Ravitch: Opt Your Child Out of State Testing: Don't Feed the Machine

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/01-2

This week begins the make-or-break, do-or-die standardized testing that will label your child a success or a failure. I urge you not to let your child take the state test.

Opt out.

The best test for students is the test made by their teacher. Teachers know what they taught; they test what the students were taught. They get instant feedback. They can find out immediately which students didn't understand the lesson and need extra help. They can get instant feedback about their own success or lack of success if the students didn't learn what they taught.

The standardized tests are useless for instant feedback. They have no diagnostic value. The test asks questions that may cover concepts that were never introduced in class. The test is multiple-choice, creating an unrealistic expectation that all questions have only one right answer. The tests may have errors, e.g., two right answers or no right answers or a confusing question. The test results are returned months after the test, meaning that the student now has a different teacher. The test scores give no breakdown of what the student did or did not understand, just a score.

These days, the purpose of the tests is to evaluate the teacher; most researchers agree that using student scores to evaluate teachers gives inaccurate and unable results. This year's "effective" teacher may be next year's "ineffective" teacher. "Value-added-measurement" has not proven to work anywhere. Most teachers don't teach tested subjects and they are assigned rating based on the results of the school as a whole. A music teacher may be found "ineffective" based on the school's math scores. This is madness.

Because the tests have no diagnostic value for students, they are worthless. If they can't be used to help students or to improve instruction, they shouldn't be used at all. We can learn all we need to know about states or cities by sampling (like NAEP, which compares states to states, and cities to cities). We can learn all we need to know about individual students by relying on teacher judgment and testing in specific grades, like 4 and 8.

[cui bono]

1. How realistic is opting out? Are there repercussions? n/t

[sarge43]

2. Just another example of class warfare

The working poor can't opt. Public school is their only option because they can't afford home schooling or private schools.

Break them in early as minimum wage slaves.

[Squinch]

10. This isn't about opting out of public education. This is about opting out of the

standardized tests that, as she describes, have no value whatsoever.

This isn't about home schooling or private schools.

This is about parents calling their public school and saying, "My child is not to take that test today." It is a right of every parent, and a right that every parent should exercise, especially if they want to see public schools improve.

Opting out of the test is not about working poor or rich. No one benefits from the testing except the testing companies.

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Ravitch, the destroyer of Multicultural education, needs to bow out. nt

[eridani]

4. Because constant testing especially helps minorities

Right. And I'm Marie of Roumania.

[BumRushDaShow]

5. I am anti-useless testing but

am also disgusted at the promotion of Ravitch on DU - the same Dianne Ravitch who did more damage against minorities by her sustained rightwing railing against historical cultural inclusion of non-European decendants in the school curricula. This same former Reagan staffer was one of the biggest contributors to efforts that set the foundation for what would become "No Child Left Behind", with its myriad of nonsensical testing that is being discussed here. So after 20 years, another generation is lost because of her mouth and her pen.

She deserves no mention whatsoever on DU.

[eridani]

7. She changed her mind. Criticism is far more effective coming from former supporters n/t

[BumRushDaShow]

8. She's a professional opportunist and she found herself some marks to beguile. nt

[Squinch]

11. Ravitch, the most effective voice against the privitization and corporatization of schools, needs to

be supported by voters and parents who believe in the importance of public education.

[BumRushDaShow]

12. Ravitch, the most effective progandist of herself.

Her decades of embracing the mis-education of students in urban school systems, in cahoots with her buddies Lynn Cheney, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, and turncoat Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., have left a vast wasteland of historical destruction from their scorched earth policy that was viciously fought against correcting the fallacious history taught in the U.S., and effectively eviscerating the work of hundreds of scholars who were meticulously trying to develop more inclusive curricula. To this day, multicultural educators are still trying to clean up her mess.

Find someone else to embrace when it comes to public versus private education and run far away from this woman.

[Squinch]

13. Don't look now, but there IS no one else speaking out effectively for public education.

And as the poster above said so well, her voice is that much more valuable as someone who used to support the opposition and has seen the error of that position. No one else is able to describe that error as well as she does.

Find a way to embrace the fact that she is now the most effective, widely heard and respected voice for the position that I think you espouse. Don't run away from the only advocate who has a national voice.

