Problem Solved?

So, the state standardized testing issue is solved, and the solution to shorten ISTEP+ will preserve the integrity of the test. Unfortunately the real problem is not the length of the test or the content standards. Rather it’s the use of a standardized test to make decisions for which it was never intended and has never been validated. Such misuse is touted as being in the interest of “accountability.” Who do we hold accountable for proper test development and use?

The new ISTEP+ test was put together in a rush to judgment. It was not field-tested; no trials were conducted to see whether the test met rigorous standards for test development. Now, the new recommendation is that testing time be reduced to about nine hours. This time reduction is to be achieved by eliminating items being field-tested for future use. So the test in the future will be as untried as this one.

Whatever its length, ISTEP+ has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation. To impose this untried test on students, parents, and teachers is nothing less than gross incompetence on the part of the state leadership. It serves no purpose to shorten the test when the test itself has never been properly validated.

The state assessment program is only one part of a larger set of problems that lawmakers have created in the push to privatize public education. The idea that competition can be used to fulfill a major responsibility of the state’s leadership fails to meet the constitutional standard of providing for the “common good.” Competition is an ineffective way of improving public services for the common good. The data that exist suggests exactly the opposite, that competition will destroy the interests of the common good.

We cannot give the students who have been misjudged back their lives. We cannot simply rehire teachers who have been driven out of the profession.  We cannot restore those communities that have been damaged morally and economically by misjudgments that labeled their schools as failing. The citizens of Indiana are being forced to participate in our lawmakers’ social engineering experiment.  In the end, our current leadership will walk away from any responsibility for the damage they do, because there is no mechanism to hold them accountable.

Indiana voters need to decide just what kind of education system they want: one that privileges the few and is driven by profit or one designed for the common good that will serve all children. How does the privatization of our public education system align with our democratic principles?

A bias has been created, portraying the public schools as failing. The facts tell a different story. Privatizing the public education system is the last gasp of those wanting to continue to make sure we have a class of working poor and disenfranchised citizens available to do minimum-wage jobs.

It’s time to take public education out of the political circus and have serious conversations about how public education should be reimagined to serve the common good.

Ending Public Education in Indiana

The state of Indiana has released information for the 2015 ISTEP testing program as reported in the Herald Times on January 31, 2015. The testing time will be 3 hours and 27 minutes longer, assess new content and new formats plus technology enhanced questions. This new testing process was apparently completed in the past year after Indiana decided not to be a part of the CCSS and the accompanying assessment pilot.  

There are several things the public needs to understand.  First and foremost the changes preclude any comparison to previous years. The increased time, the different format and the new content make it an entirely new test. Given that this is a new test it is important to wonder when the state validated the new test items and conducted the validity and reliability studies that demonstrates the test does what it is intended to do.  

The State of Indiana is subjecting the students in our schools to a test that fails to meet any of the standards of test development and interpretation of the data. This failure to meet generally accepted standards should be considered gross misconduct on the part of our state legislators.  Teachers and administrators should refuse to participate in this testing program, because it fails to meet testing standards as recommended by the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education.  Secondly, parents have a right to withhold their children from being subjected to unproven and inferior educational experiences. Students have the right not to have judgments made about their learning abilities at young ages with instruments that meet no standards.

Subjecting the citizens of the state to such ill-conceived and poorly planned experiences should be considered gross negligence and incompetence   Additionally, since this test is to be used to assess teacher quality the state leadership is obligated to show the data that proves test scores are a result of high quality effective teaching.

We are at a point where expressing our objection is insufficient. We need to take steps that send a message to our federal and state leadership that we have had enough of the mismanagement and abuse of our children's educational future.

This testing initiative is clearly not intended to improve the quality of the public education experience. The purpose of this new testing plan is designed to demonstrate how poorly our public schools are doing and promote the solution to move more of our children to private schools.  The legislators are failing to uphold their pledge to support the constitution of the State of Indiana.

Why do parents believe standardized tests tell them anything about their children?

Standardized Achievement Tests are inappropriate measures to use for making judgments about students, teachers, and schools because:

Children are being punished for a reward.  See "Punished By Rewards", by Alfie Kohn.

