peer professionals, I know of no society that has long survived, leave alone prospered, by attacking the reputation and integrity of its pedagogical classes.” It is in this spirit, and with the well-being of the children of the entire country, that we drafted our report. We appreciate your self-investment in this important issue. If only all Canadians were likewise interested!
John Donne once wrote, “No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
Much the same can certainly be said of Canada and its provinces and territories. No province is an island entire of itself – not even Newfoundland Labrador, since it is solidly anchored on the mainland by Labrador. My own trajectory as a young Canadian is a great example of how this is the case. While I presently reside in Newfoundland Labrador, I am originally from a small fishing community in rural New Brunswick. I have resided in Ontario and shortly in Québec, married a woman from Alberta, and served as a reservist in in the 1st Battalion, Nova Scotia Highlanders (1NSH).
If, as a researcher from Memorial University, I’ve helped write a report focused on Ontario, this is because when, almost a year ago, our pan-Canadian Task Force conducted a preliminary analysis of Canada’s education systems, we identified Ontario as a potentially productive case study focus. Given what occurred months later, with Bill 115 and its fallout, our preliminary analysis proved to be not inaccurate. Education is indeed a political act, and my personal hope as a researcher is that our report and our efforts will inspire public policy across Canada. The recommendations that we’ve made are invitations to review current practices in the light of our findings, with the goal of helping ensure that all Canadian students are offered the best public education possible. The amelioration of any province’s system of education uplifts all Canadians since we all have a stake in the future of our Nation.
Our (school) bells are ringing. As the Action Canada Task Force on Standardized Testing, we hear them loudly. We urge all partners in the education sector, including the Minister, the Ministry and the boards, to review current practices in order to ensure that these are in line with the mandate of the public education system as defined in the Education Act: “to provide students with the opportunity to realize their potential and develop into highly skilled, knowledgeable, caring citizens who contribute to their society.”
Omission of outcomes is one of the greater sins of the folks in the ivory towers of the public education sector. Critical pedagogy and its parent critical theories within the education field brings a mix of dangerous practices that employs the tactics of of indoctrination plus ideology plus the politicization of knowledge that demands knowledge to be extracted, that gives way to what is called the dumbing down of the basic education.Its why, one can find all kinds of examples across the data streams and on the front pages of media throughout society questioning the education quality for a moment, before moving unto solving the problems such as knowledge gaps of the young adults, low levels of numeracy and literacy levels, the latest in what passes as intelligent discourse in Ottawa, to the mind-boggling irrational excuses to parents why their child is failing math. Apparently their child is failing math, because he does not have the critical thinking processes that are needed to fulfill the homework requirement of writing a page and a half in words, on what multiplication is and is not.
WISE math, another organization that has materialized for good reason, would have a lot to say about critical pedagogy and how it has done a number to the mathematics curriculum. Likewise, would have a lot more to say about the number it has done to the students, and putting their futures at risked. A new member, a parent states – “My frustration is immense. I thought my daughter was having trouble with math. Took her to expensive tutor and discovered her trouble was with comprehension in reading. Taught her math the old way and she excelled. Worked on her comprehension and all is good. She is in grade 7 and has no recall of sime multiplication tables. That is something you always take with you. It was tamped into my memory. Used all the time.
I really can’t stand how they have turned a simple math question into a half a page long answer. That is not the real world.”
http://wisemath.org/join/
Critical pedagogy has brought to the education system, a method where no educator will be beholden to ensure that all students will have fair to good levels on the basics in reading, writing and numeracy. No need to when critical pedagogy and its dogma will served the function of dumbing it down for the majority of students who cannot learned on their own. Likewise, for the higher levels of the public education system, where they are no longer beholden to guide policy by outcomes. Yes, the doors are wide open for education opportunities, but only a few, approximately 30 % can avail and access the educational opportunities.
Two posts down, is another post by a parent with a response from one of the group of math professors, stating in part – “Hi Frank, your thoughts are much appreciated. WISE Math currently focusses our energies primarily on matters of curriculum and teacher training but, in today’s educational climate where certain strong ideologies and fads hold sway it is nearly impossible to separate these from pedagogical issues such as you raise. We may articulate the issues you raise in slightly different terms, but your thoughts as read resonate with many parents from whom we hear. The matter of group learning is of concern, partly for the reasons you state but also because of the social dynamics. Many children simply do not cope well with group work. In particular, you’ll find most strong students resent being put into groups, and most weak students are intimidated by the prospect of appearing clueless in a jury of peers. Many others simply have social handicaps or difficulty communicating, and this approach merely magnifies the degree to which they are disadvantaged.”
Now, just imagine what a group of educators immerse in critical pedagogy among other pedagogies that has been taught and thoroughly soaked in ideologies mainly from Marxist literature, of how they go about using the processes of “unlearning,” “learning,” “relearning,” “reflection,” and “evaluation” in comparison to the outcomes of students? Then expand it to the outcomes of society, where opening up a tutoring business in NL anywhere in the province, is a guarantee income for the owner on the very things you despised – the 3 Rs – reading, writing and numeracy. Declaring in one breathe that it turns children into mindless robots at the mercy of others and in the next breathe stating that the teaching profession is under attack. Educators have a job to do, and its not indoctrination of the masses, nor is it to provide future jobs for educators long into the twilight of their years teaching adults knowledge and skills on what should have been taught in the first 12 years of schooling.
The importance of standardized testing are the outcomes of the students. When the collective, the public education system works to eliminate standardized testing, plus other evaluations and assessments, it is working towards a society of the haves and have-nots. A society of the elite professionals working along side with the politicians to induce a society of people without the required critical thinking skills and foundation of knowledge to navigate through society. It also destroys a working democracy that has the people serving the government and not as it should be, the government serving the people’s needs.
Testing Illusions downplays the actions of the teachers because in the world of critical pedagogy and critical theories – the actions of the educators, their knowledge set, and skills are not supposed to questioned by others who do not have an education degree. Ergo, they feel quite free to dismissed all concerns by outsiders and treat them with contempt and ridicule. As stated by Illusion Testing, “Nancy, to compare the anxiety occasioned by standardized testing to an incidence of poor judgment on the part of a group of teachers is inappropriate, since standardized testing would do nothing to prevent this type of unfortunate incident. Many of the other comparisons you make in your long post are likewise out of order.”
Out of order eh? Not when the ETFO presents their reasons why standardized testing should be eliminated. A meeting of the pedagogies, the ideologies, the collective experiences of educators, and the political matrix meets at the intersection within the 19th century knowledge framework of the public education system model to support the 21st century education model that are in the best interests of the educators but against the best interests of society and the students.
http://www.etfo.ca/issuesineducation/eqaotesting/pages/default.aspx
In the second video, Professor Joel Westheimer on the evils of standardized testing. The opponents of standardized testing, always uses this tactic to overcome the one problem that no educator will confront, the reading, writing and numeracy levels of students. Its difficult to write any test, much less a quiz when students do not have required subset of skills to expressed their knowledge either verbally or in written form. The tactic used is to expressed to everyone that no educator is against the teaching of the 3 Rs, and no educator can be found joining an organization that is against teaching the 3 Rs. And then the speaker moves on, like Joel to the ideologies and dogma, waxing elegantly on the messages, pounding it in, standardized testing are bad for students. In the audience everyone is in agreement, since the speakers are preaching to the choir. In audiences where the proponents and opponents are engaged, the tactic is switch to critical thinking, critical pedagogy, other pedagogies to eventually speaking about standardized testing within the parameters of a working democracy. Standardized testing is bad for a democracy when children are not allowed to engaged the teacher or work in groups when taking the test. Its not normal classroom procedure. The question should be asked, does that mean normal classroom procedure for students taking a classroom test, the students can asked the student sitting beside them for the answer? Which brings me to Joe Westheimer, and his work. On one web site, he was the keynote speaker – in part – ” Most professors like to believe that it is the logic of their plan — the curriculum or the syllabus — that determines the experiences students have in their course. But really the opposite must be true. Our collective experiences must always be the central driving force of teaching. That’s what makes community service learning potentially powerful. The creative madness of community experience lives in uneasy dialogue with the professor’s plan.”
http://ctl.ualberta.ca/events/taking-teaching-edges-beyond
To further complicate why the public education stakeholders are against standardized testing, and for that matter any type of assessment, is the critical theories and its cousin critical pedagogy. A series entitled, Critical Thinking in the Classroom at the IB Africa, Europe and Middle East regional conference of 2012.
Click to access BrianHullCriticalThinkingMadrid.pdf
Assessments and standardized testing exposes what the students lacked in knowledge and their skill sets in the areas of reading, writing and numeracy. Back in high school, at times I wrote tests without ever studying the material, much less listened in class. The results would be a poor mark, where even my parents could determined that I did not studied, and as a consequence I would be grounded. But, I discovered as other students have if one is equipped with good to excellent skills in the 3 Rs, one can received a pretty good mark without studying. The only requirement is to have a little background knowledge of what is being tested. Of course that was back in the early 1970s, where teachers felt personally duty bound, to chew out students who were not performing at expected levels, and send other students for remediation in writing skills. In 2013, it has turned around where knowledge is not at all important, nor having the correct answer is. The ability to expressed one’s self within the parameters of the critical thinking pedagogy within the collective – group think – without having to have fair to good reading, writing and numeracy skills. The requirement of having the 3 Rs skills of average to above levels is no longer a requirement in today’s public education system, and as such approximately 70 % of students in any classroom are at risked for poor future outcomes and by extension the democratic society are dealing with the negative fallout of adults lacking in crucial subsets of knowledge to understand the world around them, accompanied by weaker levels of literacy and numeracy.
In turn, it enables the teaching profession to provide education and the delivering of education services based on equality of education opportunities context that allows the politicization of education to continue education children according to class and income by controlling the access doors to the education opportunities by controlling the percentage of students via through curriculum/instruction methods who will and will not received average to above skills in the 3 Rs.
As such the students’ education quality is based on the political lines at the intersection of the ideologies and belief systems of the educators. Its the reason why children are denied access to remediation in the 3 Rs, based on the reading science. Instead reading instruction is based on ideologies and dogma of the 19th century philosophies, that eventually leads to erosion of students’ skills and abilities to navigate and understand the world around them.
I despised critical pedagogy because it entraps students on an individual level to see themselves as being powerless and magnifies the image of being less capable then their neighbouring classmates. Testing Illusion, is advocating an illusion where the exploration of standardized testing is conducted under narrowly defined criteria, that allows discussion to take place only in the lens of the knowledge sets and skills sets of the people within the public education system, stressing only equality of education opportunities. Equality of outcomes is dismissed as not being worthy as easily as Testing Illusion has dismissed my comments.
I shall assume, the next response will be to attack my personal knowledge banks, education levels and if need be dismissed me as one of the chattering classes that don’t know anything. Much like another day at the red school house, where parents of all sorts and variety are dismissed when they questioned the school and school board policies based on outcomes.
I have deliberately split my response into sections since the question of testing get confused.
Here is what I have noted so far (also in other threads.
– large scale assessment has power to audit but not to improve learning
– literacy and numeracy are stressed in Ontario since they “enable’ learning in other subjects to work
– thus they are cross curricular though this message, especially in numeracy, has not yet stuck in teachers or students
– difficulties in these are as complex as the competencies that make them up
Now back to teachers and reading and testing
– reading, a part of literacy and numeracy and likely the most important part,
is itself composed of many sub competencies (hence dyslexia is a catch-all term
One approach
– teach all teachers to be better at diagnosing difficulties
– work with kids and parents and specialists to determine what to do next
– give to individual students one or more of the many use diagnostic tests available to determine the specific nature of the difficulty (in contrast to scaring all kids in a class with a BIG DEAL TEST)
– interpret the results and come up with an action plan to implement
– retest to see improvement (we hope)
Note how this differs from testing every kid in every subject in every grade.
It is – diagnostic, test and interpret result, feedback and plans and implementation of plan and assess results.
We do this in sports, drama, and music.
Better yet, have a set of tests in the principals office. If you really want your child tested you request it in,writing to the principal. The child is tested, the results are shared with the family the principal and the teacher. The parent decides if the result goes in OSR.
Some in the conservative side have taken to touting the Asian tigers as a counteri foil to Finland. My wife was born in PRC China and raised n Hong Kong. Was a superintendent with the Ministry of Education in Ontario.She attended a private school. Still she says the Asian sstem is a disaster, history all names and dates, no analysis, endless rote memory work, math cslculation only little problem solving, very heavy anxiety and stress until you hit suicides, massive cheating as students who pay for extra tme are given answers to tests by teachers, huge classes, only the exam counts, unmotivated kids move to to the back seats where they sleep in class until they are 16.
Total disaster. That is why almost all innovation stlll comes frim the west. Steve jobs and
Continued:
Steve Jobs Wosniak types will continue the innovation while China does the assembly job until they change their direct instruction, rote, memorization, fact based system.
Snoops Not Welcome: Public Education System Defensive
A thief is asked: Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is.
An “educator” is asked: Why are you in public education? Because that’s where the jobs are.
A political activist is asked: Why are you in public education? Because that’s where the opportunity for radical social transformation is?
A provincial policy analyst is asked: Why are you so interested in standardized testing? Because we think there is little accountability for public money spent. Besides, maybe there’s a scam or two going on.
The topic being discussed on this blog is: Educators and Accountability. The moderator asks: What in the world makes educators so afraid of testing?
Most critics of standardized testing are very, very defensive. Why? Because there are BIG STAKES involved. Have to guard this gold mine. Even though this field is a total usurpation from parents in the first place. But, this all makes for all the more stealth, deceit, trickery, and bringing in “evidence” that is selected and biased.
All this superiority of “We know what’s best”, and “Leave it to the experts”, has been nicely put to the lie by home education which proves all this mystification is just hot air.
If we’re talking about assessments as an audit of the system, that’s a good thing. When New Zealand did that and found 2/3 of the money never reached the classroom they made fundamental changes in the model of delivery.
If it wasn’t for individual assessments we’d never have this monumental landmark legal verdict on what public education should be about. The Moore case has undeniably established that in our public system a student has a RIGHT to an education. Furthermore, what was established as well is that this education is obtainable, even if NOT in the public system — and that the public system which pretends so much has to cough up for their facade.
Education malpractice has been zealously avoided by the industry, just as accountability is now vehemently disparaged.
But I remember the 70s when we expected the Peter Doe (San Fransisco) case to open up the system. It’s taken 40 years for the Moore case to help us open up the system. We’ll need something cataclysmic to shatter the accountability resistance.
Just to remind people of the issues 40 years ago in the Peter Doe case here are a few snippets:
– 4 general areas for grievance: negligence; misrepresentation; breach of statutory duties; constitutional deprivation of right to education.
– failure to ascertain Doe’s educational progress and abilities
– falsely represented to Doe’s parents that he was preforming at or near grade level
– failure to keep parents accurately advised, without which information parents were unable to take any action to protect their minor son from the harm suffered
– school authorities failed to educate Doe and other students with the basic skills of reading and writing
– violated the Code that no pupil shall receive a diploma of graduation without meeting minimum standards of proficiency in basic academic skills
– requiring course of instruction to meet the needs of individual pupils
– failure to promulgate the minimum course of instruction to meet minimum standards of proficiency for graduation
– through acts and omissions, Doe has been deprived of an education guaranteed by the constitutions of the United States and California.
Wait for fundamental changes to School Acts in the provinces and states as these legal challenges keep coming. No longer can the floodgates be kept shut!
Educators are not the lwast bit afraid of testing for their own sake because administrators of the public system are as aware as teachers that low results in poor schiols are no reflection on the teachers or principal of the school but on their “much tougher row to hoe”. Therefore there are no consequences.
Teachers and administrators oppose testing beclovause testing squeezes out everything that is good about education, discovery, wonder, experimentation, love of learning and replaces it with a mindless dystopia of drill and kill, test prep, canned answers, and junk education. It drives up the dropout rate, distortes property values and in a nutshell, leaves nothing but disaster in its wake. The more testing the more disaster.
Wait until Idle No More understands the severe limitations Sask. testing will place on First Nations kids. Brad Wall deserves everything that is coming. The answer to weak test results is not more tests, it is shift resources from strong to weak schools.
When are they ever going to learn.
At least until the last years of high school is our job to sort talent
or develop it?
Ontario says that the PRIMARY purpose of Assessment (distinguished from Evaluation) is to IMPROVE learning.
In this regard tests while they have their purpose they are limited.
The evidence says so, the history says so, even people who made their careers designing tests say so.
I may not agree with Doug on everything,
but
if forced to choose a side
gotta choose his perspective
since the weight of evidence definitely leans his way
though we may disagree
in small part
on the causes.
