How To Fight The Testing Industrial Complex

Michael Fiorillo left this comment on NYC Educator's post about why NYSED and Pearson insist the NY State 3rd-8th grade tests must remain secret:

The destruction of public education hinges on everyone's passive acceptance of high stakes exams encroaching more deeply into every classroom. They are the weapon used to close schools, deprive students of a well-rounded education, and beat teachers into submission. They are the primary lever for getting everyone to accept the de-skilling of the teaching profession, and teaching's devolution into temporary, at-will employment.

The tests are also the primary tool for imposing the "social learning" embedded in the testing regime itself, whereby young people are socialized into passive acceptance of the exercise of arbitrary power, tolerance of tedium and absurdity and surveillance/data mining, so as to be powerless worker bees in the future.

Passive acceptance of the exercise of arbitrary power, a high tolerance for tedium, absurdity, and surveillance/data mining: that's what the so-called reformers really mean by students being "career ready."

This abuse will continue as long as we are cowed into respecting the "proprietary" claims of the test makers, which are totally illegitimate. These tests are paid for with public dollars, are used as gatekeepers for public school students, and are the de facto drivers of public school instruction; the public has an intrinsic right to see them and openly discuss their validity.

That right has moral, if not legal, precedence over any copyright claims.

As of now, the only way to force that debate is for teachers to engage in civil disobedience and provide the public service of making these exams available for open examination by all interested parties.

It's time for photocopies, or scanned and scrubbed digital photos of these exams, to be sent to the newspapers, elected officials, parent groups and blogs. They should be handed out at PEP meetings, so that the Chancellor is forced to acknowledge their presence. They need to be distributed so widely that their "secrecy" becomes a dead letter, the media cannot ignore them, and so that threats by Pearson and it's wholly-owned subsidiary, the New York State Department of Education, become irrelevant.

With the Associated Press picking up the stories circulating that the NYSED/Pearson tests have been loaded with product placements and brand name-dropping, NYSED and Pearson may be getting too cute by half trying to keep the tests secret.

As parent Olga Garica-Kaplan put it in response to the news of all the product placement and brand name-dropping in the NYSED/Pearson tests:

@perdidostschool And that is why I want to see what my 4th grader read on this test. I think it's a fair request - no?
— Olga Garcia-Kaplan (@OlgaKaplan) April 21, 2014

So far, SED and Pearson have gotten away with keeping the tests secret, threatening any teacher who divulges test items or tests themselves with legal action.

But the more these weird stories circulate of Pearson sticking brand names of companies with connections to Pearson into the tests themselves, the harder it becomes to keep these tests secret.

Frankly I don't care if Pearson is using the tests for branding or not - as Michael wrote in his comment, these tests are paid for NY State taxpayers to serve as gatekeepers for NY State students and to drive NY State classroom instruction.

NY State taxpayers have a right to see these tests in their entirety, along with the grading rubrics, "norming" materials used for grading, and the methodology used for the scores.

NYSED/Pearson Should Be Investigated Over The Product Placement In The NY State Tests

This was written by Isiah Schrader, a 14 year old at Anne M. Dorner Middle School, in Ossining, New York.  He took the 8th grade ELA exam:

Students from Massena to Montauk, from Plattsburgh to Poughkeepsie just took the New York State English exam. The exam, created by the education giant, Pearson, featured passages and questions that required the test-taker to be able to comprehend and analyze them. This was no small feat. The passages, like one about a man fishing for a screwdriver with a magnet, and a story about a busboy cleaning up soda, challenged students throughout the state. But the test had one feature that shocked this test-taker and surely others who noticed it: product placement.

The “busboy” passage in the eighth grade test I took was fictional, written about a dishwasher at a pizza restaurant. In it, the busboy neglects to notice a large puddle of root beer under a table that he clears. His irate employer notifies him about the mess, and he cleans it up. It seems alright at first glace. However, the root beer was referred to at one point as Mug™ Root Beer. It was followed by a footnote, which informed test-takers that Mug™ was a registered trademark of PepsiCo. The brand of soda, the type of soda, and, come to think of it, the exact beverage was not necessary to the development of the story, nor was it mentioned in any of the confusing and analytical questions following the passage.

So why was the brand and trademark included? Did the New York State Department of Education, which regulates the tests, receive any payment for these references to trademarked products?  “No one was paid for product placements,’’ Antonia Valentine, a spokeswoman for the department, told me in an interview.  “This is the first time we have had 100 percent authentic texts on the assessments. Any brand names that occurred in them were incidental and were cited according to publishing conventions.” She added that only in some cases unrelated to product placement – when passages were not in the public domain – did the state pay for permission to use passages. There was, in the same story that cited Mug™ Root Beer a mention of a Melmac™ dish. It played an equally unimportant role in the passage.

Non-fictional passages in the test I took included an article about robots, where the brands IBM™, Lego®, FIFA® and Mindstorms™ popped up, each explained with a footnote.  I cannot speak for all test takers, but I found the trademark references and their associated footnotes very distracting and troubling.