A small sample of the curriculum is used to make a judgment about a child's progress.

Inadequate sample of the content is being tested.

The test is an inadequate time of observing a student's learning. 

It is an indirect observation as opposed to a direct observation of a student's learning.

Test scores require inferences that lead to questionable conclusions about children and have a lasting impact.

Comparing children with each other produces competitiveness and winners and losers.

Tests are normed with a population no one knows anything about. 

The standardized achievement tests cannot be used as diagnostic tools.

The test is designed so that 50% of students fall below the mean.

Standardized tests serve only to sort and select our children.

August 15th,2011
How Does Our Garden Grow?

By Bruce Smith and Phillip Harris

Metaphors are inherently visionary. That is, they create mental images. They don’t replace strategic plans, and they don’t expand budgetary authority. They don’t provide textbooks or other classroom-based or community resources. But make no mistake: metaphors matter. By highlighting similarities between two apparently unrelated endeavors, metaphors help us see in new ways, and so well-chosen metaphors sharpen our perceptions of complex activities. The metaphors we employ to describe our schools and what goes on within them are no exceptions.

For more than a century, we have seen our schools reflected in the funhouse mirror of an industrial metaphor. Beginning in the late 19th century, we applied to our schools ideas about “productivity” that derived from and more appropriately fit the manufacturing sector of our economy. In industry we saw raw materials, production workers, managers, outputs, and quantifiable results. So in education we could simply replace each of those terms to yield, in order, students, teachers, principals, graduates, and test scores. So where’s the harm? After all, what’s in a name? Perhaps not much if we’re talking just about nomenclature, but when what’s at stake is a guiding metaphor? The short answer is plenty.

When we accept an industrial metaphor for schools and adopt the language of industrial production to describe what goes on in them, we soon find ourselves seeking a uniformity of process that easily leads to the pursuit of a uniformity of outcomes. If taking algebra in eighth grade was good for the small percentage of kids who did so in the mid-1990s and predicted their college attendance better than other indicators, then it must be good for all kids to study algebra in eighth grade. A U.S. Department of Education staffer, who shall remain nameless, made just this argument to one of us during the Clinton Administration. (The inherent fallacies in such thinking should be obvious, and we won’t pursue them here.)

But all the evidence and our experience shows that pursuing such uniformity will always turn out to be a fool’s errand. Try as we might to interest him, Johnny just isn’t all that taken with American literature and does only the minimum required to get by. But living things and their interactions carry him away. He is a diligent and motivated observer of living systems and an avid reader when they are the subject, from the fruit flies in the bio lab, to bee colonies behind his uncle’s barn, to coral reefs and rain forest communities he’s only read about. Janie doesn’t really see the point of writing scripts for her desktop computer to execute; she’s happy to let someone else do that part and simply make use of the ones she needs. But can we please crack open the cover and “look under the hood” to see what makes it tick? How do we make such differently shaped pegs fit into our uniformly round holes? And should we even try?

We propose a new metaphor and with it a new way of thinking about our schools. Where the industrial metaphor (manufacturing products) has led us to pursue the false goal of uniformity of output, we would substitute an agricultural metaphor (growing children) that sees the development of human beings -- intellectually, socially, and emotionally -- as the primary activity for educators, parents, and, indeed, for all adults. In many ways our public schools are like community gardens. And our primary role in them is to cultivate a new crop of citizens to join us -- and, ultimately, to replace us.

Adopting this point of view does not mean that a bunch of “back to the land hippies” have taken over and that there will be no standards, however that word is construed. Reading, writing, speaking, and working with numbers in a variety of ways will always be fundamental elements of a good and well-rounded education. All children need to develop their capabilities in these and other areas if they are to grow. If you’ll forgive our giving in to the temptation of extending our new metaphor, these subjects and the skills they require are the soil, sun, and water that build the fibers of our different crops. Nor need we expect -- or accept -- poor performance in any of these areas. We simply need to expect -- and accept -- that differences in interest will to lead to differing levels of involvement with subjects. As children grow and their interests evolve, the palette of subjects they pursue and the depth at which they engage them will vary. And that, we submit, is a good thing. Some years ago, Elliot Eisner said it this way:

The kind of schools we need would not hold as an ideal that all students get to the same destinations at the same time. They would embrace the idea that good schools increase the variance in student performance and at the same time escalate the mean.