Thank You, NancyCM — Brave New World Exposed
I knew there was something bothering me about Finland stories — something elusive, sinister, and insidious. Something was really troubling me and I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
It took NancyCM’s comment (February 23, 2013 at 11:29 am) to trigger my vague remembrances of ominous forecasts . . . Also see the strong defense of “critical pedagogy” by the Standardized Testing critics (February 24, 2013 at 10:25 am). It was Paul Bennett who mentioned in his original post that this “research paper” was conveying a strong flavor from Dr. Joel Westheimer. Let’s remind ourselves that critical thinking is NOT, NOT, NOT the critical pedagogy, critical theory that Westheimer espouses. It is a political ideology coming in from the universities under the guise of “critical thinking”!
Nancy was talking about Finland’s’ “fear free” school system, about depression and suicidal tendencies, “where medication is usually the main treatment” . . . Voila !!!!!!!
SOMA
I suggest we read about Huxley’s Brave New World and it’s interpretation for modern conditions as written here by David Pearce http://www.huxley.net/
Here is a fitting Epigraph to Huxley’s Brave New World:
“Utopias appear to be a good deal more realizable than was previously thought. And today we are faced with an alarming question of a different nature: How to avoid their complete realization? Utopias are realizable. Life moves towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century when intellectuals and the cultured class will dream of ways of avoiding utopias and of returning to a non-utopic society, less “perfect” and more “free.” —Nicholas Berdiaeff
Here I felt I was unable to keep from falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. Now I more clearly see the issues and controversies in public education.
If we are to VOTE, I vote for “free”, not “perfect”.
Going to read that long analysis by Pearce now.
Finland is a totally feee democeatic society
The citizen have freely chosen a social-democratic orientation for the nation but the Finnish version of the conservative party is in power at the present time. Nevertheless there is Finnish consensus in a general sense about education and society.
This pov make you and the Randians look absurd. Finland must be a nightmareish Brave New World or 1984 collectivist dystopia where Winston Smith is fudging the #s for Big Brother and the Proles are all on drugs or collectivism could never produce superior results to free enterprise America with choice, testing, and sll of the rest of the corporate takover agenda.
Tunya, you represent less than one tenth of one percent of public opinion. Libertarians of the official party or Ron Paul variety are a standing joke in American politics.
From your pov, Harper is a communist.
Constructivism Is The New Progressivism – Westheimer Conceals
There is no question that a concerted, concentrated, co-ordinated attack on standardized testing in public schools is taking place. The attack is so intense that all kinds of assessments or anything that measures learning is suspect.
How does one attain mastery without periodic evaluations? How do special needs students get weaknesses identified without assessments? How can parents take appropriate action on behalf of their kids if they can’t monitor whether they are meeting expectations? Just because parents may withdraw their child is no reason to withhold critical information from parents. Teacher unions in Ontario and BC tried that as a stratagem in recent job actions — more, I think, to see if they could get away with it than just usual jockeying in militant collective bargaining. Parents need to see these as attacks on parental duty in education.
Incrementally, chipping away here and there, these critics are using removal of testing as a wedge to get their ideological world-view to dominate monopoly public education.
There is something very self-interested in all of this.
The fact that most of public education in North America is classified as “constructivist” is something that would be a shock to the average parent and citizen. People used to know what progressive education was but now, within the industry, this talk is now replaced with narratives about “critical thinking”, “education for democracy”, “education for equity”, “collaborative learning”, etc. Code words.
In a book critical of accountability through testing (Holding Accountability Accountable) one of the contributors, Linda Mabry writes:
“The prevailing learning theory is constructivism, the idea that each person constructs his or her knowledge base, interpreting new information against prior knowledge, experience, values. “
We really need to know a lot more — a really LOT MORE about constructivism — how the collective is more important than the individual, how peer pressure becomes important, etc. This is not something educators and their gurus preach from their pulpits. It’s all couched in those sweet-sounding narratives — democracy, critical thinking, blah, blah.
Joel Westheimer, speaking to an Ontario convention of primary teachers (ETFO)
http://www.etfo.ca/issuesineducation/eqaotesting/pages/default.aspx * was careful with his words, even though he ostensibly was using direct quotes.
Let me explain. Some conservatives in Florida became concerned and alarmed about the “constructivist” advance in curriculum, especially social studies. An Omnibus Education Bill was brought in (2006) which included these words: “The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history . . . American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable.”
Westheimer, in his speech (16:35-16:55), even though he visibly used the “quote gestures (“ ”) replaced the “constructed” with “not open to interpretation”. He went on to say, “As far as I know, Florida is the first to outlaw critical thinking.”
Westheimer and his allies are playing a tight poker game. They are not going to show their cards too soon. Meanwhile, parents need to be aware that a Brave New World is incrementally happening. More on this later.
* Thanks, Nancy for the link to the ETFO video.
They will chip away at everything until there is nothing left but Finland, Ooops oh ya, they are first in the world.
All history is constructivist. It just depends who does the constructing. “Factual” history is a joke to anyone who understands history.
Was the War in Iraq a triumph of democracy over a dictator who had weapons of mass destruction OR was it an unmitigated disaster based on the control of oil and a bed of total lies and in the end destabilized the region and can be seen as a victory for Iran.
All depends on your POV.
It is not facts that matter in history, it is the resolution of conflicting ideas, ideologies, nations, genders, races, religions, orientations, classes.
There is no doubt in my mind that history is primarily class struggle. I’m not sure everyone agrees.
Ahem on Finland: http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/blog/read/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-finland
Scary suff oooooo.
http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index.html
Sounds like what most teachers have been doing some of the time and some teachers have been doing most of the time for 40 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory)
Sebastien Despris concludes – “Our (school) bells are ringing. As the Action Canada Task Force on Standardized Testing, we hear them loudly. We urge all partners in the education sector, including the Minister, the Ministry and the boards, to review current practices in order to ensure that these are in line with the mandate of the public education system as defined in the Education Act: “to provide students with the opportunity to realize their potential and develop into highly skilled, knowledgeable, caring citizens who contribute to their society.”
If anything Sebastien Despris and his follow practitioners of critical theory and critical pedagogy, are persistent to stay within the confines of the tenants of critical theory and its offshoots, much like something I read earlier today, how persistent the academia within education are willing to clustered themselves in the cave of Plato, and let no one especially the great ‘unwash’ to enter the cave of Plato to discussed the negative outcomes of not only students, but society as well. To discussed outcomes to the public education academia is a taboo in their circles, because many would argue that two great world wars began and ended under their guidance. Critical theory as I learned today, developed within the Frankfurt School. ” The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory,[1] associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx’s followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx’s ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.[2]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
And from the socialist files – “The result was a process in which Marxism merged with bourgeois ideology. A parallel process took place in post-World War Two France, also involving a merging with Freudian ideas. One of the results was undoubtedly an enrichment of bourgeois ideology. In this connection Paul Mattick’s Marcuse: One Dimensional Man In Class Society (1972) is worth reading. But also, despite everything, the Frankfurt School makes an important critique of orthodox Marxism, and their work should be taken seriously.”
http://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/
The critical theories and its cousin critical pedagogy, its roots rest in the work of the Frankfurt school, but more importantly critical pedagogy is thoroughly entrenched in the public education model in its education policies and practices. Its why the educator with the PHD in education, feels emboldened to make pronouncements based on assumptions, belief systems, and values stemming from the great works of the leading philosophers of the 19th century, Indeed Karl Marx was not given to learn from the great ‘unwash’, as the the public education model is not given to learn from the parents. The parents are dictated to, and if not dictated to they are lured to trust the system that the educators have the best interests of their students and they are the only ones that can educate the children to reach their potential and developed into highly skilled, knowledgeable, caring citizens who will contributed to society. What the academia of the public education ivory towers are asking parents to concede, their personal values, their individuality to be replaced by the collective values of the academia. The children’s education are placed in great risk of never reaching their full potential which eventually jeopardizes not only their education, but as well as their adult future. An example, is shown at the Supreme Court of Canada that displays not only the critical pedagogy at work, but as well as other outdated thinking of disabilities that perfectly dovetails with the general thinking of the 19th century In the Moore case,. who would have thought hearing the academia with education degrees argued in court that 50 % of students will never reached average reading levels. I bet their was a few raised eyebrows among the nine Supreme Court Justices. Why even bother to have a public education system, when 50 % are not capable of reaching a basic average reading level, is the question that goes unanswered by the academia in the ivory towers of the public education model.
A paper called, Fighting for Critical Pedagogy, ” Opposing this standardized, traditional system of education, the theory of critical pedagogy seeks to engage students in an interactive educational experience that encourages insightful thinking. Examining the philosophical contributions made to critical pedagogy by Herbert Marcuse and Paulo Freire, along with an interpretation of its theoretical basis, it is evident that critical pedagogy’s alternative approach to education promotes a progressive society focused on protecting individual rights and freedom. Specifically, a brief consideration of student activism demonstrates how critical pedagogy is present on university campuses, even if it does not exist within the classrooms..”
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.2/coverweb/samuels/zine/pedagogy.html
The paper proceeds to launch into turning students into change agents, forgoing the benefits of a solid foundation of knowledge, by educating students through the lens of the social collective. It did not worked very well for Germany in the first half of the 20th century, and nor is it working very well in the 21st century when one looks at the outcomes of the students, and society. Oops I did forget, that the academia safely protected in the cave of Plato and are practitioners of Marxist critical theory don’t have much used for standardized testing, nor assessments or even assessments to determined if a child has a learning disability that interferes in the processes of learning knowledge. All done by observations, while parents learned their child is excellent at closing doors but unfortunately they are not academic material for grade 1 learning. Some families, due to their higher social status are greeted with a different set of reasons, of why their child are not performing at expected levels of achievement. A softer approach, that lures the parents into the collective culture of school that their children are performing at expected levels, with the added comments how wonderful their children are excelling in the school environment. All ready to entered the world of the bourgeois ideology if the students could only focus, listen and adapt to the collective. The latter group, becomes a wee bit upset when they delivered their child to the private tutor, only to be told their child has weaknesses in the 3 Rs that prevents them from achieving to their potential, and its based on assessments and tests that measures and tests for academic weaknesses. Something else that the academia practitioners are against, because it would harmed the collective and imposes difficulties unto the teachers and their professionalism.
Let me see above, we have the usual Red baiting from the far right similar to Tunya, we have an anti-intellectual attack, we have an attack on critical thinking, we have an attack on anything German making Nazi insinuations,
It is just so obtuse, one wonders where to begin? Seth MacFarlane make fewer insulting errors on the Oscars and he was roundly panned.
Modern democratic society has a creative tension between the collectivist and the individulalist. Overdoing it on the collectivist side leads to a primative form of communism. Overdoing it on the individualistic side leads to an equally unpopular form of Libertarian capitalism that nobody wants including most enlightened capitalists.
People choose in democratic fashion from the collectivist and individualist buffet menu. People love medicare, public education, public transit, libraries child care, universities and collecges and so on from the collectivist table but they also value their own cars, their own houses, their own farms and businesses choosing their own doctor, and so on from the individualistic table.
This type of Yin and Yang leads to the best societies in the world, like Canada, northern Europe, Japan, South Korea and so on. Many nations are not there yet but are well on the way.
Nobody wants any return to private, pay as you go, the best is for the rich only, private schools.
Tunya connects – “Constructivism Is The New Progressivism – Westheimer Conceals
There is no question that a concerted, concentrated, co-ordinated attack on standardized testing in public schools is taking place. The attack is so intense that all kinds of assessments or anything that measures learning is suspect.”
To the critical theories that their roots are deeply embedded in the Frankfurt Institute of Germany and by the World War II, critical theories were firmly entrenched not only in the education systems of the globe but in government operations and governance. In a paper, “The academic influence of the “critical” method is far reaching in terms of educational institutions in which such tradition is taught and in terms of the problems it addresses. Some of its core issues involve the critique of modernities and of capitalist society, the definition of social emancipation and the perceived pathologies of society. Critical theory provides a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy and reinterprets some of its central economic and political notions such as commodification, reification, fetishization and critique of mass culture.”
http://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur/
As for constructivism, it is the tool used to entrenched critical theory philosophy and its methods as a tool to infiltrate the consciousness of society. The collective becomes greater than the individual. Some would state, that the Frankfurt School, its critical theories are being used in the largest lab – the globe. The guinea pigs are the ordinary citizens, the students in the schools to keep them moving to think collectively rather than individually. Another term that is used in the 21st century – is to think globally. So the student who has been denied education services for reading remediation can take comfort half way across the world, there is a student who is worse off. At least the student has learned to read, but is not very good at it. The denial of the education service becomes neutral, and the responsibility is shifted to the individual person on what he did do or not do in the past, the present and the future is left up to the student and their parents based on equality of opportunities. No problem for the parents to go to a private tutor, just don’t asked the school board to pay for the tutor and don’t even think of it, booking appointments during the school day. The public education system controls the agendas of the students, parents,and education, by suppressing most individual rights for the collective. For the collective usually means that all policies and practices are in favour of the employees, the adults of the public education system.
Constructivism comes into the picture at the classroom level, to where a teacher really only has to worried approximately 30 % of the students, and the other 70 % are managed. If one explored the critical theories, its all about managing the bulk of the population, their independent actions that moves away from the collective. In fact, the critical theorists are still trying to figured out what went wrong in Germany, and are now puzzled over other world events and the rise of individual rights across the world. All education policies and practices are geared to the 30 % of the student population, the top achievers found anywhere in a population, across all social-economic stratum and they are the students blessed with excellent cognitive processes. Hasn’t anyone wonder, when the top achievers fail or did poorly on a classroom test, there is always a rewrite. Personally that never happen when I went to school, but all of us heard the lecture from the teacher. It was always fun to hear it, and it put the top achievers in a foul mood all day. And more so when I dig it in a little further, for a change I studied for this test.
However, for the average student asking for a rewrite, the games now commence on the school and school board’s part. Mind you, what they don’t tell students are the consequences lying behind door number 1, 2 and 3. I remember my child when she was 11 coming home getting all excited she opted to received a 0, rather than write the test, because she was absent the day before. I sat down with her, and showed her the law of averages. It is always better to write a test and fail the test, than opt for the 0. All the zeroes piling up, certainly reduces the overall averages. So my child proceeds to tell her friends all about this new bit of knowledge, and guess what she got chewed out for it. Somehow the students are supposed to figure that one out on their own. Crazy eh? Constructivism and its ideologies does not favour the giving out on all information and knowledge, so students, parents and even the school board trustees can make sound decisions. Somehow they are supposed to figure it out on their own, construct the knowledge from their personal knowledge banks to the new knowledge given, and decide. Its why in the 2013 math classes, teachers goes bonkers when students are using the old fashioned methods of algorithms. Students are supposed to developed their own methods to truly understand, and in the end developed and know 20 different methods of each of the operations. I would love to see the hard copies of the numeracy portion of the standardized test, how many students lost marks for using the old fashioned methods of algorithms, and how many students got full marks for using their creations even though they got the wrong answer.
“Contrary to criticisms by some (conservative/traditional) educators, constructivism does not dismiss the active role of the teacher or the value of expert knowledge. Constructivism modifies that role, so that teachers help students to construct knowledge rather than to reproduce a series of facts. The constructivist teacher provides tools such as problem-solving and inquiry-based learning activities with which students formulate and test their ideas, draw conclusions and inferences, and pool and convey their knowledge in a collaborative learning environment. Constructivism transforms the student from a passive recipient of information to an active participant in the learning process. Always guided by the teacher, students construct their knowledge actively rather than just mechanically ingesting knowledge from the teacher or the textbook.”
http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index.html
I really like the end – its a real gem -“The best way for you to really understand what constructivism is and what it means in your classroom is by seeing examples of it at work, speaking with others about it, and trying it yourself. As you progress through each segment of this workshop, keep in mind questions or ideas to share with your colleagues.”
I bet at the workshops for teachers, they would never seen a copy of a student’s work that shows obviously the student has problems in the fundamentals of reading, writing and numeracy. Its only the top 30 % that they see, and not the students who are having obvious difficulties because its pretty hard to expressed oneself when one has weaknesses in the 3 Rs, and more so in a constructivist classroom that requires excellent cognitive processes to make steady and consistent progress. And maybe it is a good thing that the teachers focus on the types of questions that will be asked on the standardized testing, because it gives the students good practice and perhaps helps them to make the grade on the test. The reason being constructivism and the critical pedagogy behind it are not given to remediation for students. But then again both constructivism and critical pedagogy are against any type of testing regardless, because its focus to construct knowledge on the virtual plane – the pretend world and not on the realities of the real world. Ergo, 70 % of students are left hanging and they never do developed a higher set of critical skills.
