Elevator Speech on Harm of High Stakes Testing

Dov Rosenberg posted this on Facebook and I think it's going viral. 

WORKING LIST! Why Testing & Privatization are Harmful - Not Helpful - to Public Education

by Dov Rosenberg on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 10:12am

A) High stakes tests & charter schools make public schools less effective.

High stakes tests do not effectively gauge student ability, are harmful to children, and make public schools less effective.

B) Less than 20% of privately-managed public schools (charter schools) are successful; they also segregate children and minimize the decision-making power of parents & the community, ultimately making public schools less effective.

High-stakes tests do not effectively gauge student ability:

• Constrict wide expanses of knowledge into only what can be measured by a multiple choice test.
• Many tests contain nonsensical questions, have multiple correct answers, or have no right answers at all (look up Pineapplegate).
• With hundreds of millions of American kids taking the same test, ethnic & regional differences aren't considered, making them unavoidably culturally biased.
• Unduly reward the superficial ability to retrieve info from the short-term memory.
• Pass/Fail status is often determined by politicians while test scores are often manipulated for political purposes.
• National Academy of Sciences, 2011 report to Congress: "Standardized tests have not increased student achievement.”
• Measure only low-level thought processes, trivializing true learning.
• Hide problems created by margin-of-error computations in scoring; scoring errors can have life-changing consequences.
• Curricula constructed from high-stakes tests are based on what legislators assume children will need to know in the future. Countless previous attempts at predicting the future have ended in failure.
• Provide minimal feedback that is useful to classroom teachers.
• Penalize test-takers who think in non-standard ways (common in children).
• Test results are not able to predict future success.
• Claimed to be used as a diagnostic tool to maximize student learning, but are actually used to punish students, teachers, & schools.

High-stakes tests are harmful to children:

• Minimal time for socializing & physical activity b/c recess & PE are cut in favor of test prep, particularly affecting low-scoring students.
• Testing anxiety has lead to sickness, vomiting, & even incontinence in the classroom.
• Excessive testing stifles the love of learning.
• Year-end tests require sitting still & staying focused for 3.5 hours, which leads to behavior problems.
• Encourage the promise of extrinsic motivators such as rewards for high scores (bribes) & punishments for low scores (threats).
• Pressure to pass tests has lead to stimulant abuse in teenagers.

High-stakes tests make public schools less effective:

• The lowest & highest achievers are left out as instructional resources are focused on learners at or near the pass/fail threshold.
• Fewer opportunities for kids to enjoy creative classes that make them love school.
• Arts & other electives are cut in favor of test prep & testing, particularly affecting students from low-income families.
• Children don't receive adequate instruction in non-tested areas like science, history, geography, government, etc.
• Divert billions of state taxpayer funds from public schools to pay huge testing firms like Pearson & ETS (Educational Testing Services).
• Divert precious time resources to test facilitation, preparation (such as begging proctors to volunteer), & administration.
• More established parents move to private schools to avoid the abundance of testing in public schools.
• When test scores trigger automatic retentions, much older students in classrooms can cause additional behavior problems
• On norm-referenced tests, nationally, 50% of students are below average, by definition.  Thus, requiring all students to be at or above "grade level" is statistically impossible. 
• Give testing firms control of the curriculum
• Test scores are used to evaluate teacher effectiveness in lieu of more effective administrator observations
• Reduces teacher creativity & autonomy, thereby reducing the appeal of teaching as a profession
• Minimize teachers' ability to accomodate multiple learning styles and provide adequate differentiation
• Create unreasonable pressure on students, teachers, administrators, and school districts to cheat

Less than 20% of charter schools are successful:

• Even the pro-charter documentary "Waiting for Superman" notes that only 1 in 6 charter schools succeed.
• Charter schools can artificially inflate their published success rate by deflecting low-scoring kids back to public schools, usually

Charter schools segregate children:

• Most charter schools are racially homogenous.
• Without diversity requirements, charter schools can market to specific demographics, ultimately segregating communities.
• Children from the same neighborhood often go to different schools, don't know each other, & don't play outside together. Alienation negatively impacts neighborhood communities.

Charter schools minimize the decision-making power of parents & the community:

• Private control, as opposed to elected control via school board, leaves curricula to be defined by a corporate agenda.
• Corporate-controlled charter school home offices are often centralized out of state.
• One more thing for parents & kids to worry about as they wait for acceptance letters.
• Undermine a fundamental democratic principle that the people closest to (& therefore most knowledgeable about) problems are the best positioned to deal with them.