[BumRushDaShow]

14. Local public school advocates and teachers unions are fighting

I will never "embrace" a rightwing hack, especially one who has the left so beguiled that they are too blind to see.

[Squinch]

15. Quick, off the top of your head, name the next most well known person fighting for public education.

Off the top of your head, name a local public school advocate or a member of the teacher's union who has a national voice.

And give it a rest. No one is too blind to see anything. We're all aware of her past. And we are all able to hear what she is saying - what she ALONE is saying - now.

Stay pure if you feel you must, but now she is a powerful ally.

[BumRushDaShow]

16. You are naive if you think that local efforts are fruitless

and folks must deliver themselves to a conservative opportunist to "speak" for them. That's the problem with "armchair activism". Looking for someone ELSE to do for you.

Here in Philly, hundreds participated a protest run to send a message to the state and this will now be a monthly endeavor -

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Protesters-Run-Around-Philly-School-District-Headquarters-254026831.html

Change must come from the bottom up, not from someone trying to sell a book -

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Philadelphia-Coalition-Advocating-for-Public-Schools/566041843412512

"National" is meaningless (see the Gun Control fiasco) when not enough "people" at the local levels are engaged, and Ravitch left alot of bodies in her wake that have many people in the largest cities eschewing her sudden, opportunist change of professed views.

[Squinch]

18. No one ever said local efforts were fruitless. Nor is anyone letting anyone speak for them.

Nor are you speaking to an armchair activist.

But you appear to need to make shit up and tout your imagined superiority, and shun your most well known and widely heard allies.

Have fun with that.

[diddlysquat]

6. Thanks for posting this, Eridani.

I love Ravitch. She has it right and is willing to speak the truth.

[Igel]

9. I can't tell if she's right or wrong.

Or oversimplifying.

You dont want teachers to just give their own tests. I know teachers who teach a lot and teachers who teach little. A "C" in the first teacher's class means that a student learned more than an A student in the second teacher's class. This is inequitable.

Team-written tests can be manipulated. One reason for team tests is to make sure all classes teach the same content. "We didn't cover that in my class" means it's not tested. Everybody gets an A and the test is emasculated. The guilty are let off the hook, and it's hard to maintain standards if having low standards is rewarded.

District written tests can be divorced from the classroom. But keep districts on the same page. Problem is, a low-SES high-school held to the same standard as a high-SES classroom will always be failing. You can't catch up 3 grade levels in reading in 6 months without a lot of intensive, individually-tailored one-on-one work that a classroom teacher can't manage. There has to be some acknowledgement of this in how the tests are administered, otherwise all that happens is that teachers are pressured to teach the test. (Then you get a conversation I had recently: "Last year's _____ test at this time focused on economic ties and influence. Our kids didn't do especially well, so that's really what we focused on. This year--not a word about it. Military expansion and conquest was 80% of the test, and we barely mentioned it." That's a crap shoot.)

Same for state tests.

But at least state and district tests aren't manipulated to make teachers look good or make students look smart. And that's why they were instituted--to get past self-serving tests.

Ravitch is wrong in some ways. Our district and state tests are "leveled and TEKed", fancy edu-Tex-speak for "ranked by cognitive difficulty and explicitly tied to one content skill and often to one content and one process skill." So I can look at district and state test results and say, "Ah, 38% of my kids don't know the kinetic theory of gases, and the number jumps to 59% when called upon to evaluate numerical data in a table."

That the tests are divorced from the classroom makes some of the data meaningless. District tests are stilled known quantities, at least after the fact. Some data we dump. "Didn't teach that. And that question is gibberish." Some we keep. "How could my students both show that 80% know this standard and 75% have no clue?" I look at the questions and find that 80% know it when it's a simple question, but 75% get the calculation using scientific notation wrong.

Where she's stellar on this is not using the valid data in useful ways. Yeah, I could teach scientific method; it comes up over and over in my class. But if they missed a bit of content there's no way to scrape together enough time to reteach it. Same for state tests--we get the results during finals week. And by next fall, when they retest if they failed this spring, they'll have forgotten a lot of the content so the "diagnostic" value of the test isn't so great.

[Smarmie Doofus]

17. "A music teacher may be found "ineffective" based on the school's math scores. This is madness. "

One need go no further.

The next step is hold accountable the politicians AND THE UNION LEADERS who have allowed this to happen.

K and R