Actually standardized testing and the benefits of the test cannot be used to their full advantage, because of the current constructivism and pedagogies practices prevents any reform and transformation to the students that most need improvement. I don’t even know why the majority of the public education stakeholders are up in arms to end standardized testing, when they have the prefect tools that are already embedded and entrenched not only in the public education system but society as well. The tools are the pedagogies based on 19th century thoughts and values, and the education theories of the 19th century matrix. It sets up the conditions for misconceptions to flow through society, that targets the individual and eventually harming their futures, which in turns allows the transfer of responsibility from the public education system who has been legally charge with delivering an education to the individual students and by extension to parents and society. But then again, if they don’t fight against standardized testing, it will exposed and unmasked that the 2013 public education system are only educating 30 % the students to reached their full potential. Its between the 30 % and the 70 % where the misconceptions of everything about A to Z in learning are employed to confused and keep the narrative that most students are hard to teach by using the SES variables. Apparently it my fault as a parent that my child is not academic material. Its my fault as well for teaching my child incorrect knowledge. Its my fault she has low phonemic awareness. My point is, it allows the transfer of responsibility to the users of the education system, and as well as accountability. It sets up the conditions for the public education system to avoid as much as possible all accountability and transparency by staying on the plane of misconceptions in learning that the individuals in and outside of the public education system.
In Wikipedia – “The common thread among all forms of constructivism is that they do not focus on an ontological reality, but instead on a constructed reality.[citation needed] Indeed, a basic presupposition of constructivism is that Reality-As-It-Is-In-Itself (Ontological Reality) is utterly incoherent as a concept, since there is no way to verify how one has finally reached a definitive notion of Reality. Talk of verification in this connection is beside the point. According to constructivism, one must already have Reality in mind—that is, one must already know what Reality consists of—in order to confirm when one has at last “hit bottom.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology
Now everybody knows, that the standardized testing and the results, as well as students learning difficulties, report cards, assessments to identified learning problems, and other related data streams is supposedly on other planes of realities that are incoherent because they are not derived from the mind. The only reality is the constructed reality, and it is one of the reasons why Canada is coming close to a 50 % in low literacy and now standing over 50% in low numeracy levels. Why over 96 % of the LD student population are the lowest achievers even though they have average to above intelligence. Why children do not received timely intervention and remediation concerning learning difficulties. Why the public education system acts only in one way communication mode, giving partial information and knowledge based on the only reality that matters – the constructed reality wholly created by the ones’ with education degrees to PHDs.
The oddest thing through, if Joel, Testing Illusion authors or Doug had a kid who was having difficulties in school, they be the first ones demanding the school to do something, and it be done under their demands and if not the kid be sent off to the tutors as fast as possible and while the kid is in the tutor, they be booking an appointment with a lawyer, to talk about suing the school. All of a sudden the individual rights will be inserted and damned with the collective rights and the sorry excuses from the school and school board mewling about their kids not being academic material. Another order of business will be to transfer schools, even if they have to move. Now where is the Harris rankings…They never thought they be using the Harris rankings other than toilet paper for the outhouse. That is the trouble with living in a constructed reality – its the pretend world. Some senators are now in trouble constructing their own realities………
Assessments Are Just The Start
The Question we are addressing is: What’s driving the public education system’s resistance to standardized testing?
Just from today’s harvesting the Internet and blog comments here are some pretty strong clues as to why the public education system — mandated by LAW and presumed by PUBLIC OPINION — supposed to produce certain expected results, is NOT, and why it is defensive and arguing against transparency:
1 The writing is on the wall. If I and a host of other annoyed and disempowered parents are gathering lots of information to bolster their case for more appropriate responsiveness from our systems, so too must the system spies know what’s going on. So, systems people, INSTEAD of gathering your PR squads, hosts of lawyers, gurus & consultants, ivory tower university sages, and public opinion pollsters to mobilize expensive defense strategies — WHY DON’T YOU DO THE RIGHT THING? Design some strategies to produce what you’re being paid to do?
2 We are told parents wouldn’t choose pay as you go private schools when there are free public schools. That’s not really true, but where it’s really overwhelmingly false is in India. Even the poorest of families are choosing private over public. http://www.enewspf.com/opinion/analysis/33262-low-income-families-choose-private-education-over-government-schools-in-india-.html
3 John Dewey shows up as the arch culprit, the father of progressivism, the “Bosom Serpent of American Education” http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53339?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=e8dad5e8df-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email A book by Henry T Edmondson — John Dewey and the Decline of American Education — says, “Dewey was not most interested in the good of students but rather the successful promotion of a political program…”
4 The pressure to resist testing, the co-ordinated attacks on standardized testing are indeed, at least partially related to Neo-Marxist influences. A new book just published a month ago, A Critical Examination of Neo-Marxist and Postmodernist Theories as Applied to Education by Tova Yaakoby is interesting in reviews. (I’ve just ordered it.) A review says that “in their quest for a just society they run the danger of creating education, which is in itself oppressive.” Isn’t that a reason to enforce cover-ups and blocking of data of these new transformations?
5 Just Google: Education Malpractice increasing. Obviously the information here is increasing, but increasingly avenues and cases are opening up for more SUCCESSFUL suits. No longer will the specious reason about financial burden on public schools be accepted because a “floodgate” of suits will result. The proper role of the courts is : “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.)”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/standardized-test-boycotts_n_2726566.html?utm_hp_ref=@education123
Thank you so much testing and reform for making things worse. The more people see than the more testing, charters and vouchers the worse things get I guess they are waking up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/24/does-school-reform-perpetuate-inequity/
you are welcome Doug
Assessments Are Just The Start
The Question we are addressing is: What’s driving the public education system’s resistance to standardized testing?
Just from today’s harvesting the Internet and blog comments here are some pretty strong clues as to why the public education system — mandated by LAW and presumed by PUBLIC OPINION — supposed to produce certain expected results, is NOT, and why it is defensive and arguing against transparency:
1 The writing is on the wall. If I and a host of other annoyed and disempowered parents are gathering lots of information to bolster their case for more appropriate responsiveness from our systems, so too must the system spies know what’s going on. So, systems people, INSTEAD of gathering your PR squads, hosts of lawyers, gurus & consultants, ivory tower university sages, and public opinion pollsters to mobilize expensive defense strategies — WHY DON’T YOU DO THE RIGHT THING? Design some strategies to produce what you’re being paid to do?
2 We are told parents wouldn’t choose pay as you go private schools when there are free public schools. That’s not really true, but where it’s really overwhelmingly false is in India. Even the poorest of families are choosing private over public. http://www.enewspf.com/opinion/analysis/33262-low-income-families-choose-private-education-over-government-schools-in-india-.html
3 John Dewey shows up as the arch culprit, the father of progressivism, the “Bosom Serpent of American Education” http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53339?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=e8dad5e8df-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email A book by Henry T Edmondson — John Dewey and the Decline of American Education — says, “Dewey was not most interested in the good of students but rather the successful promotion of a political program…”
4 The pressure to resist testing, the co-ordinated attacks on standardized testing are indeed, at least partially related to Neo-Marxist influences. A new book just published a month ago, A Critical Examination of Neo-Marxist and Postmodernist Theories as Applied to Education by Tova Yaakoby is interesting in reviews. (I’ve just ordered it.) A review says that “in their quest for a just society they run the danger of creating education, which is in itself oppressive.” Isn’t that a reason to enforce cover-ups and blocking of data of these new transformations?
5 Just Google: Education Malpractice increasing. Obviously the information here is increasing, but increasingly avenues and cases are opening up for more SUCCESSFUL suits. No longer will the specious reason about financial burden on public schools be accepted because a “floodgate” of suits will result. The proper role of the courts is : “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.)”
Thompson: The Line Separating Reformers from “Reformers”
A light went on while reading Alexander Russo’s Charter Advocates Denounce Reuters Reporting. It illuminates the fundamental difference between school reform and “reform.”
The dividing line is not evidence-based disagreements over charters, competition, collective bargaining or teachers’ due process. The issue is how do “reformers” deal with inconvenient truths.
Stephanie Simon’s Class Struggle – How Charter Schools Get Students They Want explains that “charters and traditional public schools are locked in fierce competition – for students, for funding and for their very survival, with outcomes often hinging on student test scores.” Simon then punches holes in the hype of “reformers” who claim that this is a “fair fight” and that charters get better results with the same types of students.
Conservative reformers like Mike Petrilli and Frederick Hess acknowledge that charter students come from more motivated families. Hess says that charters’ supposedly open access policies make for popular talking points, but “there’s just one problem: It’s not true.” He adds, “There’s a level of institutional hypocrisy here which is actually unhealthy.”
The real issue is not the fate of individual charters. A bigger problem is that the proliferation of charters has become a drain on traditional public schools. As Simon explains, even some staunch fans of charters agree that “the charter sector as a whole may be skimming the most motivated, disciplined students and leaving the hardest-to-reach behind.”
The single biggest problem is that too many “reformers” spin the data in order to justify the closing of scores of neighborhood schools to be replaced by more charters. “At some point, the slow leak of the most motivated students and families can put traditional schools in a downward spiral they can’t recover from,” says Teachers College’s Jeffrey Henig.
For instance, Siman reports that 3/4ths of Philadelphia charters studied last year placed “significant barriers” in the way of open enrollment. Worse, Philadelphia could close 37 neighborhood schools using a law that greases the skids for charters. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that that system is likely to reflect the national trend where 40% of schools that are closed are replaced by charters. If such a pattern continues, charters will become an existiential threat to collective bargaining and, perhaps, the principle of public education.
Think of how different our debates would be if we limited ourselves to accurate evidence used in an intellectually honest manner. If charters were not granted unacknowledged advantages, would school closure decisions be made in a more constructive manner? We could also debate whether charters’ exclusionary policies make sense and whether their higher expulsion rates were due to an intentional effort to pad their test scores. We could argue whether charters, while admittedly starting with an advantage, did some things better and thus added more value. Perhaps, charters could then return to their original ideal and serve as laboratories of best practices.
If we had a debate based on accurate information, I wouldn’t expect conservatives to join the AFT or the Diane Ravitch fan club. But, it could end the civil war between otherwise liberal or neo-liberal “reformers” and educators who should be allies. And, we could still debate with Petrilli and Hess over the ways of helping neighborhood schools that are being subjected to more intense concentrations of extreme poverty due to “creaming” by charters.-JT(@drjohnthompson) Image via CCFlickr
The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease
We’re getting into rather uncomfortable territory here.
The question arises: Is the testing movement a symptom of a problem, or is it a cause? Or both. Are the backlash and counter movements much worse than the original problems? And, just far will these disturbances — increased protests and political agitation — go?
From my point of view, it seems that we’re getting scared to ask the obvious questions: How did we get here? Is the charter and choice movement a backlash and counter measure to the excesses of the teacher union movement’s intrusion into territory, which never should have been theirs in the first place?
Since charters main attraction is that they bypass both the teacher union and school board prescriptions, then that’s a good place to start to ask — why were teacher unions allowed to undermine the cherished notion that school boards were about local control — so that we have now come to the point that since we can’t abolish school boards and teacher unions entirely, then we go for the avoidance option of charters. EXIT, like the home educators who are proving that exit is indeed a desirable option. Disentangle from ALL the restrictions, commands and taboos of “The System”, “The BLOB — Bloated Learning Organized Bureaucracy”.
Doug: Can you please provide a link to this recent post about “Thompson: The Line Separating Reformers from “Reformers””….. Diane Ravitch’s post you provided earlier about dentists was “truncated” (only a partial quote which left out important parts of a longer conversation going back to 2002). I suspect this entry might also be truncated and leaving out important bits.
Let me assure you, Doug, I highly appreciate your contributions to this conversation. Without your contributions we would not be not be making the advances in knowledge and insight as is happening on this thread. I do disagree often with your POV, but I’m beginning to understand where you’re coming from.
So please, the link to that Thompson article.
Links are hard on my phone
Google: This Week in Education
Ravitch google
Diane Ravitch blog
There is universal approval within teaching that decisions that involve
Teachers must be co-determined and not imposed thus collective bargaining. The literature on reform also points to the fact that, if teachers do not approve or at least were involved, reforms eill not work or survive.
Where teachers’ unions are strong results are high. Where they are weak or non-existent results are low. Facts are facts. Why is this? Good teachers want to work where wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions are good, they therefore gravitate away from low wage areas to high wage areas. Guess what, the latter are strong union areas.
This comment has been hung-up by the machinery because of length, so I’m breaking it up into two — originally sent yesterday. See if it works. TA
ASSESSMENTS ARE JUST THE START – Part I
The Question we are addressing is: What’s driving the public education system’s resistance to standardized testing?
Just from today’s harvesting the Internet and blog comments here are some pretty strong clues as to why the public education system — mandated by LAW and presumed by PUBLIC OPINION — supposed to produce certain expected results, is NOT, and why it is defensive and arguing against transparency:
1 The writing is on the wall. If I and a host of other annoyed and disempowered parents are gathering lots of information to bolster their case for more appropriate responsiveness from our systems, so too must the system spies know what’s going on. So, systems people, INSTEAD of gathering your PR squads, hosts of lawyers, gurus & consultants, ivory tower university sages, and public opinion pollsters to mobilize expensive defense strategies — WHY DON’T YOU DO THE RIGHT THING? Design some strategies to produce what you’re being paid to do?
2 We are told parents wouldn’t choose pay as you go private schools when there are free public schools. That’s not really true, but where it’s really overwhelmingly false is in India. Even the poorest of families are choosing private over public.http://www.enewspf.com/opinion/analysis/33262-low-income-families-choose-private-education-over-government-schools-in-india-.html
ASSESSMENTS ARE JUST THE START – Part II
3 John Dewey shows up as the arch culprit, the father of progressivism, the “Bosom Serpent of American Education
”http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53339?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=e8dad5e8df-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email
A book by Henry T Edmondson — John Dewey and the Decline of American Education — says, “Dewey was not most interested in the good of students but rather the successful promotion of a political program…”
4 The pressure to resist testing, the co-ordinated attacks on standardized testing are indeed, at least partially related to Neo-Marxist influences. A new book just published a month ago, A Critical Examination of Neo-Marxist and Postmodernist Theories as Applied to Education by Tova Yaakoby is interesting in reviews. (I’ve just ordered it.) A review says that “in their quest for a just society they run the danger of creating education, which is in itself oppressive.” Isn’t that a reason to enforce cover-ups and blocking of data of these new transformations?
5 Just Google: Education Malpractice increasing. Obviously the information here is increasing, but increasingly avenues and cases are opening up for more SUCCESSFUL suits. No longer will the specious reason about financial burden on public schools be accepted because a “floodgate” of suits will result. The proper role of the courts is : “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.)”
We HAVE the data. It proves ONE thing POOR kids to badly and the system fits SES like a hand in a glove. There is a pretty much perfect relationship between test results and SES. The people who demand testing are the very people who DENY the OBVIOUS results. We test every year at many levels and once again it shows EXACTLY the same thing.
Teachers are not concerned about their own or their schools test results because they. their principals, their senior admin and their trustees all know EXACTLY the same thing. It is NOT the teachers fault in low scoring schools. EVERYONE involved knows that.
1) It drives up the dropout rate. (U of Texas Austin).
2) It demoralizes students.
3) It whipsaws the curriculum and dumbs it down.
4) It demoralizes racialized communities with low scores.
It is the most negative force in education.
It is totally unnecessary Finland, end of story.
BTW the stronger the unions, the stronger the test scores.
The Texas Miracle under Bush was the Vatican of school reform. It is now seen as a total disaster by conservatives as well as everyone else. The entire reform movement accountability movement is coming unglued and discredited where people know it best.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/27/an-education-reform-warning-for-democrats/
Why don`t you look at who owns the W.Post?
All of us who do instruction based on the NICHD study know the difference between what works and doesn`t.
Jean Chall at Harvard knew it,Reid Lyon knows it…your views basically co operate with the publishers.
The K-3 space needs change in both Reading and Math instruction,I stand by that.We must test in grade 3 as well as grade 6 to see if the interventions occurred and to find a way to report to parents.
The disaster in all the above mentioned is that whole language has been allowed to survive and you helped it with your views.The lobbying killed Reading First.
If kids are in grade 4 and up and struggle with the basics they can`t improve.I agree that testing curriculum achievement is based on the soul of the student and motivation but I know that the basics are instructional casualties and somehow you must be FORCED to change,by the reformers I guess,if that`s what we are.
I find it ridiculous that I have to belong to a religious affiliation to protest flawed foundational instruction
You have a perfect right to your views. Few in the education field share them. I guess that is frustrating.
