Wednesday, May 23, 2012

John King Attacks Adults Who Oppose Pearson Field Tests

Buried at the end of a Wall Street Journal article on rising parent and teacher opposition to the field tests Pearson plans to administer next month in 4,000 elementary and middle schools around the state is this quote from John King:

Mr. King said he's concerned the reaction from parents misses a larger point. "Reading a passage and answering questions, or doing a set of math problems is an ordinary part of life of school," he said. "The environment around standardized testing has become so acrimonious that we've forgotten that adults need to set a positive tone for students around assessment as a natural part [of education]."

When you use standardized tests to bludgeon students, teachers and schools, when you create an environment where FEAR over these tests rules the day, what do you expect the reaction is going to be?

King makes it sound like parents and teachers opposed to the Pearson field tests are against "Reading a passage and answering questions or doing a set of math problems."

No, they're not.

What they're against is making those activities so high stakes that the outcomes - the scores - become the only thing that matters.

This is especially so when the tests have been so badly devised and the scoring rubrics have been hammered as "amateurish."

And we haven't even gotten around yet to the value-added measurement they're going to use on the teachers - the one with the wide swings in stability and huge margins of error.

Can't wait to see that put into place.

I can't decide if our dear NYSED commissioner truly doesn't understand why there is such acrimony over his testing regimen or if he's just playing dumb.

Either way, he had better get used to this opposition to his testing regimen and his education philosophy at the NYSED.

Because as the state starts to roll out the Common Core exams in the next few years, and the local districts start to roll out the local exams and students have to sit for 35+ high stakes standardized exams a year so that their teachers can be evaluated in the new "scientific" and "objective" Cuomo/King/Tisch/Iannuzzi/Mulgrew system, the opposition to what they're doing is only going to grow.

2 comments:

  1. As a NYC public school parent, I thank you for this post. You write, "I can't decide if our dear NYSED commissioner truly doesn't understand why there is such acrimony over his testing regimen or if he's just playing dumb." I think he and Walcott genuinely don't get the anger because they are clueless about how high-stakes testing has warped public education. They are so preoccupied with so-called "failing" schools that they have no idea what a decent public education might look like -- their standards are too low.

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  2. NYSED should take their large collection of Education Law §3020-a hearing panel reports and use portions as reading comprehension passages. Some of the reports are hilarious such as the one about the assistant principal who challenged the teacher to a fistfight at a faculty conference, shouting, "If you don't like it, you can blow it your ___!"

    The book "Teachers on Trial" describes some of these very entertaining reports:

    http://books.google.com/books?id=AilGTNBVFGcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

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