According to Barbara Kolson, an intellectual property lawyer for Stuart Weitzman Shoes, “The fact that the brands did not pay Pearson for the ‘product placement’ does not mean that the use is not product placement.” To the test-takers subjected to hidden advertising, it made no difference whether or not it was paid for. The only conclusion they (and this test-taker) made is that they could not be coincidental.

The effect of advertising on children is a hotly debated subject. Studies show that children are more susceptible than adults to advertising. The American Psychology Association recommends legislation restricting ads directed towards children. In Maine, for example, the advertising in schools of  “Foods of Minimum Nutritional Value,” or FMNV, is prohibited.  Following the same logic, shouldn’t state tests also exclude references to trademarked products that eighth graders find appealing, even tantalizing, like Mug™ root beer, or Lego® toys?

Why would Pearson, the world’s largest for-profit education business, include gratuitous references to trademarked products in its tests?  Pearson did not answer my e-mailed messages requesting comment. [Pearson did issue a general statement, which you can read after this article.]

The company, which has a five-year, $32 million contract with New York State to produce standardized tests, should have been more responsible and reproduced texts that did not include trademarked  – and highly recognizable – products.

Additionally, why would New York State permit these tests to create a captive market for products, like soda, that lead to obesity and other health problems in children? Arguably, New York State taxpayers have paid for the ads in their children’s state tests, one way or another.

Students in grades 3-8 are required by New York State to take standardized tests annually. No students should be required, however, to take tests that subject them to hidden advertising. Clearly the trademarked products mentioned throughout the exam had no relevance to the stated goals of testing students’ reading comprehension and analytical skills. Surely Pearson can afford to edit standardized tests and remove all mention of trademarked products.

Pearson has been under fire for bribing state officials with free trips to Singapore and elsewhere, so I wouldn't be shocked to find out that they have been less than honest in their explanation of how the trademarking showed up in the tests.

The same goes for NYSED officials - remember, the last NYSED Commissioner, David Steiner, was one of the officials who took the Pearson free trips.

There needs to be an independent investigation of how the product placement got into the tests.

Who signed off on that?

Why did the Regents and the NYSED okay the tests with product placement and trademarks in them?

NY State Tests Full Of Free Corporate Advertising

A shocking report by Yoav Gonen and Georgett Roberts in the NY Post:

At least a half-dozen companies got an unexpected boost in marketing their brands to New York’s children this week — with free product placement on the state’s English exams.

Teachers and students said yesterday’s multiple-choice section of the eighth-grade tests name-dropped at least a handful of companies or products — including Mug Root Beer, LEGO and that company’s smart robots, Mindstorms.

IBM, the comic book and TV show “Teen Titans” and FIFA — the international soccer federation — were also mentioned in the test booklets, some of them with what educators referred to as out-of-place trademark symbols.

“I’ve been giving this test for eight years and have never seen the test drop trademarked names in passages — let alone note the trademark at the bottom of the page,” said one teacher who administered the exam.

Students at JHS 190 in Queens said the inclusion of some of the brands both within and after the reading passages left them scratching their heads — particularly when the questions had nothing to do with them.

“For the root beer, they show you a waitress cleaning a table and the root beer fell on the floor and she forgets to clean it up. Underneath, they gave you the definition that it is a soda and then the trademark,” said Marco Salas, an eighth-grader at the Forest Hills middle school.

“I didn’t think they should put it there,” he said. “There is no reason for it. It is out of place.”

The new exams, created by the education arm of the firm Pearson, are the first issued by the New York state Education Department that will not be made public after they’re scored — so educators have gotten stern warnings not to discuss their content.

State officials have said the exams became too predictable and encouraged test prep when the content and format of the questions were publicly available.

The tests are also the first to rely heavily on unedited excerpts from nonfiction works — to which department spokesman Tom Dunn attributed the bump in trademarked and brand names.

“This is the first time we have had 100 percent authentic texts on the assessments,” said Dunn. “Any brand names that occurred in them were incidental and were cited according to publishing conventions.”

He said none of the firms paid to have their names included in the passages. Reps for IBM and LEGO said the firms were not involved in any way.

The NYSED shill says the brand names and trademarks are there because the texts are "100 percent authentic."

But the Post article reports that one of the trademark signs showed up in a definition in a footnote beneath the text.

Nothing "100 percent authentic" about that part of the text.

The Pearson people created the footnote.

How did that trademark for that corporate brand get there?

Just seems weird.

Now maybe the NYSED shill is telling the truth that these companies did not pay the state to get product placement in the tests.

But did they pay Pearson, the test developer?

Given the funkiness around Pearson, which has been under investigation for bribing state officials (including former NYSED Commissioner David Steiner) with free trips and other largesse, this needs to be investigated.

How did the product placements get into the tests?

Why were the trademarks used?

Pearson and the NYSED need to explain this matter further.