Yes some see Wapo as a liberal paper but not so much any more. Read the Texas papers. It is not only liberals and Democrats that are furious with testing, it is conservatives and Republicans that want to kill testing. It has run it’s course. People have discovered the cute is far worse than the disease.
Launching A New Service For Parents In Education
As a result of increasing attacks on parents and public who want to see accountability in education, especially regarding public schools, I have launched a new blog — Parents Teaching Parents.
I am increasingly feeling that parents are being left out.
I see the system using parents as adjuncts and flunkies for militant resistance to accountability. I see the teacher unions wanting to extend control of schools by teachers. I am disappointed that people like Diane Ravitch, who has a long history in chronicling past education reform movements, is now fully behind the current anti-standardized testing and choice efforts.
Please see my new site: http://www.parentsteachingparents.net/2013/02/launching-parents-teaching-parents/
Today’s entry brings forward articles on parent rights, effective schools and home education.
For the topic of this thread — accountability — I draw your attention to the link to effective schools where you’ll find:
#6 Frequent Monitoring of Results — Means exist to monitor student progress in relationship to instructional objectives (and results can be easily conveyed to parents).
___ Means to monitor teacher effectiveness
___ A system of monitoring school goals
Parents are very important. It is critical that they are on the bus. They are not qualified to drive the bus.
Parents elect trustees and MPOs (
Parents actualize their power by electing trustees and MPPs (MLA, MNAs). The parents role is advisory. Their political power is critical to who forms governments but reformers act as if parents want the same as they do. Tell Annie Kidder or most parents. They divide up on the same scale as the political parties.
It is the same relationship between doctors and hospital boards.
Read the literature on reform. If teachers really don’t like a reform it will not survive in the long run.
“Their political power is critical to who forms governments but reformers act as if parents want the same as they do. Tell Annie Kidder or most parents. They divide up on the same scale as the political parties.”
So far removed from standardized testing, eh Doug? I supposed Kidder had some nerve last week on national TV telling the teachers’ unions that they will loose parent support all together, if the extra-curricular activities are not put back in place.
What Doug states, is the typical example of political gamesmanship in the public sector. The only power that a parent has is at the voting booth, but not the right to criticized the operations of the public education system. Parents only have advisory roles. The red herring that Doug wants us to chase is that parents have only one set of political powers that is neatly divided by political stripes of the parents. Of course in Doug’s world it doesn’t applied to the teachers’ unions, let along the public sector because they are united along the line of political stripes. Just parents who are the divided ones, and therefore parents should only be seen in their capacity as advisory roles.
Doug, omits that ultimately parents are the bosses over their children’s education, and they alone can decide what is best for their children. Its why standardized testing is not going to go away any time soon, nor the report cards and it sure is shaping up in Ontario that extra-curricular activities will become part of the teachers’ duties legally in the near future. Parents even though are not united in political and social circles are united where it counts – the best interests of their children. Standardized testing brings a different type of data that can be compared to the data of their children’s report cards and school work.
Parents do have more power than what is perceived. Just watch the public education system do the educrat dance when parents have asked questions at any level of the public education system. The educrat dances begins, and it is sure not like the Gangnam or the Harlem Shake. Not at all fun, when the professionals gang up on parents telling them in no uncertain terms that they are no qualified to drive the bus, and not even qualified to understand the nuances of standardized testing scores, its rankings, comparison of their children’s scores to other ranking, and arriving at conclusions that makes the public education system do the educrat’s dance, espousing why standardized testing is bad or good for students. On both sides, why parents should not be concerned with the personal scores of their children………the educrat dance begins with earnest.
Hom much would you like to bet on extracurriculars becoming compulsory? Are you going to pay for them? Do you expect them free? Good luck with that.
In the 1970s as LDH points out, the USA had the worlds greatest education,system. Then came Reagan, A Nation at Risk, NCLB, charters, some vouchers, mass testing, teacher bashing, and all of the other things that Nancy advocates.
Now they are #17.
Every one of these policies are unmitigated disasters.
When is the reform movement going to face up to the fact that yheir Frankenstein monster has made education markedly worse?
What is ironic – one Ontario school board is moving to canned teachers, and bring in the volunteers without having a teacher present during the extra-curricular activities. Just a matter of time when the parent volunteers move into tutoring and other activities relating to teacher instruction. Just a matter of time. Meanwhile, the ETFO will soon find out that what they are doing are considered illegal strike activities.
Meanwhile, there is lots of talk about having the extra-curricular activities as part of the teachers’ duties and responsibilities. School boards are hitting back. All spurred by the headlines, where the biggest school board is leading the pack for shocking headlines of what is being taught and in what fashioned it is being taught. Just the more reasons why standardized testing will stay in place, when everyone is wondering what is being taught besides dumb blond and sexist jokes.
Wait until they need to buy insurance for all of the parent volunteers. Wait until the pedophiles move in.
Canned teachers? Is that like canned tuna?
You have zero clue what you are talking about.
Tests may stay for a while but they are being increasingly ignored by the system. Since there are no real consequences of any type and the system knows exactly which school will score what in advance.
It does have a downward prressure making the system worse but it is also becoming an expensive yahn. zzzzzzzzzzz
Wow the rich kids did well and the poor kids did badly. Somebody stop the presses.
Arne Duncan thought parents would want low scoring schools in Chicago closed. Think again. They fought tooth and nail to keep them open.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-testing-20130304,0,4686481.story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/04/how-george-orwell-might-explain-school-reform/
And we wonder why the poor do badly in school?
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/71/3/393.abstract
Is there anyone that actually believes phonics closes the reading gap? I have never met one in serious education. Does it have a role? a little. Is it a silver bullet? Nope.
Doug,your reply is in keeping with what we know.Educators don`t defer to research.We are speaking here of getting better results by grade 3 so failures are reduced.
Research should be important,why isn`t it?
“Educators don`t defer to research” is a gross stereotype.
Thinking about this some more-May I draw an analogy?
Dr. Smith to patient-I am giving you a prescription for Penicillin for 7 days.Patient replies,no thanks,I like the idea of zinc lozenges for a week instead.
One will work dramatically better than the other and P. is based on research.
Another set of professors all from the education crowd asking for the end of standardized tests. Complete with the usual reasons that emphasizes its not good for the teachers, accompanied by the usual watered-down reasons for students without the supporting evidence and more importantly solutions that would increased achievement for all students.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/22/massachusetts-professors-protest-high-stakes-standardized-tests/
One reads one, one reads them all. They differ little and more or less state the same thing. In Canada, the same kind of reasons are now being voiced and the latest is one of the people at Testing Illusion, getting his named voiced out loud on the provincial VOCM radio station. “Despres says there is no way to assess whether or not the current testing system is achieving the necessary objectives in the educational system. He says in Newfoundland and Labrador, tests are conducted for literacy and numeracy at various stages, while sciences and social sciences are tested in grade 12, which comprises 50 per cent of a student’s final grade. Despres says the practise has come under some scrutiny as to whether or not standardized testing is an appropriate way of evaluating students and the overall quality and effectiveness of educational systems.
Questions were raised late last year when a MUN geography professor revealed that a large number of her students couldn’t identify basic geographical features on a map, including Africa and the Atlantic Ocean.”
http://www.vocm.com/newsarticle.asp?mn=2&id=31718&latest=1
VOCM is still a bit old-fashioned, and presents the other side as to why standardized testing and now Despres is targeting the public exams, when university students don’t know where the Atlantic Ocean is located, nor Europe and Africa. Standardized testing is achieving its goals, when one considers the scores based on the outcomes of students. The number one reason why the education system is against standardized testing, it raises a number of inconvenient questions on the education quality that students are receiving.
In another recent news article, “It goes something like this: You pass the students, no matter what their abilities, and then, just like Mr. Schell says, slam them into a brick wall of mandatory tests that they aren’t equipped to pass, because they have never had a chance to fail.
And … so … guess what happens next?
“The kids can’t pass the tests because they don’t have the skills, and so they get frustrated and eventually they stop going to school and then they drop out,” Mr. Schell says.”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/07/nunavut-school-system-sets-students-up-to-fail-by-not-failing-them/
No failure policies plus no mastery leads to lower scores on standardized testing. And more so when students do not have the required reading, writing and numeracy skills. Do you blame the kids? The education system loves to do that number, to explained away the inconvenient final outcomes of students with weak foundation skills. A typical response from an educator – “. I am an educator in the U.S., and this article spells out some very important dangers associated with standardized testing. In the U.S., we are watching the arts and vocational programs disappear, we see students learning to hate reading, writing, and math because they “keep failing the test,” and we are powerless to stop the unending pressure to produce test-takers rather than learners. I have longed for the day when the U.S. would look north to Canada, where I was educated, and see that high-stakes standardized tests are NOT the path to improved learning for students.”
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/pluses+standardized+tests/8000313/story.html
I don’t know how the educators within squared it with the pattern of rising teachers’ salaries and benefits to the decreasing dollar amounts to resources and education services. Nor how they squared it, when the kids can’t pass the tests because they don’t have the skills, mastery and pertinent knowledge to passed the tests.
In the comments of the NP article – a mother – “My son got passed on up through to fourth grade, where he was then so far behind – and so painfully aware of it every single day when he sat there in tears feeling stupid while all the other kids did their work – that he quit trying altogether. It did so much damage to him emotionally. The kids were so cruel to him…”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/07/nunavut-school-system-sets-students-up-to-fail-by-not-failing-them/
Yes, how do the educators squared the above by the elimination of standardized testing, and apparently now the public exams in NL?
John states that educators don’t defer to research is a gross stereotype.
The only research that they defer to, is the research in the ivory towers of the public education system. No failed policies, no zero-policies are all the present range. Mastery? No. Just one of the many teaching practices and pedagogy methods that one won’t see in the schools across Canada, let alone looking hard at the education and pedagogy practices that are being taught across the teachers’ faculties by comparing it to the outcomes of students.
Daniel Willingham is another researcher that is ignored by the ivory towers of education. One of his latest article, is about memory retrieval.
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2013/02/cone-of-learning-or-cone-of-shame.html#comments
Not too much attention is being paid on the cognitive processes of students. If students are not blessed with near perfect cognitive processes, they bound to have trouble passing tests…..
Another article bemoaning the fact – ” But most of the 3 million students with disabilities (out of roughly 54 million students in schools today) are fully capable of being taught in a mainstream classroom, provided our schools are willing to make some changes. Students with learning differences have tremendous talent, creativity, and academic potential–not to mention potential to enhance the learning experience of those around them. That most school systems have failed to recognize this is a regrettable missed opportunity, both for students who learn differently and for their general education peers.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belzberg/can-dyslexics-succeed-at-_b_2718579.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=4196391,b=facebook
The article above raises the question of education quality being received by students. As of 2013, 94 to 96 percent of students with learning differences are at the bottom of the achievement chart. One can only imagine if the public schools are doing nothing for the students with learning differences, another inconvenient question arises – What are the schools doing to increase achievement among students without learning differences?
And what would achievement look like without standardized testing? I would suspect the students’ outcomes would lead to 1 to 2 years paid by the student in additional upgrading at the post-secondary level on stuff that should have been taught in the first 12 years of schooling.
Personally I love how one half of the dynamic duo, Jo Anne says teachers have no respect for research while the other half, Nancy, accuses all research she doesnt like as being “ivory tower”. Anti-intellectualism at its best.
Get your act together over there. I think you mean we should just listen to reform intellectuals
Like Hanusheck but not the Ravitch, Darling-Hammond type.
I am a teacher.
I read and am a fan of the work Dan Willingham has done.
So please, do NOT stereotype us all.
BTW he is not a fan of the mania for standardized testing
which has a HUGE research pedigree not tied to any interest group (see earlier posts).
Yet, unlike Doug, I do not see them disappearing soon, though they need to be limited. This is in part because, sadly to say, much of teacher grading is poor
(aspects of which I have also acknowledged in earlier posts and posts on other threads.
If all we do is talk past or at each other we get nowhere and solve nothing.
And THAT is backed by research!
Daniel Willingham has a great video on youtube showing why standardized testing, especially VAM should never be used to evaluate teachers Nancy. You would love it.
I fully expect the standardized testing regime to totally collapse within the next 10 years. I was around when parents turned against the regime of Departmentals in Ontario when the mask slipped and it was revealed as a totally useless predictor of future success in university and as a gatekeeper keeping smart kids out of university.
The parents and public are turning against testing with avengance. It delivery no value added to the system. It is there to demonstrate concern for the system on the cheap.
Oh we have problems, dont fix them that costs money. Test some more as Brad Wall in Sask.
Pathetic.
The video \ is good stuff.
Interestingly Dan also sees value in direct instruction
as do I
because
we do the research and read it carefully rather than through an ideological lens.
Educator Opposition To Testing A Last Ditch Effort – Part ONE
Politicians in government are the only ones who can make substantial and needed changes in education. And this is happening in various states such as Wisconsin and Saskatchewan. There is also a growing movement of mayors in the US endorsing the Parent Trigger as a way of returning schools back to the parents and community.
Political action is mounted when tests illustrate whether public education systems are performing up to expectation. And if accountability is met and if tax dollars apportioned for education are being spent appropriately. That is, for the education of young people. Not for jobs.
Without an audit New Zealand would never have determined that 2/3 of the education dollar was spent elsewhere than the classroom. It was a Labour government (Socialist) that brought in advisors and economists to study the matter to produce solutions — even if they were radical ideas as the Prime Minister David Lange supposed might happen.
A magazine cover proclaimed: The LOST GENERATION — Victims of the Great Education Experiment.
“So where did we go wrong? However did we let our system come to rest so precariously on a knife blade? How did we allow the workers in the system — the teachers — to control it?”
A report came it. It said — good people, BAD system — far too many points of overlap — cumbersome, unresponsive.
They wrestled with the question — What is the role of the state in education?
Educator Opposition To Testing A Last Ditch Effort – Part TWO
In 1989 New Zealand abolished regional school boards and devolved to a school board at each school with parents as a majority on the board. Trustees were unpaid volunteers. In high school a student was on the board.
A quarter century later New Zealand scores as well as Canada in its school achievement scores.
Self management is a transferable skill. New Zealand scores #1 as being perceived as Least Corrupted Nation out of a list of 183. Being accountable for public money and achieving good results yields cultural benefits for communities.
What kind of society do we want? Isn’t school-based management with strong parent involvement and abolition of school boards something worth considering?
What would our audits and standardized testing show us if we had true transparency? Why is the system so resistant to accountability? Does it see governance and control slipping out of establishment and union hands? Producer capture is the reason for the dysfunction and negativity we have to endure.
Why can’t our policy makers and politicians have the guts to also entertain “radical” ideas that would obviously ruffle the feathers of the status quo, that is, IF we want a responsive education system?
For a very insightful video of the New Zealand process see this 25 min video. Just note one thing: This is an Anti Reform protest video made to expose “neo-liberal” reform but enough gets through to show the thinking why this reform was seen as necessary by the government of the day.
http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/a-civilised-society-2006
Your education ideas have about ad much support as your Libertarian Party. No provincial party will allow an anarchist system they want the control at the provincial level. School boards are getting bigger not disappearing.
Teachers oppose testing because it does far more harm than good demoralizing students and raising the dropout rate.
Bloomberg has tried every reform suggested in the reform msnual and failed badly in NY. Parents want him to give up control.
“Teachers oppose testing because it does far more harm than good demoralizing students and raising the dropout rate.”
There is a lot of literature and research both inside and outside of the public education ivory towers that attests that the dropout rate hinges on the fundamental skills of reading,writing and numeracy. The lower the skills, the greater risked of dropping out. Standardized testing does measured the skills, and more so with the criterion reference testing that is used in Canada. Concluding that its NOT the lack of knowledge, but the lack of skills in reading, writing, and numeracy that students processed to expressed their knowledge.
Its pretty hard to expressed one’s knowledge, if the person has low reading, writing and numeracy skills.
http://literacyencyclopedia.ca/index.php?fa=items.show&topicId=312
Again,you paint with a broad stroke Doug,you move to politics versus WHY we test,because we need to-the next great step would be to follow up with intense supports from what we find in the testing.I`m waiting for that one in my lifetime.
Grade 3 kids NEED to be tested.If you keep pushing them along without proper teaching that would assist them to succeed,it`s immoral!
Name one school that has actually used parent trigger.
Texas, Texas has turned sharply against testing, read about it.
NZdid what Tunya says and set off a mass exodus of teachers. They had an instant critical shortage.
Testing, vouchers, charters are all past their best before date. They have all crashed and burnrd Interesting that American catholics charge charters with deatroying the RC system in the USA.