That’s a professorial way of saying that a successful school will help children become more different, rather than more alike, as they grow to physical and intellectual maturity. More different, yet everyone grows.

This individualized view of children and their growth and learning is not new. Friedrich Froebel certainly got there first with kindergartens. And other educators, from Deborah Meier to James Comer to Eric Schaps, have continued to pursue it even after decades of working in a field dominated by industrially designed structures and processes. But if such “organic” views are ever to be seen as achievable and accepted widely as ends worth pursuing, we need to stop allowing the language of industrial production and balance sheets to limit our vision of what’s possible and desirable for each child.

When the seed packets arrive in the mail each spring, without looking at the pictures on the envelopes, it’s not easy to tell a pumpkin from a zucchini. But no matter what regimen of watering and fertilizing you follow, you’ll never turn one into the other.

Joan, Katy Abbott and I had a very stimulating interview with Daniel Hornberger who is doing a documentary film tentatively titled STANDARDIZED.  He is planning to tell the story of how the standardized testing movement is destroying public education.  He has a number of very significant individuals who have been taking part in this project.  Be looking for more information toward the end of July about when this very important documentary will be released.

While we were in the Philadelphia area Joan and I did a workshop at the Abington Public Library which was attended by 20 individuals.  We tried something very different at the workshop and it was a success.  We did a National Cookie Tasters Testing and compared the results of the cookie tasting with the national norms we had gathered.  It gave us an opportunity to really talk about the Myths of Standardized Tests, with some first hand experience.  It made it much easier to talk about sampling issues and the other myths we discuss in our book.  The audience was really engaged and the questions were really pointed and direct.  We expect to continue to tweak the activity to make sure we get the focus were it needs to be which is on the harm the current testing practice is having on our nations educational system.  I found the group very responsive to the idea that the current testing going on is the civil rights issue of this century.  We also discussed what can be done at the local level to get the conversation underway to put a stop to this comparison to nowhere!

We thank the librarian Mimi Satterthwaite for making the presentation possible.

Phillip and Joan Harris

Indiana Coalition for Public Education had a public meeting last night to discuss the state assessment that begins this week.  The title was "ISTEP What Does It Tell Us".  We had an Assistant Superintendent, Teacher, Parent, Educator, Faculty member from I.U.

Essentially, the standardized test didn't really seem to tell them much of anything that they didn't already know.  We were given a history of the standards movement which has vacillated between being progressive, student-centered to more rigid and content driven over the last one hundred years.  The difference now is the addition of the high stakes testing and the multiple uses for which the test results are being used.  One of the panel members characterized the test as being the most magical test in the world as it can be used to evaluate, diagnose, place students, judge teacher effectiveness, and school quality-all with the same number.

The Assistant Superintendent was asked how she felt about parents opting their children out of the state assessment program, and she couldn't understand why anybody would do that.  Since testing has become such a major part of the curriculum parents should have the same option of requesting their child be exempted as they do for other curriculum areas.  Another panelist commented that the lack of an opt-out for parents is the "ugliest" part of the state assessment program.  Conversations like this need to be taking place in every community.  We need to have an informed public.

The Community Conversation can be seen on the local CATS network.

Joan and I did a workshop for the local League of Women Voters Wednesday January 16th and it was a great success. We had a group of really interested individuals in the testing subject and they had some really good questions. We are building a knowledge base with a core group of individuals who are beginning to understand the real truth about the standardized testing program in the State of Indiana. We have a new power point presentation that if anyone is interested just let us know. We are looking forward to continuing our work in educating the general public about the problems, flaws and misuses of the standardized tests scores.

Response to LA Times Article

This is our response to a recent Los Angeles Times article regarding school test scores that was published in the LA Times on October 1, 2010.

