"Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3..."

"Integrity in Education is a project whose mission is to restore integrity to the conversation about public education. We believe that providing equal opportunity to all children is a moral imperative, not just an economic necessity. Supporting high-quality public schools that are open to all, regardless of background or identity, is an essential part of ensuring liberty and justice for all."

Click on title above or here for main website: 
http://integrityineducation.org/

"The Alliance for Childhood promotes policies and practices that support children’s healthy development, love of learning, and joy in living. Our public education campaigns bring to light both the promise and the vulnerability of childhood. We act for the sake of the children themselves and for a more just, democratic, and ecologically responsible future. "

Click on title above or here for main website: 
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/

by Valerie Strauss - Washington Post - Jan. 3, 2014
"Privacy concerns have been growing over a $100 million student database – largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and operated by a  nonprofit organization, inBloom Inc. —  that contains detailed information about millions of students. Most of the states that had signed up to participate in a pilot program have pulled back, and in New York, parents and educators have pushed back with protests and a lawsuit. The nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued the U.S. Education Department over the database."

Full post at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/03/student-privacy-concerns-grow-over-data-in-a-cloud/

..."District leaders and school boards throughout the state are speaking out in protest, returning their Race to the Top funds,  and refusing to sign up for the inBloom-linked dashboards. Superintendents from the Lower Hudson region have decided to send letters to inBloom, citing the provision in the state's contract allowing districts to opt out, and demanding that their student data be deleted.   

They are also demanding that the corporation "immediately notify us so that we can consider next steps."  South Orangetown Superintendent Kenneth Mitchell, president of the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents said, "Based on the contract, we believe we can do this."  More and more, it seems inBloom's days are numbered.  If the Gates Foundation is wise, they will drop this unethical data-mining privacy-violating project, before they are targeted with lawsuits and the ensuing controversy brings down the Common Core as well."
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/11/tuesdays-elections-disaster-for-inbloom.html

By Elaine Weiss & Thomas Payzant:
"Every three years, American policymakers eagerly anticipate the release of scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). While any single test, no matter how strong, can explain only a limited amount about our education system, PISA provides some unique insights, testing students' ability to apply knowledge and skills both in and out of school. It is taken only by 15-year-olds, making it a decent proxy for the "college-and-career readiness" that is the focus of current debates.

The 2013 headline is basically that the United States falls right in the middle of the pack, as it has for several decades. The U.S. Department of Education and its allies used those rankings to argue that U.S. schools are "stagnating" and to advance specific reforms it says will fix them. However, average scores may obscure and confuse more than they inform. Indeed, scores from individual states that have their own PISA rankings offer more policy-relevant insight than overall U.S. rankings. This makes sense -- U.S. education looks more like a diverse patchwork than a unified system. Public investments in schools, and in students and their families, vary greatly across states, as do other policies that may boost or depress scores. Luckily, this year, three states received individual PISA rankings -- as if they were independent countries. This can help us connect the dots between those disparities and scores."...
For full post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-weiss/pisa-implications_b_4441077.html

By Abigail Zuger, M.D. ..."In 2009, a Supreme Court decision upheld the validity of multiple-choice testing for evaluating firefighters for promotion, prompting a heated nationwide discussion. Critics pointed out that test-taking savvy may have little to do with job performance.

Medical educators have been contemplating this possibility for years. But the problem particular to medicine may be the sheer volume of these tests, and the standard hysterical preparation they engender, which constitute a form of training in itself. Educators may not actually teach to the test, but students think to the test, in linear multiple choice.

They learn to recognize key phrases (neck pain) and stock situations (older woman), and they live in dread of unlikely worst-case scenarios. (Dies from heart attack while buying new pillow. You are sued.) Sometimes the actual, three-dimensional patient is not real enough to eradicate all her paper iterations."...

Full article at:  http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/the-real-world-is-not-an-exam/

"ALBANY—Senator Lee M. Zeldin (R-C-I, Shirley), Senator Greg Ball (R-Patterson), Assemblyman Al Graf (R,C,I –Holbrook) and Assemblyman Ed Ra (R-Franklin Square) introduced comprehensive legislation today to halt Common Core and its associated testing for three years.

In 2010, the State Education Department secured Race to the Top Funding from the U.S. Department of Education.  In exchange for $700 Million in funding, the state education department made various commitments related to educational standards, testing, a teacher evaluation system, and data collection.

As part of this, the Common Core Standards were adopted—without legislative approval—and the implementation of such has been nothing short of a disaster.