Read the follow up work on NZ.
Parents do not participate.
Principals complain of reduced budgets endless paper work.
Results in poor areas and Mairori areas still terrible.
Doug,I`m not a reformer-I want research based reading instruction to alleviate the failure rate accumulated by grade 3.I also want kids with Dyslexia-1 in 5,see Sally Shaywitz research at Yale,to get early reading intervention.
The only way to see who`s failing and who`s not is to test.If we changed reading instruction day one,we`d see low SES students do better and much more success but if we don`t then we MUST test and those that are failing the reading test must get reading intervention.The public must insist on this.
This has zero to do with politics,give me a break!
John,with the MOUNDS of research on reading instruction,if educators do defer to research,why are we still teaching whole language?
My point is the researchers lying outside of the public education towers are ignored for the most part, and when they are not ignored, there work is cherry-picked by the public education crowd to support the ideologies, the political direction, and worse yet, to continued on without change the pedagogies and curriculum that produces mediocre outcomes for students.
An example is Willingham, who is not against standardized testing, but against how standardized testing is being applied, its applications and how standardized testing results are the main parameters for education reforms on both sides of the coin. The students are left out in the cold, while the adults inside and outside of the public education play war on the backs of the students and their futures.
Michael Zwaagstra in a recent article describing the benefits of standardized testing. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/saskatchewan-students-will-benefit-from-standard-tests-195212771.html
However, in reality do the benefits of standardized testing play out in the realities of a public education system? Or will the data be used for the political agendas of the adults?
In another paper, it outlines the consequences of eliminating standardized testing in the conclusions. 1. “One likely consequence of eliminating standardized testing is a system of social promotion with many levels of nominally the same subject matter, ranging from classes for the self-motivated kids to those for the kids who quit trying years before, kids the system has ignored ever since.” 2. “Another likely consequence of eliminating high-stakes standardized testing is the large-scale institution of remedial programs in colleges to compensate for any deficiencies of instruction in elementary and secondary schools.” 3. “A third likely consequence of eliminating high-stakes standardized testing is a blackout of reliable information on student performance anywhere outside a student’s own school district.”
Click to access characteristics-of-an-effective-student-testing-system.pdf
A Willingham article – How to abuse standardized tests
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/04/how-to-abuse-standarized-tests.html
Another article on Kohn with a quote from Willingham – “Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia professor who has been critical of Kohn in the past, said student assessment is “essential.’’ Willingham is the author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?’’
“I think it’s too extreme to say that all tests currently in use are without value,’’ Willingham said. “All standardized means is everybody gets the same test. It seems much more fair if everybody gets the same test, and everybody is graded in the same way.’’
But Kohn disputes that standardized testing is the only way to ensure fairness.”
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/05/05/belmont_author_presses_fight_against_standardized_tests/
And than there is the famous article where Willingham takes Kohn to task.
Its called, “Alfie Kohn is Bad For You and Dangerous For Your Children.
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/alfie-kohn-is-bad-for-you-and-dangerous-for-your-children/
Unfortunately, Kohn is the leading star in the teachers’ unions. They can’t get enough of him, because he is against all types of testing, including the reading assessments that pinpoints the learning difficulties of children. Kohn would put children with learning difficulties in the class of basket weaving, and sing out on his pulpit that kids with learning difficulties should not be subjected to testing of any kind, because their minds are not suited for the academics. Another misconception and part of the belief systems of many of an educator, that kids with learning difficulties are not suited for the academics. Its probably why, the results of standardized testing, reform changes only benefit approximately 30 % in the middle, leaving the the top and bottom achievers out in the cold.
“John,with the MOUNDS of research on reading instruction,if educators do defer to research,why are we still teaching whole language?”
Because we live in an imperfect world.
I too wonder about the unwillingness of too many of us to recognize the power (thought there are limits) of
direct instruction- even within phonics / phonemic awareness.
It is in part because
– we set up false dichotomies when elements of many strategies are required
– because one side or the other- oversimplify or oversell a particular magic bullet
– some folks do make careers out of selling snake oil
– the unwillingness to recognize that the “basics” however defined
are necessary
but
not sufficient
– researchers are often poor at marketing and sometimes come off as ivory tower arrogants, thus busy teachers, subjected to poor quality pd, tend to do what they have usually done which has varying degrees of effectiveness
– change is hard
Thank You John,that last line of yours is so true:).
You are welcome.
I think we, including us parents, are harder to please because
– we know more
– so
– we want more for our kids
because
we have a better sense of what is possible
Jo Anne you are a reformer even if you are unaware of it. Pasi Sahlsberg lays it out very well in Finnish Lessons. He has 2 vertical columns. One is labelleled GERM, the Global Education Reform movement. The other is a constructivist, Deweyist progressive movement. They diagnose the problem differently and as a result, prescribe differently.
GERM, believes in a set of interlocking policies from testing to vouchers, charters, mayorsl control, privatization, corporate involvement and so on. The progressive camp believes that all of these are not just wrong but spring from a corporate desire to privatise education based on greed, ideology, religion and other evil purposes. At its root it is a radical right wing movement in its modern incarnation reinvented by Reaganites but with a historic tail that goes back to CW Taylor Taylorisn and Alfred Binnet.
Our camp goes bsck to Rousseau but the pantheon includes Dewey and the modern heros sre Diane Ravitch, Pasi Sahlsberg, Linda Darling Hammond and others. The core belief of the progressives is that poverty explains ALMOST everything.
There is a confused middle camp that believes that this can be dealt with a la carte. This is the confused narrative of Fullan, Levin, Obama, Duncan, and so on. As in politics, there really is no centre, they are just people who borrow half of their ideas from the left and half from the right like Canadian Liberals. They have no core. They believe like Kathleen Wynne my friend, that the truth is in the middle and we must all compromise.
Tim Hudak and I both have little respect for the centre position. We long for the philosophical and political and educational fight to the death, so confident are we that we are totally correct about every issue every day.
So unreal!
And the evidence is overwhelmingly against this idea of
permanent dichotomy.
For example Alfred Binet would be horrified at your classification.
ALMOST is a broad term since in previous posts you have said it explains
– everything
– all but 10%
– all but 20%
The world is way too complex for this notion of “either you’re with us or against us” Sure did George W a lot of good in the world.
The view that “Tim Hudak and I both have little respect for the centre position. We long for the philosophical and political and educational fight to the death, so confident are we that we are totally correct about every issue every day.” has had a bad history in the last century- from Hitler to Stalin to name but two.
Profoundly undemocratic and deeply disturbing.
Besides how do you explain Diane Ravitch’s change of heart as well as Bob Linn and Jim Popham of testing designer fame? Or Orwell or Hugo Black (went from KKK to liberal justice)?Or Malcolm X?
perhaps they were wise enough to look at the evidence again or see new evidence or different perspectives and adjust their thinking on that basis.
The truth is sometimes in the middle, sometimes towards the end mistakenly characterized as “right”; e.g., the power of direct instruction and often towards the end earmarked as “progressive”; e.g., co-operative group learning and the valuing of the arts in school.
Labeling on the basis of the seating plan of the National Assembly in 1791 has outlived its usefulness. Besides, in addition to stereotyping it is anti-democratic.
What is the sense of participating in a blog if all you do is rely on the technique of brutal persuasion- you keep making the same point over and over again, but louder. Moreover, you alienate those who tend to support your cause, but who see value in other positions. That is what we call participatory, informed citizenship.
Have to return to marking.
Dont agree, labelling based on French Chambrr of Deputies has never been more relevant. We will be seeing more Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street unless someone arrests this race to the bottom.
There has been a massive shift of wealth and opportunity from the 99% to the 1% since the 1970s. You either find that outragious or you dont.
We lost a great one with Chavez lately but La Lucha Continua.
We need to get the Gates Foundation, Eli Broad, the Waltons of Walmart, the Koch Brother and their ilk totslly out of education before they destroy the entire Horace Mann, Ryerson enterprise of pristine, totally public, totally democratic, public education with a primary goal of the total elimination of privledge in our society.
Opinions are easy; it’s evidence that counts.
– the cultural anthropologist Deborah Tannen in The Argument Culture noted the coarsing of debate through labelling 2 decades ago
– some labelled “left” support oil, and logging, and the Keystone pipleine
– some labelled “right” are strong ecological advocates
Real people are a mix: Nellie McClung had “progressive” and “regressive” views all at once.
As for “We need to get the Gates Foundation, Eli Broad, the Waltons of Walmart, the Koch Brother and their ilk …” lumping these all together is a gross oversimplification.
I have no problem with “switchers” if they do it for sound reasons.
We do not want to suffer from “hardening of the categories” gets us nowhere.
On the other hand, there are examples of folks who switch from one extreme to another.
Barbara Amiel and Benito Mussolini were once “socialists”.
Lesson
Reality is complicated. So our human beings. Work with it.
Finding the best solutions may not need “compromise”; it does take active listening and working things out.
One example, most disputes between labour and management get worked out. Wonder why.
How does anyone explain switchers. In my view Diane Ravitch saw the disaster that reform eas in practice.
People switch political parties, Bob Rae, Tom Mulcair, Belinda Stronach, Scott Brison, etc. people switch education camps as well. Many are leaving reform these days or moderating their views like Rick Hess or Mike Petrelli.
As Hess says, “reform over promises and underdelivers”.
Is Ravitch Trying To Make Amends?
Is there anyone in all of history who has had more influence to change education directions in his or her early years up to age 73, then completely reverse gears and now, as zealously and persistently, work to reverse what has been unleashed? Most people on recognizing the error of their ways try to set things aright in measured steps. Ravitch is all over the map! She heads protest marches. She starts anti-testing efforts. She uses all the social media she can — blogs, twitter, Facebook . . .
As Scott McLeod points out (Should we absolve Diane Ravitch of her earlier decisions? http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2010/07/should-we-absolve-diane-ravitch-of-her-earlier-decisions.html )
Ravitch is a former advocate of “the No Child Left Behind Act, standardized testing, charter schools, and market-based reform.”
McLeod goes on to say, Ravitch is now a “critic of the No Child Left Behind Act, standardized testing, charter schools, and market-based reform.”
180 degree turn.
Is it redemption she seeks? Deliverance?
Her new book, due in Sept, is gathering pre-orders, with some teachers ordering multiple copies.
Will her book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger for America’s Public Schools”, turn back the tide of the accountability movement in public education?
Ravitch has always been a “tough liberal” she wrote in her early days for left wing journals. She was a Democrat when asked by Bush to join his admin. Many liberals were fooled by NCLB. Ted Kennedy for one. Many black leaders, unwilling to name poverty, the real proven enemy, blamed teachers for not caring about their kids the do call soft bigotry of low expectations. As all of the NCLB reforms blew up in everyones faces, nobody wanted to be associated with its spectacular failure.Diane was one of the first to notice the entire reform project was wrong headed and would lead to disaster. She has been proven right in spades.
The answer of the Brad Wall types to the failure of testing? More testing. What was that definituon of insanity again?
John M
Read some George Lakoff, Dont Think of an Elephant” and many other titles, a psychiatrist and political expert. He will show you how there are no moderate opinions, moderates are those who attemt to square the circle by choosing half of their policies from the left – education, health, environment mainly and half from the right, corporate tax cuts, strong military, austerity….. They have no original ideas of their own. They end up looking foolish, like Fullan.
One of the insights that is most powerful from Lakoff is that education favours the left in that moderates favour the left position over the right. Moderates favour smaller classes, all day Kindergarten, bigger budgets, and general expsnsion of the reach of the state in education.
Moderates have very little interest in any of the reform solutions except testing. That is why the left is working overtime. Eliminate testing and the whole right wing effort in education,comes unravelled.
There are very poeerful corporate forces who want technology to put testing on steroids. All testing all the time, Bill Gates, Michael Dell before he sold Dell, etc. There is billions wrapped up in Common Core for this very reason. The war on testing has become the war on the billionaires. High stakes testing indeed.
Sorry, Doug, evidence about the value of more than two positions is too powerful to be ignored. Stereotyping and oversimplification serves no one any good, especially students.
I learned in my academic history training decades ago to check the sources and compare them. “Moderate”, Lakoff notwithstanding, is just another label.
To me a moderate is a fence sitter, indecisive, selfinterested, timorous, insecure, and in the end, hollow.
Words like “moderate” “conservative” etc. are social constructs of varying degrees of usefulness. when people cannot come to agreement on their use and meaning, then their usefulness is limited.
I teach a teaching strategy called Concept Formation which looks at student thinking when they group items together and give them a label.
The goal to to reveal their thinking and sometimes their biases or misconceptions.
POC without evidence? that and a toonie gets you a small coffee.
In other words, unproductive.
Doug,you`re out of control.
Im just getting started. People who dealt eith me in the unions and Toronto education politics know my views are very strong.
It is hardly just me. The teaching profession as a whole believes that policies such as testing are highly destructive of young lives.
From my pov standardized testing is a form of child abuse.
Doug, Stereotyping and oversimplification serves no one any good, especially students, as John has stated, and making charges of child abuse, is the hallmark of a radical or a stubborn fool.
Evidence, to which there isn’t any evidence that standardized testing destroys young lives. However, there is plenty of evidence that any type of testing including standardized testing provides data that ascertains if students are learning the knowledge that was taught. It also provides a window of progress over time. Nothing more satisfying than seeing a student steadily progressing from grade 1 levels at the end of grade 3 to maintaining consistently high ‘B’ averages by the end of grade 6. Data from testing, can inform educators on the individual basis as well as the whole group and the sub-groups within the whole.
As I discovered, classroom educators do not have the historical achievement data of the individual students. Hence, as a parent starting in grade 5 – I had to informed the teacher how far my child has come in achievement. It is relatively easy in 2013 to collect the achievement data of individual students. due to the technological advances. If I could do it, using the free software available on the web, I am sure it can easily done having teachers collecting the data in real time, as the teachers are recording the marks on tests and assignments for reporting cards and other necessary reports that must be done, to abide by the legal legislation governed by the School Acts. The data that provides a historical base for teachers the following year, to obtained a deeper understanding of the individual students in the classroom.
Why Student A went from all As at the end of grade 3, to being a C student in grade 5, or why Student B went from all Ds in the primary grades to all Bs at the end of grade 5. Standardized testing provides points in time, a set of data numbers that complements the historical data, in the context of additional information, informing the classroom teachers. Informing them, to prevent failure, or perhaps alerting the teacher that a student has a weak foundation in reading and writing, and it needs to be remediated. All done to safeguard the students’ futures and opening as many future pathways in their adulthood.
To call standardized testing, child abuse is disrespecting your own profession as an educator, who has been duly trained to administered assessments and evaluations of students. Its akin to a medical doctor calling diagnostic testing – patient abuse.
The research from University of Texas ( at Austin) clearly shows that standardized testing drives up the dropout rate. When students get low scores on standardized tests they become demoralized and when old enough, they want to drop out. All of the good work done by the teachers and guidance inn undone and destroyed.
There is an open revolt against testing in Texas. Parents hate it, even Republicans are running scared and turning against it. Texas is the home base of NCLB, the totally descredited American test based reform system.
NCLB has become a national joke. Testing demoralized students causing them to give up on school prematurely and as a result it is child abuse.
Nancy, all of that days is never used, highly unreliable, useless to teachers, we know why children fall off, parent does, parent in jail, illness, too many moves, bullying, etc. Nobody needs or wants that test days in the system.
Data not days*
Doug,you`ve lost the debate.
We all agree other than yourself that testing in the early grades will assist in identifying strugglers and they should receive interventions in order to make sure they have a chance at success in future grades.
The scientific research community knows why students fail to learn to read in the early grades-and spell-and we need to follow their directive.
I know,let`s do that to your kids,they`re failing in grade 3 so they are poor,their dad is in jail or they moved twice.
Oh you are the referree? That is a funny one. The sole progressive on a reforers board lost the debate because he was outnumbered? It is to laugh.
Test averse Finland #1
Test mad USA #17
This one fact alone totally destroys the pro testing argument to the point that they dont have a fig leaf to cover their privates.
Deal with reality.
Testing is not good for the system and it is not even neutral and therefore a waste of money, it it the absolute worst thing for students that the system itself can control.
It creates dropouts needlessly.
People who follow American politics closely will be aware that future political success for either the Democrats or the Republicans is almost totally dependent on which party gets its needed share of the Latino vote. The Reps must get over 35% or the cannot win the presidency and they risk losing Texas, and many other st ates forever. The Dems must win 70% or they lose.
The Latino community has decided en masse that standardized testing exists to hold them back. In Mexico their are massive demonstrations against testing as an anti working class tool of the rich to horde higher education for themselves.