Collateral Damage?: The Problems of Teacher Assessment
By Phillip Harris, Bruce Smith, & Joan Harris

"We've got to be able to identify teachers who are doing well [and] teachers who are President Obama said on September 27 in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show. "And, ultimately, if some teachers aren't doing a good job, they've got to go."

Don't think too hard about it, and everything about education reform seems so simple, doesn't it? Find out who are the ineffective teachers, try to help them improve, and if that fails, then fire them. What could we possibly be overlooking?

For starters, let's look at the President's first point: distinguishing between teachers who are doing well and teachers who aren't. That should be easy enough. That's what the various value-added systems of evaluation seek to do: compare students' test scores early in the year with the same students' scores late in the year and, after some statistical legerdemain, voilà!: a measure of growth to judge a teacher's effectiveness. How simple it all seems to politicians and policy makers!


But like most of what passes for reform in public education, the more you know about it, the less likely it seems that it will achieve what you hope for. Like charter schools and merit pay (which also depends on finding a sound way to judge teaching performance), using value-added efforts to improve the teaching force has surface appeal that just doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. And anything that will affect the lives of so many teachers and so many of our children is worth at least a little close scrutiny.


We've argued in our new book, The Myths of Standardized Testing, that the tests aren't very good at measuring real student achievement, or predicting future success, or motivating improvement, or even being objective. So using these flawed measures for value-added assessment, a purpose they weren't designed for, just seems way off base. But we're not assessment experts, so maybe we're missing something.


Here's what those who know best say. Five years ago, Henry Braun, then at ETS, now at Boston College, argued that value-added assessment wasn't yet ready for prime time -- and might never be the panacea some of its proponents hoped. Now, just three weeks before the President sat down with Matt Lauer, Eva Baker of the National Center for Evaluation Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA and a list of co-authors that constitutes a Who's Who of Assessment issued a report titled Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers (Economic Policy Institute, 2010). In that report, the co-authors cited non-random assignment of students and teachers, the failure to distinguish the contributions of multiple teachers over time, and the instability of the ratings from year to year for the same teacher as problems that made using value-added methods an unwise choice, at least for the time being. We think if you can't resolve the instability problem, the whole effort becomes a crap shoot.


But using a complex assessment mechanism for unsupported purposes is always fraught with problems and unintended consequences. Already blowback has begun. With the LA Times' recent publication of the test scores of students linked to individual teachers and schools, we now have the apparent suicide of Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr., a fifth-grade teacher who was upset that his scores were not higher. Described by former students as someone who "took the worst students, and tried to change their lives," Ruelas has now lost his own. Collateral damage?


Phillip Harris is Executive Director of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology. He is the former Director of the Center for Professional Development at Phi Delta Kappa International and was a member of the faculty of Indiana University for 22 years, serving in both the Psychology Department and the School of Education. He is the author of The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don't Tell You What You Think They Do (December 2010), with co-authors Bruce Smith and Joan Harris.

Reponse to the New York Times Report on School Performance

This is our reponse to the article titled "New York School Test, Warning Signs Ignored", which was published on October 10th, 2010 in the New York Times

October 13, 2010
Heads Up, Mr. Mayor!
By Phillip Harris and Bruce Smith

No doubt it comes as a shock to Glen Beck fans and to many politicians and policy makers, including those who run our nation's school systems, but experts really do know a thing or two about their areas of expertise. Could it hurt to pay some attention to them?


One obvious example came to the fore this past week when the New York Times ran a longer-than-usual story on the release of test scores for New York City schools. Headlined "On New York School Tests, Warning Signs Ignored," the story by Jennifer Medina makes a real effort to tell a complicated tale of numbers-based accountability gone rogue, with warnings from experts ignored and another unholy marriage of political ambition and good intentions. "The mayor uses data and metrics to determine whether policies are failing or succeeding," says Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor for government affairs and communications. Sounds like a good idea -- until you come down from the rhetorical clouds and see how that's worked out for the schools. We have argued that a technology as limited as standardized testing could never be expected to give you a fair and complete picture of student learning, teacher performance, or the success of any school system, much less one as large and complex as New York City's (see The Myths of Standardized Tests). But even if you disagree with us, when you reward or punish schools and educators on the basis of those test scores, you should expect them to rise -- and rapidly. To everyone's consternation but no one's surprise, that's just what happened in the Big Apple.