The misguided transition to Common Core has resulted in an emphasis on developmentally inappropriate material and poor educational outcomes. Worse, the hasty implementation and lack of communication between NYSED and educators on the ground have created widespread problems for teachers and parents, resulting in poor outcomes for students."

For full announcement, click on title above or here: http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/state-legislators-advance-legislation-halt-common-core

"Bertis Downs is a parent who lives in Athens Ga., and the former legal counselor and manager of the band R.E.M.  He wrote the following letter to President Obama, inviting the president to visit a high school in Athens to see the impact of his administration’s standardized test-based policies there.

'Dear President Obama,

Last month, you hosted Clarke Central High School’s college admissions advisor Lawrence Harris at the White House. You honored this exemplary educator at a forum on making college more attainable for low-income students, and our  community celebrated his recognition.  The C-SPAN clip of you telling how Mr. Harris was a first-generation college graduate and praising his commitment to give back through College Advising Corps went viral around Athens, Ga. We were genuinely grateful to see you acknowledge his vital and successful work.

But I wish you could also visit the school where Mr. Harris works, an urban high school with about 1,500 students in Athens.  Clarke Central is diverse in every way.  It serves students from all over the west side of our small city, students of many races, socio-economic levels, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities.  The school has high needs, yet ensures that every student has the opportunity to achieve at the highest levels, and many do.  Clarke Central has won state and national awards for progress in closing the achievement gap, sends graduates to the nation’s finest schools, and enrolls many upperclassmen in dual-credit programs with local universities. Clarke Central strives to educate any and every student within its community. By and large, it succeeds.'"...

For full post, click on title above or here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/05/parent-to-obama-why-dont-private-schools-adopt-your-test-based-school-reforms/

By Noah Zeichner, Education Week Teaching Ahead Blog: "When the PISA 2012 results were released on Dec. 3, renewed calls for reforming our public schools flooded the airwaves. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the scores a "wake-up call" in his remarks at the official PISA release event. (He made the same comment three years ago about PISA 2009 results). 

What can we as a nation do to avoid yet another wakeup call three years from now when PISA 2015 results are released? One answer may be simpler than you think: fewer standardized tests.

There is no question that children in U.S. public schools are over-tested. My daughter, who is in kindergarten, is expected to take a computer-based standardized reading test this spring. She can barely operate a mouse. No Child Left Behind currently requires testing in multiple subjects almost every year of a child's education. As members of Congress debate proposals for a reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2014, they have an opportunity to "wake up" and shift the current test-based accountability paradigm.

Our overreliance on multiple-choice tests might make sense from an efficiency standpoint. They are easy to score and much cheaper than more meaningful assessments, such as student portfolios or teacher-scored performance tasks. But the costs to both teacher quality and student learning are high."... 

Full post at: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_ahead/2013/12/can_we_overcome_our_testing_addiction.html

By Brent Duckor and Daniel Perlstein.  Teacher's College Record 2014

"Background/Context: Educational researchers and policymakers have often lamented the failure of teachers to implement what they consider to be technically sound assessment procedures. In recent years, the belief that teachers are unwilling or unable to implement appropriate assessment procedures has contributed to the rapid expansion of high stakes, standardized testing in schools. Supporters of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have contrasted teachers’ assessment practices with standardized testing, arguing that teacher-created classroom assessments lack the technical characteristics required to produce trustworthy measures of student learning or compare large populations of students.
 

Research Question/Focus of Study: Through a case study of New York City’s Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), in the years when it served as a model for progressive American school reform, Duckor and Perlstein demonstrate the usefulness of an alternative to reliance on the technical characteristics of standardized tests for constructing and judging assessments: teachers’ self-conscious and reasoned articulation of their approaches to learning and assessment.
 

Research Design: In order to determine CPESS teachers’ assessment practices and the process through which they were developed, Duckor and Perlstein conducted semi-structured oral history interviews with a sample of CPESS teachers. They triangulated teachers’ recollections through a content analysis of course assignments, rubrics, grading reports, and other artifacts of assessment at CPESS. The sources of this data included published accounts of CPESS and primary sources provided by teachers or uncovered in archival research.

Conclusions/Recommendations: Duckor and Perlstein conclude that when teachers are given opportunities for genuine, shared reflection on teaching and learning and classroom practices are tied to this understanding, fidelity to what they call the logic of assessment offers a more promising framework for the improvement of schooling than current forms of high-stakes, standardized accountability. Thus, instead of expecting teachers to rely on data from standardized assessments or replicate features of standardized testing in their own assessment practices, researchers, policymakers and teacher educators should promote fidelity to the broader logic of assessment."

For full post and access to article:  http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=17338