In short if the Reps dont throw testing under the bus soon, they will lose Texas the linch pin of their entire national strategy and their only large state.
If the Dems dump testing faster and use it as a club to beat the Reps, they can achieve permanent domination.
It is THAT important.
Everyone knows that nobody does more testing than the Americans. They are also one of the richest nations on earth however, in the latest PISA they were now # 31 in reading.
Everyone familiar with testing knows that if only American middle class scores were ranked against the middle class of other nations, USA would be in the top 5.
All of the scores that drag America down come from the terrible results of their bottom 20% of SES.
The issue is poverty, always has been, always will be. Game set match.
why talk America politics as a reply?
Kids drop out because they can`t execute the work-that`s the 90% reason.Ever been to Nunavut?
Crazy place run by educrats.
They insist on their own language till the end of grade 3-they should be teaching both at the same time.
They introduce English in grade 4,no instruction-they buy the high school curriculum from Alberta,the most stringent of all curriculums.
Grade 9-80-90% drop out rate.
Nobody looks at the details,they talk politics.
That`s what you represent.We talk instruction for greater success by grade 3 and 4,you talk politics.
The research community views this thinking as flawed,the politicians run the empire this way,not the worker bees,they know different.
Every day these bees take the failures and teach them and success is 95%.
How to change government so it defers to research,recently in one province which I cannot name,government met with researchers about reading instruction and have allowed them some pilots for next year.Imagine that.Will they find it`s poverty,no,they`ll find success and realize it`s instruction.
The K-3 model in Finland and teacher prep allows such success they don`t need testing.
You shoot from the hip Doug,you are first and foremost a politician versus an educator.
You speak for the research community now? Please get down off that high horse. There are 2 research communities, yours and mine. There are an endless number of PhDs who say I am 100% correct.
The reseach community is 100% political. They find what they are looking for according to their bias.
Finland has a 5% child poverty rate which ALLOWS for success. Ask Pasi Sahlsberg. You have someone who knows Finland better than him?
Of course teacher prep in Finland is superior. I have been touting double masters for all teachers for many years now. Nobody here wants it for one simple reason. In North America, double masters teachers would demand salaries that match their education and training, as they should.
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
From your website-working on improvements model
Notice assessment and analysis followed by instruction.
It`s your hopelessness that is completely unfair-to be poor is not a dead end.
Some wiser minds than you, Doug, thought that data was useless. They don’t anymore. Take the collection of data without the science. http://kaleidoscope.kontagent.com/2011/11/09/big-data-is-useless-without-science/
I wonder why the public education system cannot do the same thing. and start using the science?
Or this new initiative – ” So a new initiative, supported by state education leaders and funded by prominent foundations, plans to provide a place in the cloud for each state to store all data for every student, using “free” open source software. And, in the process, student achievement information will be connected to instructional apps and web resources. That is, as long as the effort can address concerns about technology, privacy, and whether enough education companies will want to build products for a system that could undermine parts of their own businesses.
In a nutshell, this describes the complicated Shared Learning Infrastructure, being built by the near-namesake Shared Learning Collaborative.”
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/how-will-student-data-be-used/
Why go to the bother, if student data is irrelevant?
Another article by Joanne Jacobs – Teachers refuse to give ‘useless’ tests
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2013/01/teacher-test-boycott-draws-support/
Its in the comments – “My son takes a MAP test 3 times per year (at the end of each trimester) at his private school. They don’t take other state exams. The teachers see the results of the tests and are responsible for tracking weaknesses/strengths/gaps and remediating where necessary. They monitor with a pretty complex data system.
In my opinion, if used properly, it’s absolutely invaluable.
But, that’s a private school for you, responding to the real needs of students and parents and requiring accountability from teachers and administrators.”
Isn’t that a novel concept, of teachers being responsible for tracking, weaknesses/strengths/gaps and remediating where necessary. That can be done very easily in any public school, using the technology tools of the 21st century.
And there is Daniel Willingham – What predicts college GPA?
“You can usually quibble about the order in which variables were entered and the rationale for that ordering, and that’s the case here. As they put the data together, the most important predictors of college grade point average are: your grades in high school, your score on the SAT or ACT, the extent to which you plan for and target specific grades, and your ability to persist in challenging academic situations.
There is not much support here for the idea that demographic or psychosocial contextual variables matter much. Broad personality traits, most motivation factors, and learning strategies matter less than I would have guessed. ”
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2013/02/what-predicts-college-gpa.html
My own child’s data tells a story of rising achievement from being at the bottom of the achievement charts, steady but sure with the backdrop of never having her reading problems corrected. As of today, they still remained uncorrected, and an impressive overall grade average of 80 something. Just imagine if the reading problems were corrected by using the reading science, my child’s full academic potential would be obtained and she be sitting with the few students obtaining a 90 something overall average.
Another thing that data numbers can be used is to measured the lost academic potential of each child and as well to assured that a child is reaching their full academic potential. It can’t be done, without the proper recording of the data based on testing and standardized testing. As Doug suggests, data is useless. I wonder why he suggest that? Could it be because data cannot tell the story of the student going without breakfast, or the father in jail or the student without books at home. But what data from standardized testing, even the classroom test and report card numbers can tell a story of academic progress or the lack of progress. Collectively, over time, it presents a historical record of a student’s achievement and as I found out recently becomes highly relevant in applying for post-secondary studies, and more so for students who worked hard climbing from their D averages in the primary grades to graduating with high B and A averages.
Achievement data tells stories, and its just a matter of reading the numbers correctly, based on the science……….
I am not the least bit hopeless but if the problem is misdiagnosed then the wrong prescriptions will be applied. I have laid out over and over and over again the solutions that ACTUALLY WORK.
Pre and post natal help for young poor mothers, breakfast and lunch at school nutricious meals, after school academic support including summer academic camps, opticl and dental interventions, decent housing and transportation, smaller classes, school beginning at age 2 (Montessori style), free tuition in post secondary, a phase out of the streaming system, more treacher education/training.
All of these things can seriously mitigate but not end the problem. The problem will come to an end when their parents have very good secure union rate jobs.
Solving the education problems of the poor is our number one priority our ought to be as a nation but we MUST come to realize that most of it is outside the school site.
I am afraid many middle class parents oppose doing too much for the poor because it creates too much competition for their own kids. Some but not too much.
Read some David Berliner University of Arizona. You would like him Jo Anne he is a researcher.
He says I am 100% correct.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/poverty-and-potential
We are all aware that the educational reform movement is largely an astroturf movement financed by the Gates/Broad/Walton et al group of billionaires that hope to profit from the total privatization of the system. Diane Ravitch has seen it up close which is why she became an apostate.
Achievement data does tell stories Nancy. It tells us that society is not yet doing enough for the poor, and then it tells us again next year… and the next and the next….
Achievement data proves the progressives case not the reformers case but Denial goes on and on.
Lets test again next year because we don’t like the answers from the last 25 years everywhere in the world. All the tests prove is that poverty is the problem.
Good thing I saved this piece called – Misuse of statistics
“A misuse of statistics occurs when a statistical argument asserts a falsehood. In some cases, the misuse may be accidental. In others, it is purposeful and for the gain of the perpetrator. When the statistical reason involved is false or misapplied, this constitutes a statistical fallacy.
The false statistics trap can be quite damaging to the quest for knowledge. For example, in medical science, correcting a falsehood may take decades and cost lives.
Misuses can be easy to fall into. Professional scientists, even mathematicians and professional statisticians, can be fooled by even some simple methods, even if they are careful to check everything. Scientists have been known to fool themselves with statistics due to lack of knowledge of probability theory and lack of standardization of their tests.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics
And yes Doug, its a fallacy that you have inserted – “Achievement data does tell stories Nancy. It tells us that society is not yet doing enough for the poor, and then it tells us again next year… and the next and the next….
Achievement data proves the progressives case not the reformers case but Denial goes on and on.”
Its a fallacy, that appears to be the truth – only and when students are given inappropriate instruction that does not meet their learning needs, and the correct and timely remediation to correct the path and put the students back on the pathway of steady achievement. In other words, in reality, when a student does not received remediation and poor instruction, the outcomes of students will be poor. Plenty of parents can give Doug a earful on educators who told their children were only C students, based on NOT the achievement data, but on the subjective SES variables and biases of teachers.
I am afraid the data streams of standardized testing and other testing are not being misused in the public education system, to worked for the hidden agendas of the adults and education stakeholders to assert the SES variables as being the main predictor of student achievement. Shame on them, and more so when teachers are not trained at the teachers’ faculties to read data without falling prey to misusing the data and claimed the subjective values of SES as the fault of the failure of the students.
Achievement data tells the story of achievement progression or the lack of progression. It does not tell the stories nor cannot tell the stories of the SES variables. that lie outside of the school. The achievement data can only reliably point to the school variables. After that point, extending the data to external SES student variables it becomes unreliable to ascertain if any external SES variables are important, relative to the school variables.
Time to study Daniel Willingham and a host of other researchers that has and still are – on going research in student data. .
Daniel Willingham has strong reservations about testing and strongly opposes the use of student testing to measure teachers.
You can site him anytime you like.
All standardized testing on Earth demonstrates the overwhelming effects of SES and very little else. The experts at PISA confirm that American results are due to very high numbers of very low SES students.
Smell the coffee.
Daniel Willingham points out that merit pay for teachers based on test scores or even growth in test scores is a serious mistake.
Smart fellow.
Straight From The Horse’s Mouth — “Standard tests improve accountability” — Pasi Sahlberg
Just came up on Pasi Sahlberg’s Twitter —
Echoes from Saskatchewan visit: Standard tests improve accountability http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/Standard+tests+improve+accountability/8066625/story.html
“Recently, Finnish activist Pasi Sahlberg, who opposes standardized tests, shared some thought-provoking ideas on developing high-quality teachers, accountability and nurturing a moral commitment to education.
He also unfortunately dropped this whopper: “Accountability is what’s left when you take out responsibility.”
I think the point of Sahlberg’s presentation recently in Saskatoon was that teachers in Finland take their jobs responsibly and are accountable for outcomes. Then the story goes on to say how disheartening it is when graduates here go to university, lacking the basics, example: math skills.
THAT is an interesting concept and I guess Pasi Sahlberg read the whole article he referenced. Implication of his statement is: If you as a teacher are NOT responsible, then you will have accountability measures enforced.
I think that is the message behind all these “reform” efforts that are now so strenuously resisted and protested by teacher unions. Teachers in large measure are just not held accountable for results. Look at all the reports from the universities, for example!
What I would like to know is if teachers in Finland, if any, fail in being responsible and accountable for outcomes. How ARE THEY TESTED and found out? AND, what happens to them?
Pasi: Where are you? What do you say?
I think he is in Amsterdam tomorrow? Or does anyone else know what happens to a Finnish teacher who fails to bring a student or students up to speed?
Tests of student achievement are not designed to measure teachers as the test makers will tell you directly. Merit pay is proving impossible in the states because the same teacher varies wildly from year to year.
Nancys favourite psychologist has a great youtube that explains why teachers cannot be evaluated by student scores even so called value added scores. It simply does not work.
Even the most ardent student test advocates understand that student scores cannot be used to evaluate teachers.
Principals, superintendents, directors and trustees all understand that scores cannot be used with teachers unless they are wildly off from the expected year in and year out. That is very rare.
Nothing is enforced because nobody believes in the system. Too many variables.
I recall the first time the grade 10 literacy test results came back to my high school. The principal brought the list of those who failed to a meeting of department heads. Every single kid was already in special Ed getting tons of support. Everybody looked around at each other and said duh. Is anybody surprised.
While I do not think standardized tests are going away soon, Doug’s views on them has the overwhelming weight of evidence. While I see them as having some use as an “audit” that’s it. It is what happens between tests that counts.
Their history, going back nearly a century and a half, notes that as soon as we started grading and testing as quick and easy ways to sort kids
– there were serious criticisms from the start (they distort achievement)
– interesting that the “standardized test” was originally a “progressive” measure hoping that it would level the playing field so that rich kids would not be favoured
(though the “gentleman’s C is still around)
– grades have little or no influence on student learning, especially those who get low grades.
– efforts to link testing with teacher effectiveness have been tried for 2 centuries without success- so let’s stop this.
– my hope is that at least the march of testing as seen in the US has stalled; like Doug I hope for some retreat on this front because they do not work, except for auditing purposes- this can likely be done with random sampling
I have written in posts posts and other threads about other ways to ensuring we do a better job of diagnosing student strengths and weaknesses and working with them.
I actually do this with kids and adults. Many teacher do with better effects than testing the @#!$@*&$ out of them.
The days of sorting talent is long gone- or should be.
Our job is to develop talent.
Relying on a test to do this is like relying on a thermometer as a doctor’s only tool.
We should know better.
One of the first uses of mass testing was the testing of immigrants to the United States on Ellis Island at the turn of the lest century. Alfred Binnets tests came to the conclusion that Jews, Eastern Europeans and southern Europeans would not make good Americans since they weretoo dull.
The entire history of testing is full of this stuff. As I mentioned previously, American Latinos are convinced that tests have the sole function of limiting their futures.
This is NOT Alfred Binet but his American adaptors.
And the entire history is NOT full of this. See earlier post.
Oh well,in my work of reading remediation I test pre and post a few times throughout the year.
I like to know I am being effective,if you don`t like that kind of thing,what can we do ?At least the teachers I train learn to love doing that as well.Help where you can,groan.
Of course every teacher evaluates Jo Anne, are you being obtuse on purpose?
The difference is the state mass testing and thanks to FOI, the Fraser Institute publishing it in the paper and drawing unsubstantiated conclusions.
Of course Alfred Binnet was hardly at Ellis Island on purpose.
Some of you should read up on Taylorism and its application to schools.
“my hope is that at least the march of testing as seen in the US has stalled; like Doug I hope for some retreat on this front because they do not work, except for auditing purposes- this can likely be done with random sampling”
Random sampling eh? In an education system that refuses to look at the outcomes of students, much less providing timely intervention to prevent the dismal outcomes of students.
And yet, Pasi Sahlberg tweets – ” Standard tests improve accountability”.
“grades have little or no influence on student learning, especially those who get low grades.”
I beg to differ, as well as a good many researchers – grades do have great influence upon students.. More so on the kids who are struggling in learning. Or perhaps have never witnesses the tears of children trying to expressed, the teacher hates me between the teacher won’t help me to the teacher thinks I am dumb to the more devastating one, ‘I hate school’. Just a sample from the primary grades where all can be found on the parents files and the researchers. that lie outside of the public education system. Children of the Code and the Mind-Shame theory.
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/
And guess what, children walking in to take standard tests with weak reading and writing skills, or for that matter already know they are going to fail, and the question is by how much. Even my youngest child already figure that one out by the age of six – and yet she tried so hard to succeed. A failing grade made my child tried that much harder the next time, even though the completing thought running through her head, why is it so hard for me, looking enviously at other children who find reading and writing so easy for them. Then by the miracle of default, the children who have the weaker reading and writing skills, will give up, and accept their fate in various ways, that they are too dumb for school. Grades certainly influence student learning. Its a pity the public education system do not see it, are deaf to it and remain silent until one of the silent elephants decides to speak out. The elephants get put under my the bus, by the very same educators that claims the standardized testing is harmful to children and their learning.
One of the elephants is this set – ” Craig Alexander, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist for Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group presents his argument for why Canadian businesses and governments can prosper significantly by investing in adult literacy programs.”
http://decoda.ca/resources/rsc-adults/rsc-adults-business/canadas-literacy-challenge-craig-alexander-2012/
Craig is safe providing he does not wonder in the territory of the public education system, discovering that the public education system has become the steady supplier of the increasing numbers of adults with low literacy and numeracy skills. For low literacy – 5 out of 10 adults and for low numberacy – 6 out of 10 adults. Craig talks about the difficulties and problems arising from low literacy and numeracy in work and society.
So my question is what does happen in between tests in the classroom, or as John puts it, like a good many educators have in the past, – “The days of sorting talent is long gone- or should be.
Our job is to develop talent.
Relying on a test to do this is like relying on a thermometer as a doctor’s only tool.”
Without testing, how does accountability, much less finding out the strengths/weaknesses of students are going to be based on? Teachers’ observations? Teachers training? The teacher’s expertise?
As Andy Hargreaves has mentioned, if you want to evaluate one child the classroom teacher is far more accurate. If you want to evaluate a system, random samples are just as good and far less expensive.
This is a fabulous paper-topical to testing and accountability measures.