The downside, well-known to social scientists, is that when you tie important consequences to a quantitative measure, you will "corrupt" the measure. In this case, the test scores will be artificially "inflated." That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone broke any laws or did anything morally questionable. When any district uses a similar form of a test for a number of years in a row, the scores of its students will rise. That's score "inflation," it's predictable, and it means that the indicator -- i.e., the test -- is "corrupted." It no longer gives a valid measure of the student skills it was supposed to measure.


How does this come about if no one is blatantly cheating? Almost all teachers really do care about their students. So when teachers are familiar with the form of a test that's used year after year, they may adapt some of their teaching, consciously or not, to help their students perform better. If schools, teachers, or students are rewarded or punished according to the scores -- that is, if the stakes are high -- then teachers will try even harder to prepare their students for the tests. Throw in the national industry that creates and markets test-preparation materials that many schools use, and you have the perfect incubator for score inflation: familiar tests, high stakes, and organized preparation efforts.


Now a confusing mishmash of misunderstanding has the mayor and the school chancellor defending scores that are so high that ordinary observers -- much less testing experts -- suspect that they must be "inflated." Does it seem likely that 82% of the city's students were proficient in math in 2009? What were your city's scores? Now when a bona fide testing expert, Harvard's Daniel Koretz, proposes a plan to "audit" the tests and get a sound measure of the score inflation, so as not to deceive the public, he and his colleagues are turned down, more than once. Meanwhile, Hizzoner goes on claiming a record of success in running the city's schools. Maybe so, maybe no. Maybe the mayor should allow a disinterested look at his chosen measuring stick.


Phillip Harris is Executive Director of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology. He is the former Director of the Center for Professional Development at Phi Delta Kappa International and was a member of the faculty of Indiana University for 22 years, serving in both the Psychology Department and the School of Education. Bruce Smith was a member of the editorial staff of the Phi Delta Kappan, the flagship publication of Phi Delta Kappa International, the association for professional educators. They are co-authors with Joan Harris of The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don't Tell You What You Think They Do.

STATE SUPE FAILS CONSTITUENTS
On Friday, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett had much to say in the Herald-Times with regard to supposed silver lining in the current budget crunch facing all school corporations in Indiana. But once he got under way, what was offered, far from being silver, was a tired medley of tried-and-true slogans and half-truths with which so-called conservatives have sought to weaken our system of public education. Some even blatantly wish to privatize it. Now is not the time for such political gas-baggery.

A case in point is Bennett's premise: "I don't think our population believes that money automatically brings quality." Certainly not with that skewed adverb "automatically" slipped in. But if more money doesn't necessarily (other people can slip in qualifying adverbs, too!) lead to excellence, does that imply that less money does so? Run that one past an eighth-grader who is being introduced to elementary logic. A does not imply B does not therefore mean that B implies A. But if that's too abstract our state supe to understand, maybe he could ask the citizens of Carmel if they'd like to have the per-pupil expenditures in their district equalized with those of the folks in, say, Franklin. That seems fair, and after all, more money doesn't mean more quality.

The truth is that there are thresholds above which additional money will no doubt yield diminishing returns on the investment. On the other end of the scale, there are thresholds below which the education of children suffers. We do not know exactly where each of these tipping points is located, but I submit that it is disingenuous to pretend that they don't exist.

Or consider where Bennett is willing to locate the blame for the current crisis. On switching from property taxes to income and sales taxes as a source of revenue for education? Oh no, we can't do that. Cutting taxes is always a good idea, and cutting property taxes is such a good fiscal idea that we ought to remove from future legislators the option of ever raising them above a specified cap. The reason representative democracies have constitutional governments is to spell out broad constraints within which democratically elected officials can operate for the public good. Place too many constraints on the future actions of elected officials, and they won't be in a position to respond to future crises. When voters decide this November whether to tie the hands of their yet-to-be elected representatives, I hope they remember the statewide anguish brought on by destabilizing school funding and at the very least prevent the property-tax cap from being enshrined in the state constitution.

