Our pal Fred Smith continues drilling deep on high stakes testing. Fred is a member of the GEM spinoff Change the Stakes Committee. See our blog at:
http://changethestakes.wordpress.com/
A good reminder of past high-stakes failures from Fred at
http://www.citylimits.org/conversations/168/school-testing-drama-are-students-center-stage-or-a-sideshow
Next month, city students take the
standardized tests on which their progress, and perhaps the fates of
their teachers and schools, depend—all amid a debate over testing that,
this writer observes, is nothing new.
In 1980, a promotion policy was put forward by Mayor Ed Koch,
who wanted to be known as the education mayor and judged by student test
performance. He championed a promotion/retention effort built around
results obtained on the citywide test. He talked about returning to
tough standards. He received favorable press for this bold initiative.
Decisions
on promoting children would be based on their performance on the city's
annual reading and math tests. Score a year or more behind and you'd
be retained in fourth and seventh grade, the so-called Promotional
Gates.
Koch’s chosen chancellor held obligatory hearings, where
mothers and fathers raised rational arguments against the policy:
unreliable data; not enough highly-skilled teachers to reach kids in a
way the schools had been unable to before; the harmful, disruptive
impact keeping kids back would have (the specter of "bearded 7th
graders"); the lack of an appeal process; and the likelihood of
insufficient funding to support the program.
The school system
didn't listen to parents. But it did listen to its bean counters. An
arbitrary cutoff score was initially set for each Gates grade to
separate students who met the promotion criteria from others who would
be eligible for retention. Based on preliminary data, the budget office
projected how very high the cost would be for the instructional
services needed by so many low scorers, including money for prescribed
summer school. No problem, the administration effectively said. The
cut-off points for holding kids back were immediately lowered—literally,
a new bottom line—and a more affordable plan adopted. So much for
standards.
The chancellor then asked the city's 32 school
districts to tell him what practices worked best in reaching the
holdbacks. Clearly, this was a policy in search of a program. The
mayor and chancellor, having rejected input from the public and not
thought out the consequences, lurched ahead.
Three or four years
later, five independent studies came out concluding the program had
come up short largely because of the very problems parents had warned
about. The Board of Education stuck by its own statistics and hailed the
program's success, distorting test data to show an exaggerated rate of
promotion after summer school. However, by 1984, the city had quietly
begun phasing out the program. In short, Gates (no relation to Bill)
was a failure.
The episode should have served as an historical
object lesson for the current administration. Instead, Mayor Bloomberg
has recited the “let’s end social promotion" mantra in every grade. He
took credit when the number of holdbacks almost vanished in 2009. Their
near-disappearance was because the cut-off scores needed to reach
“Level 2,” the threshold of promotion, had been set so low that kids
could advance to the next grade by guessing. The mayor was too busy to
acknowledge this fact as he ran for re-election to a third term.
In
2009, Albany was finally forced to admit its exams lacked rigor and
that tough standards had to be imposed. So, the state and its test
publisher increased the number of items required to pass in 2010. Many
more students wound up in Level 1, the lowest performance category,
making them eligible for additional services. Upon that news, the Board
of Regents approved a waiver: Districts wouldn’t have to provide such
costly help. As had happened under the Koch administration, which
scaled back its own standards in the face of fiscal constraints, city
students who needed extra support did not receive the services to the
extent they should have. Once again, budget trumped need.
But
the Bloomberg administration has done more than echo the Koch
administration's mistakes on the use of standardized tests to govern
promotion. It has expanded on them. High-stakes test data have become
the basis for denying tenure to teachers and rating their effectiveness
via complicated value-added formulas that give major weight to how well
their students do on statewide exams whose scoring in recent years has
been anything but reliable. And flimsy test results have been
overextended to generate school report cards, identifying and justifying
which will be closed, restructured, turned around, etc.
All but
invisible amid these furies, the troubled promotion program has been
relegated to secondary or tertiary status, an ironic outcome,
perhaps—one showing how education has devolved from focusing on the
children to a preoccupation with administrative and organizational
matters.
But the voices of parents that were long ago ignored never died.
Unaddressed concerns have grown louder about how testing and its
misapplied results have damaged education. A spectrum of resistance is
emerging now among parents who question and conscientiously object to
putting their sons and daughters through the testing wringer. The
proposals range from advocating that informed parental consent be a
pre-condition for testing, to more boldly opting out of a program some
see as inimical to learning, to flat-out calling for a boycott of next
months' test.
We shouldn’t forget that our current raging
debates started in the classroom. Somehow I feel a mixture of
ambivalence and perverse consolation in knowing that children hold in
their hands the most potent weapon in education today: the No.2 pencil.
Armed with this, they fill in circles on answer sheets that control
the fate of teachers and schools, as well as their own.
===
AFTER BURN
Confused
about what might happen if you decide to opt your child out of high
stakes testing in New York this year? Opting out is not for everyone,
but if you have already considered this (or if you want to learn about
other ways to challenge high stakes testing):
- Check out our new flier at www.changethestakes.org
- For additional information on how to opt out visit http://nystoptesting.blogspot.com/
- And if you have already decided to opt out contact us at changethestakes@gmail.com
Please repost the petition demanding a non-punitive opt out process on Facebook and share via email, Twitter, etc.
http://signon.org/sign/give-new-york-state-parents.fb1?source=s.em.cr&r_by=1228146&mailing_id=3021
Thanks for your support!
Andrea from the Change the Stakes Campaign