Using the data to make a plan and do better…
Click to access WhatWorks.pdf
Fine paper, Jo-Anne, which supports much of the opposing sides above. No mention of standardized tests (note NOT the same as “standard” tests). Mention of classroom assessments, including tests and power these can have when done well and aligned to curriculum.
BTW, in reference to an earlier post by Nancy,
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/
does not support the idea that grades have power to improve learning.
and
I await the citation of the “good many researchers” that grades have positive influence.
I cite the following that they do not
– Tom Gusky
– Dylan Wiliam
– Paul Black
– Bob Linn
– Jim Popham
– John Hattie
– Lorna Earl
– Ann Davies
– Robert Marzano
the first eight above (from three continents) made their reputations as assessment experts.
What might influence me that they have power?
– when students do more than look at a grade when they get their paper
but instead
– look at where they did well
– where they did badly
– ask or better yet figure out why
– do something about it
Having taught hundreds of classes with thousands of students over the decades and talked to hundreds of other teacher, the above use of grades as motivator is extremely rare (yes it has happened but on the fingers of one hand I am afraid).
The above scenario is easier for parents to do working one on one.
Would be nice if it happened in classrooms but this is physically difficult.
I know this from experience as a parent and grandparent as well as experience in music, drama, and athletics where we do
– assess (but not grade)
– compare it to a tangible standard
– figure what we need to do to improve
– work on the strategy to improve.
The fact that this thread has many posts attests, not to the power of standardized tests, but to the emotions we brig when evaluation of any sort- good, bad, or ugly comes up.
Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, was worried about this more than a century ago when his designed his testing for poor children’s readiness for public school. He warned against labelling. He was interested in early diagnosis and using assessment6 for improvement.
The Americans, operating under some different assumptions—some clearly racist—turned his work into the IQ test.
So let’s return to this century. We have enough to do to help kids learn in the here and now. Better teaching and a limited use of testing would be a good start.
Pasi Sahlberg on Education in Finland. Upshot is reject every position of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and you can be #1. Special note to Tunya read the standardized testing paragraph.
http://pasisahlberg.com/text-test/
THE LAST HURRAH — Part ONE
The noble experiment — compulsory monopoly government schooling (CMGS) — is being seriously challenged as never before. As concepts, each of those four elements are contested:
1 Compulsory: Just what is expected from bringing your child to a building called school? Without any kind of tests or measurements we really don’t know what is being achieved. Some call it a 12-year sentence equivalent to being in prison. Standardized testing is fiercely opposed by the industry, partly to guarantee a captive unquestioning audience who don’t leave.
2 Monopoly: Why is shopping around for appropriate education for your child so discouraged and obstacled? Parental choice is one of the main complaints of the anti-reform movement. There is fear that competition and choice loses clientele.
3 Government: Why does education have to be performed by government public servants? They don’t act like professionals. Are they really “piece workers” but who can’t be graded for faulty assembly? Deprofessionalization is another of the complaints of the anti-reform movement. Then why don’t teachers form professional organizations?
4 Schooling: Going through the motions, warming the seats, taking a head count for the daily credit that comes to the school for the child’s attendance is hardly “education” — it’s schooling. If a private or charter school is chosen then this is called “privatization” — a serious moral error, say the anti-reformers, because it’s against the “public good.” Isn’t public value accrued regardless of how you get an education?
Some call this “public education” but it’s really one huge industry — K to university — that more conveniently serves as an employment agency than a demonstrable service for the young. The anti-reformers, now get this; WANT to retain the CMGS system so that they can take turns in controlling it, top down and continue receiving self-interest benefits.
These industry people are completely hypocritical if they refuse to see that they’ve entirely brought this negativity upon themselves — through self-indulgence, through empire-building, through trampling on democracy, through refusing to hear, really “hear” what parents are saying, Having usurped education out of the hands of parents, these systems people refuse to accept parent voices and choices. Where are the parents rights? Where are the training courses in parent relations?
THE LAST HURRAH — Part TWO
Diane Ravitch spent decades in the vanguard of reform movements, which she now totally repudiates. Now she is zealous in what is called “anti-reform”. “ I feel I have to make up for the damage I’ve done.” (Public Defender, The New Yorker, Nov 2012)
She will be one of the leaders involved in a four-day rally of anti-reformers in Washington, DC, April 4-7, 2013. http://unitedoptout.com/event/occupy-doe-2-0-the-battle-for-public-schools-read-all-details-here/ How many Canadian teacher unionists will attend?
The stakes are high — the industry is trying to shore-up a crumbling façade.
The 21st Century is demonstrating cracks in this long-standing experimental model of education. Just follow all the education conferences all over the world. They’re not about education. They’re about protecting the safe harbor of compulsory monopoly government schooling (CMGS) that they’ve so heavily invested in. Long-time teachers on the ground say they’ve seen all this tweaking and “global” planning before. A good number of teachers would also welcome choices to avoid all these meddlings and top-down, centralized dictates.
This person, Valerie Hannon, has been across Canada to develop “base camps”. She is part of GELP, Global Education Leaders’ Program. Does anyone understand this? Is this the future? YELP !
http://www.innovationunit.org/blog/201111/world-innovation-summit-education-2011-wise-global-take-innovating-education
Pasi Sahlberg, the missionary from Finland spreading the good news about Finland’s education, warns against GERM — Global Education Reform Movement. He is against competition, choice and accountability measures including standardized testing.
Maybe we need better testing strategies.
But be sure, anti-reformers, parents want and need markers by which to fulfill THEIR biological duty in the education of their children. They need to know if their children have the basic ramp by which to keep learning. And be sure, anti-reformers, the public, the taxpayers, want proper accounting for all the heavy-duty spending on a disappointing record where graduation levels are poor and where graduates need remediation in basic skills if they go to university. And now we have legislators trying to help reform efforts by bringing in accountability measures and choices such as charters.
The entrenched education system as we have known it is fighting for its life. Meanwhile parents and grandparents have to hold firm to make sure those in their care get the best education possible under the circumstances.
I think these protests by educators are really a last ditch stand — the last hurrah — of a system past its due date.
THE LAST HURRAH — Part TWO
Diane Ravitch spent decades in the vanguard of reform movements, which she now totally repudiates. Now she is zealous in what is called “anti-reform”. “ I feel I have to make up for the damage I’ve done.” (Public Defender, The New Yorker, Nov 2012)
She will be one of the leaders involved in a four-day rally of anti-reformers in Washington, DC, April 4-7, 2013.http://unitedoptout.com/event/occupy-doe-2-0-the-battle-for-public-schools-read-all-details-here/ How many Canadian teacher unionists will attend?
The stakes are high — the industry is trying to shore-up a crumbling façade.
The 21st Century is demonstrating cracks in this long-standing experimental model of education. Just follow all the education conferences all over the world. They’re not about education. They’re about protecting the safe harbor of compulsory monopoly government schooling (CMGS) that they’ve so heavily invested in. Long-time teachers on the ground say they’ve seen all this tweaking and “global” planning before. A good number of teachers would also welcome choices to avoid all these meddlings and top-down, centralized dictates.
This person, Valerie Hannon, has been across Canada to develop “base camps”. She is part of GELP, Global Education Leaders’ Program. Does anyone understand this? Is this the future? YELP !
http://www.innovationunit.org/blog/201111/world-innovation-summit-education-2011-wise-global-take-innovating-education
That compulsory, monopolistic, state run, schooling has given us the most educated population on this Earth. We are the only society on this Earth where more than 50% of our young people go to post secondary education. We are here even miles ahead of Finland. The nations that dominate in the world of education follow a similar state run, monopolistic, compulsory education system.
If I were made Czar of education across the land I would complete the job by
1) The abolition of the catholic system
2) Refusal to give one red cent to any school that is not totally democratically control under a school board.
3) no money for any religious education.
4) A long slow phase out of the streaming system
5) A heavy state ownership and control of voluntary early childhood education down to age 2 with free wrap around child care.
6) The abolition of tuition fees and very generous scaled to income living allowances for post secondary
7) After school and summer education programs for the poorer schools.
8) Much smaller classes at all levels
9) A government owned textbook and technology aquisition corporation to drive down costs.
10) A gradual increase in educational demands to the Finland level of 2 MAs for every teacher.
These reforms could rocket Canada forward to become the world’s education super power.
It will be a great day when there is not one single private or religious school in Canada.
We need testing to keep the “system” in check. Accountability required.That`s called living in the real world.
We dont need to keep the system in check and we dont need accountability. Pisa is enough and it says we are doing great. Test mad America is doing very badly.
The Ever-encroaching State Against The Individual
It’s a sad, sad day for me.
1 I was reading a UNESCO document about early childhood education. We are having severe pressure in BC to bring in $10 a day daycare with a provincial election looming and the lobbyists eagerly awaiting a socialist government. A “paradigm shift” is to happen if integrated daycare is then brought in. “Family primacy” over early childhood will be replaced by shared responsibility between state and family. Reminds me of the co-parenting notion some school board official in Ontario was talking about last year.
I will fight hard to retain the primacy of the family and of the individual vs the state.
2 Now Doug state’s “It will be a great day when there is not one single private or religious school in Canada.”
I truly fear for Canada if this opinion is widely held by the teaching community. Do teacher-training institutions hold this view? Do teacher unions?
3 Does this view apply equally to home education — that parents shouldn’t educate their children at home?
I prefer state primacy over the family when it comes to education. The state knows what it is doing and what is good for the child. The families are often ignorant on this score. Individual rights are important but they do not trump collective rights. western democracy is mainly about sorting out the balance. We once believed that healthcare was an individual right. We have evolved to see it as a collective right. Child care is going the same way.
American women were recently asked in a major survey of their #1 political wish and it was affordible high quality child care. Only the state can keep the cost down and the quality up bh spreading the cost across all citizens.
For our society to progress we need to find more and more way for the 1% to pay for what the 99% need.
I would loved to be a fly on the wall, Doug- when the state is over riding your individual rights and demand to dropped your pants, to search your diapers or the clerk at the government bureau – declares your driver’s license invalid or the next door neighbour is taking you to the human rights commission because he doesn’t like the cut of your jib. It offends his sensibilities.
Doug has been too long in the public education sector that thinks the state rules supreme over civil/human rights. Standardized testing or for that matter any type of testing is simply a measure of accountability in the context of education. At the very least, standardized testing holds the education system to account for by the public. Its good to know that two schools down the road, one school has 76 % of their grade three students making the grade and the other school, only 59 % making the grade. Which school would a parent select?
Online discussion on this thread seems to have morphed into a War of Words and entrenched positions along Education’s Maginot Line. Standardized Testing and Accountability is a lightening rod issue and it sparks noise and fury. The last word on this topic belongs to me, for now.
Isnt it nice to agree on community hubs.
Nancy, if their was a difference like that it would have nothing to do with the school but with the SES of the 2 schools. You cannot all select the first school. If you do, we close school number 2 and move all the kids into the first school with an addition. At that point you are no farther ahead.
Here is what “School Choice” means in the USA. I don’t have that much money but if I go to my neighbourhood school, my white kid will have to go to school with too many black kids. Charter schools are being used to resegregate the American south and inner cities.
Nancy you are way out there with Tunya on the extreme Libertarian position (her party). Most Canadians are not there. It is the Margret Thatcher position. “there is no such thing as society only individuals.” The vast majority of Canadians are far to the left of you, in fact, most conservatives are far to the left of you. It must be frustrating hangin’ with the 1% farthest right Canadians and wondering what is wrong with everybody else?
Dr.Sally Shaywitz-1 child in 5 is dyslexic,nothing to do with SES!
I wanted to honour Paul`s request as I agree with him,we`ve said it all and everyone has a right to their opinion.
Then I guess testing results will not be congruent to SES, except that they are everywhere on Earth.
Lots of present examples in the smaller communities, of which one is dealing with the identical SES variables. Such as the Catholic school filled with kids hanging out of the rafters to the public school with empty classrooms.
Not only that, one can go and do the historical route – and read all about the public school based on Protestant values, and war in the legislative building why even the Protestant kids are attending the Catholic school. The parents say its a better school than the public school.
Again Doug, standardized testing has nothing to do with civil rights. If it did, all that testing by the teachers would be declared an act of discrimination. The collective rights of groups can only come into being, by the individual rights of citizens. If the state overrides the individual rights, in favour of the collective rights of the sub-groups and entire groups in order for the state to control the activities of their citizens. In this case, the public education sector – the state becomes the final authority and dictator of what education will be and not be.
Its why the public education model as it stands now, is unsustainable. Everyday the individual rights and the collective rights of students are being overridden by the best interests of the public education system and its stakeholders to maintain their monopoly and authority. Standardized testing came into being for one reason only – the public education system model was no longer doing its job and that is educating all students that enters into the public education system. The standardized testing came into being, based on the reports, complaints and the outcomes of the data streams across society that was generated at the bottom levels of society from individuals and groups of people. Its the continued violation of the individual rights of students such as receiving reading instruction without having to avail of a private tutor or outside private services because the school no longer provides or will not provide instruction that differs from the one-sized-fits-all approaches being used. The Moore case can be cited of refusing to provide reading instruction to the Moore boy, that would have helped him to learn and overcome his reading difficulties.
Standardized testing would not posed a problem for any student, but it poses many problems if the individual student was denied access to education services that would allowed the student the tools and knowledge to making a passing grade. Its akin being denied driver instruction lessons, and forcing the person to take the driver’s exam, which is a standardized test at their expense, that benefits the government’s revenue coffers. The chances are few would passed the driver’s examination.
Doug, you sure have a warped view about civil/human rights when you think the state should be in charge of the rights.
Nancy, Your views are similar to Tunya the Libertarian. This is a party so extreme that it cannot get 1% of the vote anywhere.
There is a long history of black, Latino and working class history of resistance to standardized testing. In Mexico they have giant demonstrations by the peasants and the poor against testing because they understand that it is a tool of their oppression.
The tide is going out on testing because it does not fix anything.
Finland #1
USA #34
You will never get it, until the day your own civil rights are being dismissed, in favour of the local fellow at the government agency denying service because you are passed the age criteria. And if you should argue about it, a night in jail will be in store for you. I have never heard of protests about standardized testing by the people on the lower income levels. Standardized testing and protests are coming from the professionals in the public education field that is supported by the higher income professional class of a great diversity that is in their best interests to keep the public education as it is with no changes that hurt’s the public education’s authority, and its monopoly.
That said any demonstrations that have taken place across the globe by people at the lower end of the income ladder, for the most part its all about having access to the public education system, where the two tiered and sometimes added tiers of quality of education such as the 4-tiered education model in China is what the protests are all about. In Canada, access is governed by providing the minimum levels of providing education services under the school acts. Another way of putting it, all the public school have to do is to provide a desk, a set of books and a teacher but what they do not have to legally provide are the tools to access the books, the knowledge and the education opportunities. Education quality becomes whatever the public education system and its authority say so. And them comes the causalities, the students who many never reached their academic potential nor even acquired the necessary skills and abilities to navigate in the adult world or be prepared for post-secondary studies.
Standardized testing will be in placed for many years to come….for the reason that the public education system does not have to legally provide a quality education for ALL children.
What you fail to understand as critics of the public school system is that the ps system is loved and respected in,our society and only out done by our state monopoly socialistic medicare system that Canadians use to define themselves.
When you are half a dozen malcontents on,a few right wing discussion boards you start to mistake your mutual agreement for mas appeal.
Go ahead, campaign for educational privatization. See if you can,fill a phone booth.
Texas just announced that they are cutting back on testing under public pressure. You heard me- TEXAS.
Testing is a placebo so that governments will not have to pay for real improvements. Set your watch until Idle No More sees the test results in Sask. I can tell you right now First Nations will be on the botom behind by s mile. What next, test again next year until it improves?
http://www.fairtest.org/protests-against-teaching-mexico
Education Tourism Based On Standardized Testing — Part ONE
If it wasn’t for the publication of international standardized school scores Finland would not be attracting so much educator attention.
There is now a constant flow of edu-tourists visiting Finland to learn from their successes. Many analytic articles and news stories also flow because of the phenomenon of Finnish high achievement lessons.
Is Finland to be treated as a “tall poppy” to be cut down to size because people are jealous of its success?
No, it is seen as a beacon, a lighthouse, a model to be studied, admired, and from which we can learn.
There is no defensiveness in Finland about its education success. There is pride of achievement — comparisons by other countries yield insights for their own improvements.
Now, let’s contrast the slamming attacks we get in North America and UK to standardized tests. Instead of using tests as benchmarks from which to advance, standardized tests are condemned. Defensiveness is rampant.
Public spotlights on public school performance are bringing forth critical analyses by decision-makers — those legislators under tight economic constraints who are looking for “the best bang for the buck”.