Finally, just a word of two about Bennett's purported solutions: consolidation, pay cuts in exchange for some spending flexibility, and merit pay/competition for schools. On the first, I'll just say Ellettsville. This idea isn't new in Monroe County, but for some reason it just never seems to appeal to the folks from Richland-Bean Blossom. Maybe Bennett should pay them a call as well, say, at their next school board meeting and hear what they have to say.

On exchanging pay cuts for the freedom to spend some other designated funds to support the general fund, I'll say this. It's probably coming in some form. The teachers know it, and readers of the H-T know it. But it is a temporary solution to a manufactured crisis and in no way will put the school budgets back on a sound and stable footing. And while Bennett acknowledges that "he's no economist," his attempt to explain teacher pay using such figures as six hours a day and only 180 days per year is laughable. Do he teachers in Bennett's family work such short days? Do they do no preparation, do no grading, and seek no professional development outside of school hours? I don't think so, and to imply that teachers work that way is insulting at best. I hope he apologized to his spouse.

Finally, is anyone else tired of hearing how merit pay and any number of ideas grounded in competition will cause schools to improve? I hope so, because the message is stale, and it wasn't very substantive to begin with. In a few locales (notably Denver), systems involving some sort of differentiated pay scales not based solely on tenure and longevity have proved to be workable. No stunning turnarounds for schools, but workable. These are complex, nuanced systems negotiated with teachers, administrators, and the public involved from the start. Flat-out competitive systems haven't worked well and make the mistake of assuming that education is a zero-sum game, that is, if the kids in my class succeed and I get a bonus, there's less left in the teacher compensation pie for you. Do you want to help me work on my lesson plans to see if I can help my eighth-graders learn their algebra better? Probably not so much.

Educating our children concerns every American, those with children now in schools, those like me whose children have moved on, and those without children or whose children are not yet in school. All of us depend on the public schools to develop the next generation of citizens. For an institution with such an important charge, we expect our leaders to provide stable funding, frequent public discussion of aims and purposes, and, as much as possible, to put politics aside. What we see in Superintendent Bennett's statements to the Herald -Times fails on all counts and is not worthy of his constituents.

THE MADNESS CONTINUES

So now in mid-February 2010 the school board in Houston has approved a policy to allow the district to fire teachers whose students fail to show adequate growth on the state's standardized test. Meanwhile, the Czar of New York City -- sorry, make that hizzoner Mr. Bloomberg -- and his grand vizier -- I mean Schools Chancellor Joel Klein -- have decided that, for those teachers who are in the bottom quartile of performance (determined how exactly?), student test scores will "inform tenure decisions." Both ideas have met some resistance from teachers, though not as much as you'd expect from their unions.

Now, to take the Houston case, tracking student growth seems to make sense. But the valued-added technology is not yet as good as many of its proponents would like it to be. In fact, value-added testing or the use of growth models may never be good enough to allow us to say with confidence how much of a student's growth is caused by anything the teacher did or didn't do. (Forget for a moment whether the test can measure growth that really matters.) Pretending that the problems have been resolved won't make them go away, no matter how many school boards, state legislatures, or even U.S. congresses vote that it should be so.

At the moment, both test scores and other kinds of measures (yes, there are some!) ought to be made available in a timely way for formative purposes. But certainly they're not ready for the prime time of summative assessment, with the highest stakes possible attached. Student failure rates reflect many influences, only one of which is the performance of the teachers. Student failure rates are also intimately connected to poverty levels, extend across generations, and will only be exacerbated by ratcheting up the stakes on yet another quantitative indicator.

Already home to numerous scandals with regard to data manipulation and outright cheating, the state of Texas and the city of Houston -- and soon many other large cities -- will be subjected to another round of policy makers' chanting in self-congratulatory ignorance: "Campbell's Law? We don't need no stinking Campbell's Law!" But the distortions will follow as surely as the night follows the day.