Charter schools make public schools less effective:

• Taxpayer dollars are deflected from public schools into charter schools where they're utilized w/o transparency or accountability.
• Charter schools have the freedom to select high-achieving kids w/ few needs so low-achieving kids w/ high needs get deflected & ultimately concentrated into an underfunded local public school.
• Charter schools aren't obligated to provide special services for high-needs kids so they often get deflected & ultimately concentrated into an underfunded local public school.
• Only families who can navigate application processes can apply to a charter. Families w/o the time or know-how to "work the system" (often very poor and/or immigrant families) are ultimately concentrated into an underfunded local public school.
• Private entities have already tried running school districts according to corporate models & seen disastrous results.

Special thanks to Marion Brady, from whom I borrowed heavily!

Marion Brady on the One Reason Dunc's "Race" will Fail

From Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post:

My guest today is Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author. He writes about Education Secretary's Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" initiative, intended to be the successor to "No Child Left Behind."

By Marion Brady
When "Race to the Top" fails, as it will, the main reason won’t be any of those currently being advanced by the corporate interests and politicians now running the education show.

It won’t fail because of lack of academic rigor, poor teaching, weak administrators, too-short school year, union resistance, differing state standards, insufficient performance incentives, sorry teacher training, or lingering traces of the early-20th Century Progressive movement.

It will fail primarily for a reason not even being mentioned by leaders of today’s reform effort: A curriculum adopted in 1893 that grows more dysfunctional with each passing year. Imagine a car being driven down a winding rural road with all the passengers, including the driver, peering intently out the back window.

The familiar, traditional curriculum is so at odds with the natural desire to learn that laws, threats and other extrinsic motivators are necessary to keep kids in their seats and on task.

It has no built-in mechanisms forcing it to adapt to change. Ignoring solid research about their importance in intellectual development, it treats art, music, dance, and play as "frills."

It isolates educators in specialized fields, discouraging their interest in and professional dialog about the whole of which their specializations are parts. It fails to explore questions essential to ethical and moral development.

It neglects important fields of study, and has no system for determining the relative importance of those fields it doesn’t neglect.

Its failure to reflect the integrated nature of reality and the seamless way the brain perceives it makes it difficult to apply what’s being taught to real-world experience.
And that barely begins a list of the problems.

There’s no easy, quick fix, but one thing is certain.

Doing with greater diligence and determination what brought America’s schools to their present state will simply move forward the day when failure becomes obvious to all. There are, however, some things Congress and the administration could do.

First, they could stop basing education policy on the opinions of business leaders, syndicated columnists, mayors, lawyers, and assorted other education "experts" who haven’t passed the 10,000-hour test-10,000 hours of face-to-face dialog with real students in real classrooms, all the while thinking analytically about what they’re doing, and why.

"Experts" who see more rigor, more tests, more international comparisons, more "data-driven decision-making," more math and science, more school closings, more Washington-initiated, top-down reform policy as the primary cure for education’s ills, are amateurs. And policymakers who can’t see the perversity of simultaneously spending billions on innovation and billions on standardization should consider finding other work.

Second, Congress and the administration could accept the fact that, in formal schooling, the curriculum is where the rubber meets the road.

No matter school type-public, charter, private, parochial, magnet, virtual, home, whatever; no matter the level-elementary, secondary, college, or graduate school; no matter first-rate physical facilities, highly qualified faculty, enlightened administrators, sophisticated technology, generous funding, caring parents, supportive communities, disciplined, motivated students, no matter anything else affecting school performance, if the curriculum is lousy, the education will be lousy.

Third, Congress and the administration could stop for a moment, think, then acknowledge what they surely must know, that the key to humankind’s survival is, at it has always been, human variability.

Trying to standardize kids by forcing them all through the same minimum standards hoops isn’t just child abuse. It’s a sure-fire way to squeeze out what little life is left in America’s public schools after decades of appallingly simplistic, misguided, patchwork policy. Maximum performance, not the minimum standards measured by tests, should be the institution’s aim.

Anything less invites societal catastrophe.

If Congress and the administration are wise, they’ll use their levers of power not to tighten but to loosen the rigor screws and end the innovation-stifling role of Carnegie Units, course distribution requirements, mandated instructional programs, and other curriculum-standardizing measures.

They’ll do what enlightened school boards have always done and say to educators, "We want you to unleash creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, and enthusiasm, and send the young off with a lasting love of learning. Tell us what you need in order to make that happen, and we’ll do our best to provide the necessary support."

Even the suggestion of such a policy will appall many.

We say we’re big on freedom, democracy, individualism, autonomy, choice, and so on, but advocating aligning our schools with our political rhetoric invites being labeled as too radical to be taken seriously.

Such a policy, most are likely to believe, would trigger chaos, pandemonium, anarchy.

Not so. Two things would happen.

In most schools, institutional inertia, entrenched bureaucracy, and pressure from powerful corporate interests, would maintain the status quo.

In most schools, but not all. A few would point the way to a better-than-world-class education by demonstrating what experienced teachers have always known, that the traditional curriculum barely scratches the surface of kids’ intellectual potential.

You can reach Marion Brady at www.MarionBrady.com.