Audits and tests help direct policies and political decisions. In New Zealand, when it was found that 2/3 of the education dollar never reached the classroom, most of the middle-man level was scrapped in favor of school-based management. In the US, Parent Trigger legislation and charter schools are arising because parents in failing schools resent being trapped and want choices in seeking the best education for their children.
Preservation of an unresponsive system is not topmost in the minds of frustrated parents or aware politicians.
Education Tourism Based On Standardized Testing — Part TWO
Now, here is a current example, which — because of standardized tests — should direct some education-tourism.
In BC we’ve just finished the elementary Foundation Schools Assessments and last year’s results and rankings are in.
Out of 853 schools 20 were described as having shown the fastest academic improvement over 5 years. 10 are public schools where the family income is below average. At 3 of these schools, 33 % of students are ESL.
AND, 3 of the top 10 fastest improving schools are located in Cranbrook, BC, population 19,000. Cranbrook should be bracing itself for some edu-tourists. Will this happen? I’m sure there is much we can learn from Cranbrook’s committed achievements.
This report, produced annually by the Fraser Institute, puts to rest the myth that low SES and high immigrant populations are the reason for low scores. See: “46 elementary schools across B.C. score improvement in Fraser Institute school rankings” http://www.fraserinstitute.org/publicationdisplay.aspx?id=19440&terms=Cranbrook#
And, another good piece of news from Finland, is that special needs students, because of concentrated and specialized attention are proudly included in assessments. “ . . . paying attention to the weaker schoolchildren raises the average level of performance.” (Why Finnish pupils are top of the European game http://euobserver.com/education/31458 )
There are plenty of examples where — because of the signals disclosed through standardized testing — schools then dedicate themselves to improvement — regardless of low SES, high immigrant populations, or special needs students — frequent excuses used by the anti-reform movement.
To evoke Finland on the pro-testing side of the argument simply provokes guffaws. Finland has one test near graduation, it discourages testing and does the least testing in the western world.
Finns tell everyone that will listen that their success is a demonstration that test holds a nation back and no testing is the way to get ahead.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/staiv.htm
The well known and omitted by the anti-standardized testing crowd are the FINNISH MATRICULATION EXAMINATION – a standardized test composed of more then 4 tests of which 4 is mandatory. “Nowadays, the purpose of the examination is to discover whether pupils have assimilated the knowledge and skills required by the curriculum for the upper secondary school and whether they have reached an adequate level of maturity in line with that school`s goals. Passing the Matriculation Examination entitles the candidate to continue his or her studies at university. The examination is arranged in upper secondary schools.
The Matriculation Examination is regulated by Section 18 (766/2004) of the Upper Secondary School Act, the Act on the Organisation of the Matriculation Examination(672/2005) and the Government Decree on the Matriculation Examination (915/2005).
The Matriculation Examination Board is responsible for administering the examination, its arrangements and execution. The Board issues guidelines on the contents, the arrangements and the assessment of the tests. The Ministry of Education nominates the chair of the Board and its members (about forty in number) at the suggestion of universities, institutions of higher learning and the National Board of Education. The members represent the various subjects covered by the Matriculation Examination. About 330 associate members assist the members in the work of preparing and assessing the tests. The technical arrangement of the tests is taken care of by the Board’s secretariat, which has twenty-two civil service employees.
The Matriculation Examination is held biannually, in spring and in autumn, in all Finnish upper secondary schools, at the same time.”
http://www.ylioppilastutkinto.fi/en/
Not too many second chances either. Would love to see the data outcome streams on this one. On another site – “Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish expert in education and director general of the Helsinki-based Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, confirmed by email that the overall standardized exam consists of a minimum of four tests, but students “if they wish can take more exams.” Typically, he said, students take five or six tests. These may be spread over a 12-month period, he said, though most students take most of their tests in the spring of their last school year.
Notably, too, Sahlberg emailed, Finnish students who focus on vocational training after completing the country’s nine mandatory years of basic education do not have to take a state-mandated exam of any kind. In 2010, 45 percent of the students who continued their schooling after the nine years chose the vocational track, Satu Mäki-Lassila of Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture told us by email.”
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2012/dec/17/thomas-ratliff/thomas-ratliff-says-massachusetts-imposes-three-ma/
What Sahlberg won’t openly talk about is the standardized testing at the high school level. Considered them final exams and the only way to be admitted to university. If the student is in the vocational track, graduates will unlikely get the chance to attend university because entry to university requires the passing of the MATRICULATION EXAMINATION. Does life-time learning occurred in Finland. Well – I let the readers be the judge……
Testing clearly does not reallocate resources to where they are needed or we would witness a massive eallocation of educational resources from the affluent towards the poor. The affluent do not like that conclusions so lets test again next year and see if we get a different answer.
“The affluent do not like that conclusions so lets test again next year and see if we get a different answer.”
An excuse, like the very one above is commonly used at the school level to delay education services such as reading remediation, or assessments to determined learning difficulties by waiting another year or two in the hope that students’ learning will improved over time via by report cards.
Of course the myth of the anti-reformers is reforms such as testing supposedly reallocate resources to where they are needed, as Doug has conveyed is not true.
Resources are not reallocate due to reform changes and usually never are within the education system model. The educational resources are predetermined in advance and kept at numbers that are insufficient for demand at the local school. Hence, the resources now become scarce, that allows the conditions for the various and diverse needs of a school to complete for the resources.
Doug’s use of the word affluent, is trying to relay another myth being propagated by some within the education system, that the affluent are more demanding of the available resources, and as such, creating shortages for the less affluent schools and students. Not at all true, because there is two kinds of resources, of which one is the kind, that is given to all children and the other kind, are resources that become the scarce resources at all schools, no matter the income.
Standardized testing is not part of scarce resources. Its given to every student, in the same way as textbooks are given to every student. However, Doug implies that the affluent are the ones that do not like the conclusions of standardized testing and want to be tested again the following year. The implication is that the affluent are hogging the resources, and not allowing a reallocation of resources to the less affluent. Laughable, because the public education system in advance, selects and predetermines the allocation of all resources. Thus, the cycle completes itself, where the more affluent seeks private services such as tutoring for their children, and other less affluent schools and parents make do with the available resources and skills of the school.
Another way of looking at it is to change the word affluent to high achievers. Would the affluent parent be demanding another test, if their children received an unexpected lower achievement on a standardized test? No, and like other parents before them, the parent will go the private route, rather than waiting for help at the school, and fighting to complete for scarce resources at the school level. The less affluent parent, have fewer options at their disposal, and as such must relied on the school to provide.
Standardized testing informs parents on their children’s achievement levels, their progression, and the school’s ability and skills to advanced their children in learning. Standardized testing cannot and will not allocated resources from the affluent to the poor.
I hope you read to the last paragraph where the NAACP asked congress to stop relying on tests. Many other civil rights groups have taken the same position.
Education Tourism Based On Standardized Testing — Part TWO
Now, here is a current example, which — because of standardized tests — should direct some education-tourism.
In BC we’ve just finished the elementary Foundation Schools Assessments and last year’s results and rankings are in.
Out of 853 schools 20 were described as having shown the fastest academic improvement over 5 years. 10 are public schools where the family income is below average. At 3 of these schools, 33 % of students are ESL.
AND, 3 of the top 10 fastest improving schools are located in Cranbrook, BC, population 19,000. Cranbrook should be bracing itself for some edu-tourists. Will this happen? I’m sure there is much we can learn from Cranbrook’s committed achievements.
This report, produced annually by the Fraser Institute, puts to rest the myth that low SES and high immigrant populations are the reason for low scores. See: “46 elementary schools across B.C. score improvement in Fraser Institute school rankings” http://www.fraserinstitute.org/publicationdisplay.aspx?id=19440&terms=Cranbrook#
And, another good piece of news from Finland, is that special needs students, because of concentrated and specialized attention are proudly included in assessments. “ . . . paying attention to the weaker schoolchildren raises the average level of performance.” (Why Finnish pupils are top of the European game http://euobserver.com/education/31458 )
There are plenty of examples where — because of the signals disclosed through standardized testing — schools then dedicate themselves to improvement — regardless of low SES, high immigrant populations, or special needs students — frequent excuses used by the anti-reform movement.
Linda Darling-Hammond on testing and achievement gaps.
http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/blog/entry/295
Withholding Of Report Card Information Was A Signal To Parents
Recently in BC, during teacher union job actions, when report cards were sent home blank this was a signal — to parents and everyone else — that parents don’t matter. This proved to be a successful test to diminish the role of parents to monitor their children’s progress in public schools. Because few raised their voices against this slap against this sacrosanct right of parents, they got away with it.
When a similar test was repeated in Ontario — this time with just one line on the report cards — again few protested.
What we don’t generally know is that this tactic is in the playbook of teacher unions during strikes and job actions in other parts of the world as well. We find this out thanks to the Internet.
I think there is a major — undeclared — war going on to exclude parents as much as possible from knowing about how well their public schools are performing.
I think that is one of the main reasons why standardized tests are being so vehemently opposed and demonized by those in the education establishment — to further exclude parents from making informed decisions and choices on behalf of their children.
I think parents need to be perceptive and alert to the ways in which their involvement in education decisions is being constantly eroded and compromised.
Standardized tests are opposed for one reason, they are bad for kids and they lower educational achievement.
The USA was #18 in math in PISA until George Bush instituted the test mad NCLB in order to allow the USA to catch up. Now they are #31 in math, same in science and they have made no progress in reading either.
Tunya, the Labour laws of every province allow unions when striking, to withdraw any or evey service they offer. Management has one choise, lock them out or negotiate. They are not allowed to lower wages. It is the law. These laws have been tested in courts many times. you really ought to know what you are talking about before you pontificate.
This says it all….
Canada Is Not A Totalitarian Nation Yet
Though we accept that education of our youth is “compulsory” — as a biological requirement for a person to be functional in our society— that need not happen in a specified place.
The reason we have “public education” is that Canada is a welfare state. It provides back-ups and safety-nets for those who need help in obtaining an education for their child. If parents are unable or unwilling to educate the child(ren) themselves or don’t enroll them with a tutor or private school, the government provides a free back-up service.
Upon enrolment in a public school — with a parent or guardian signature — a certain contract falls into place. School Acts specify the considerations a parent should expect. The School Acts across Canada clearly specify that there are to be three written progress report cards. Note, they are called “progress” reports.
Furthermore, Family Law Acts specify that parents are not to be denied health or education information from third parties.
Public school report cards are deliberately called ”progress” reports because primarily and ultimately it is the parents who are responsible for the child’s education. They are to monitor progress in the event expectations are not met. This enables the parent to advocate for more services, enroll in tutoring or a new school or home educate.
When progress report cards are not delivered to the parents when expected this is actually a breach of a contract.
Furthermore, harm may actually result to even the “point of no return” if the parent is so disabled or disempowered that appropriate and timely intervention is not initiated. (See “Matthew Effect”)
In BC when the teacher union prepared to strike or withdraw services it took its list of 30 or so requests to the Labour Relations Board. The LRB denied only one — attendance must be taken and this information was to be conveyed to the office. Presumably this was for the guarantee of safety of the children having reached the school.
I contend that the request for withdrawal of Progress Report Cards should also have been denied at this point on the grounds that this information is requisite for the parents to continue doing their part in the contract. Parents unvaryingly know there are to be three such reports during a school term. There is a “need to know” basis here.
It was only later in the game that the employer group on behalf of the school boards sought to have this withholding declared illegal — in effect an illegal strike. Before this was actualized, the job action was over.
Meanwhile, the government, through the Ministry of Education, ordered the deployment of report cards to parents — blank or not. Perhaps this was a legal maneuver to avoid being sued because of the School Act specification. But on the whole, this drew public outrage as a farce of reporting and squandering of mailing costs.
School Acts across Canada should be amended to make this right of parents to evaluation information not subject to teacher union collective bargaining tactics.
[This comment should be read alongside my previous comment — “Withholding Of Report Card Information Was A Signal To Parents” — wherein I conclude that current educator protests of standardized testing are part of a piece to exclude parents from proper information that is important in fulfilling their biological and legal role in the education of their children.]
The fact tbat reports were not denied means that you are wrong. I fully understand attendance, it is a safety issue. You cant seem to understand the fact tbat teachers on strike can “strike” anything they want. It is not up to you, it is up to them. A strike supercedes all duties of the scbool legislation.
How is it that, you cant grasp that point?
Let me try again. Strikes , if they happen come at the end of contracts. Therefore “the contract is over” if teachers go to work while on strike while a new contract is being negotiated they can choose to do or not do whatever they want but the board must eith give them full pay or lock them out. If the board chooses lock out there will be no report card, no classes, no parents nights, nothing.
A recent Pew Research inding in the USA clarifiies Republican prooblem. When asked if they wanted smaller less intrusive government Americans answered yes but as each massive area of government expenditure was tested the answer was no, social security, medicare, medicaid, ……
People like cutting government in theory just not in practice or put another way, cut things other people use but nothing I use.
Interesting that when asked the most popular area of public expenditure is education.
89% want it increased 10% want it cut.
This is the problem for Canadian Conservatives as well. Canadians want lower taxes but far greater spending on health and education. Sorry pick one.
http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/blog/entry/575
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/12/real-consequences-of-school-choice/
Ontario’s Stephen Hurley recently invited a member of our Action Canada Task Force on Standardized testing to participate in a conversation for the VoicEd.ca Website. Here’s his introduction to this podcast:
“An artist, an academic and an award winning educator, Sébastien was part of the Action Canada Task Force that chose to look at the issue of standardized testing in the province of Ontario. But, as you’ll hear, although the group’s report, “Real Accountability or an Illusion of Success,” begins with a look at standardized testing, it is really a call for all Canadians to take a much deeper look at the goals of public education. Do our current measures of accountability provide an authentic picture of how our systems of education are progressing towards the broad and compelling vision that we have for our schools, and for our children? How can we make our accountability systems more…well…accountable? How do we make them more intelligent? Who should be involved in the conversation?
Conversations about standardized testing is often polarized and polarizing. But an interesting thing happens when people retreat to their respective positions and turn their back on real conversation: the ground between opposite becomes less populated, affording the opportunity to explore, imagine and envision. We hope that you find the podcast conversation with Sébastien Després engaging and thought-provoking enough to become involved in the conversation—here at voicEd.ca, in your own blog space, at your local school, around your dinner table, with your local and provincial representatives. Let’s use this issue to explore that space in-between!” (Podcast available at http://voiced.ca/?p=4222 )
So.
Do our current measures of accountability provide an authentic picture of how our systems of education are progressing towards the broad and compelling vision that we have for our schools, and for our children?
How can we make our accountability systems more accountable?
How do we make them more intelligent?
Who should be involved in this conversation?
Ground zero in the war on Standardized Testing is now Saskatchewan. Two University of Regina professors recently weighed-in:
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/opinion/Reconsider+mandatory+tests+Sask/8198550/story.html
The Ontario @TestingIllusion critics do not seem to have touched-off the Prairie fire. It looks like the work of Premier Brad Wall and his Education Minister.
The two major players against Standardized testing – Spooner and Orlowsky.
” Currently, Paul is a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. His research interests include anti-racism, class-consciousness, media literacy, Aboriginal education, and teaching for democracy.”
http://education.uregina.ca/index.php?q=apple-orlowski.html
And for Spooner – http://education.uregina.ca/index.php?id=20&type=faculty&uid=81
A video for Spooner on standardized testing – http://vimeo.com/60044642
It appears the education faculty that are against standardized testing all have some type of expertise in critical pedagogy and creative theory. I took a look at Spooner’s published papers – This gang should spend their time to study the effects via through critical theory or another theory that i never heard of until today, called interactionist grounded theory to explored what happens to students when they do not acquired and mastered the skills of reading, writing and numeracy. A whole new avenue would be open to them – in viewing how society and the education establishment looks upon students who are saddled with low skills in reading, writing and numeracy, through no fault of their own. In one area, students with low literacy and numeracy skills, are often seen as having low creative skills, and therefore are seen by the adults around them as not being capable in achieving academically because of their perceived lower creativity abilities by the adults.
A whole new avenue would be open up to them, and as it stands now, they would never run out of a supply of students…….
I cannot believe this thread is still an issue, given the research by people in the area of assessment who spent decades designing large scale standardized measures. They note that such tests may have a use but it is limited.
Gusley, Linn, Wiliam, Davies, Hattie et al (see earlier posts) did their work in this area, not philosophy or critical theory.
I’m amazed, I have to admit. Rarely do I come across a blog that’s equally educative and engaging, and
without a doubt, you have hit the nail on the head. The issue is something that not enough folks are speaking intelligently about.
I’m very happy that I came across this in my search for something concerning this.