To the AFT, allegedly the protector of the interests of teachers in both Houston and New York City, there's only one sensible message: Just say no! Sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is, and bartering your purpose for a "seat at the table," which has been the ineffectual modus operandi of the NEA for a generation, is unworthy of our teachers or their representative organizations.

Moreover, as more states twist themselves into contorted shapes in order to qualify for Race to the Top funds, we see a range of serious abuses of teachers and the children they are responsible for. But rather than continue to rant on my own, let me share with you what my late friend Gerald Bracey said on the matter as recently as September 2009, just six weeks or so before he died. Here's the text of an e-mail from Jerry, which I'm glad I retrieved from my Sent Folder:

[QUOTE BEGINS]

The President of the United States and his Secretary of Education are violating one of the most fundamental principles concerning test use: Tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were developed. If they are to be used for some other purpose, then careful attention must be paid to whether or not this purpose is appropriate. This position was developed jointly by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education in their document "The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing." The President and his Secretary want to use existing tests, willy-nilly to evaluate teachers. They should both be ashamed. The President should be chastised and Secretary Duncan should be fired on the simple grounds of incompetence. From the American Psychological Association’s “Appropriate Use of High-Stakes Testing in Our Nation’s Schools:” “It is important to remember that no test is valid for all purposes. Indeed, tests vary in their intended uses and in their ability to provide meaningful assessments of student learning.”

It is not the case that a test is a test is a test. Research into the use of existing tests to evaluate teachers has called that use into question. (I summarized other people’s research on these issues in my May and December 2004 Research columns in Phi Delta Kappan.) More recent studies, summarized in the July 15 issue of Education Week by Debra Viadero, cast further doubt on the whole enterprise. States are rolling over and playing dead on this issue because a) they are desperate for money and b) it is unlikely that people like Bloomberg or the Governator—or Duncan-- have a clue about the abuse they are permitting and advocating. Duncan’s enthusiastic championing of a “reform” that has been shown not to work very well—charter schools—can only be taken as an instrument for union busting. If the NEA and AFT won’t stand up to this abuse of testing, they deserve to be busted.

[QUOTE ENDS]

But the madness continues unabated. I don't fancy myself to be a prophet, but I will go out a limb and I say that this, too, shall fail.

Those who want to follow some really thoughtful exchanges on this an other topics related to the current silliness ought to visit the Bridging Differences blog, hosted at the New York Times website. There, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier find that their differences are a lot smaller than many folks would have predicted. Of course, when the subject is the errant nonsense being foisted on educators by those in Washington and the nation's state capitals, it's fairly easy for two sensible people to find common ground -- and to keep their feet firmly planted thereon.

Important Community Meeting

The Monroe County Community School Corporation will have two public meetings this week to discuss the proposed cuts due to state revenue decline. The recommended cuts by the administration need to be reviewed and responded to by the citizens of Monroe County. If the cuts are accepted it will put our school district in a position to not serve the reason it was created. There can be no acceptable reason to compromise our educational system, as it is the basis for the future of the community and the region. If we as citizens don't let the leadership know what we want then we have no one to blame but ourselves. From the list of proposed cuts it is clear that the current leadership is taking the easy way out. The suggestion we have made to reduce the length of the school year is not even on the list of items to consider. The current list of cuts is like death by a 1,000 cuts!

Vi Simpson Responds

January 29, 2010


Dear Mrs. Harris,

Thank you for your recent email expressing your concern with the cuts made to the education budget. I appreciate you taking the time to provide such thoughtful suggestions for alternative ways to address the proposed funding shortfall. I have noted your ideas about ISTEP testing and will continue to research these options.

In announcing his cuts to both K-12 and higher education, the Governor is relying on information from an updated revenue forecast that was presented to the budget committee in December. Unfortunately, the revenue forecasts used incomplete information to reach its conclusions.

I believe the governor is acting prematurely by cutting education. The state has a 1.4 billion dollar reserve, including the rainy day fund, which could be used to hold us over until the revenue picture becomes clearer after income tax filings. The Governor has the authority to reduce or withhold budget allocations or distributions, but he also has the ability to restore cuts should the revenue picture improve. The budget agency, which is part of the executive branch, made several reductions in several important areas that were covered by the legislative budget that we produced. The Governor is ignoring the priorities set out by the legislature.

Be assured that I am staying on top of this. Hopefully, we will find positive improvements in the state's revenue picture and we will be able to restore the cuts that the Governor made to education.

Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me. Please continue to keep me informed on matters of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Vi Simpson
State Senator
District 40

S40@iga.in.gov
www.in.gov/s40

I attended the presentation by Alfie Kohn to the Indiana Superintendents meeting in Indianaoplis today and he received a standing ovation at the end of his presentation. He made many significant points about the problems of using standardized tests to judge children and evaluate teachers. He really put out a challenge to the Governor and State Superintendent about their recent statements and suggestions for changes in the Indiana schools. I hope that some of the individuals who were there will also post their views and thoughts about his presentation. He talked about the problem with standards and the emphasis on teaching just to them. He stated that schools and districts that focus on test scores are little more than test prep centers. He felt that whatever is measured by standardized test it isn't real learning. The overall message is that we as professional educators have to protect our students and teachers from the evils of the testing mentality. Suptenintendents can and should protect their teachers and their students from the policy makers who can think of nothing but increasing test scores.

Check out some of Alfie's publication on his webiste at http://www.alfiekohn.com/. He has written a lot about how to really create a student centered educational opportunity.

Responses to the Suggestion

We are getting a lot of response to our suggestion that considerable revenue can be saved by suspending the state testing and reducing the number of school days that students and teachers actually are together. These responses are coming from a variety of teachers and parents who are concerned about the consequences of staff reductions and increased class size. We are hearing from people who don't have children in school that see the impact this loss of revenue will have on our children. An article in the February 1,2010, Columbus Dispatch in Ohio by Charlie Boss titled Turn the Page on Rote Tests is an excellent piece that provides a little different perspective. Check out The Dispatch.com education page.

Alfie Kohn will be speaking Thursday to the Indiana Superintendents Association and has indicated he will reference the recommendation as a courageous move by the leadership of the schools in Indiana. Check out his website http://www.alfiekohn.org/

We are encouraging everyone we can to spread the word. We have heard from Oregon to Florida and New York to Arizona. We can make a difference if we join together to make sure that the children are not sacrificed in these difficult times.

States Faced with Budget Crisis

I have sent the following letter to the newspaper in Bloomington Indiana which is the Herald-Times.

A little creative thinking can minimize the negative impact on the MCCSC of the 3.8 million dollar funding shortfall. One solution that does not involve sacrificing our children's learning by firing teachers and increasing class sizes is simply to suspend the ISTEP assessment for two years.

The savings from this "cut" would come from two budget items: 1) the direct expense of the test and the cost of scoring it; and 2) the five days added to the school year when ISTEP was implemented. Recall that, when ISTEP was put in place the school year was increased from 175 days to 180 days to provide the time to administer the test.

The most current figures from the MCCSC annual report (February 10, 2009) show a cost of $615,707 per day of operation. This figure is derived from multiplying the average annual expenditure of $10,100 per student times an enrollment of 10,973 students, which yields an annual figure of nearly $111 million. Dividing this number by 180 days produces a daily cost for MCCSC of more than $600,000. Thus, reducing the school year by five days yields a saving of nearly $3.1 million. Including the cost of the test and its processing would provide the full savings the district needs.

We can think of at least three concerns that would need to be met if this idea is to take shape. First, the governor and state legislature would need to pass a bill immediately that would allow a district to temporarily suspend the test. But this IS an emergency. Second, we would need to make use of alternative sources of data for the placement of students, but such information already exists in the form of teacher observations and performance work of the students. Finally, we could use these same alternative sources of data for purposes of teacher accountability.

If our primary aim is to ensure that our children have the education they deserve, with the teachers they deserve, in classes small enough to be effective, we should be willing to forgo ISTEP testing to help us get through this budget crisis without sacrificing our children’s education.

Phillip Harris, EdD, Executive Director of Association for Educational Communication Technology pharris@aect.org 812-335-7675

Joan Harris, MS, Third Grade Teacher – University Elementary School