Now You Know

     One spring many years ago my principal needed to take some personal time during the week of the grade 5 state standardized test.  As lead teacher (there was no vice-principal), I was nominally in charge, but given the grave importance of the week's events an administrator from central office was sent to help me cover the building.  Not minutes into first day of testing we got a call from the BD room.  One of the students, set off by the stress of the situation, was having a violent, emotional breakdown.  His teacher had removed him from the room and was restraining him in the hallway.  The rest of the students were waiting to continue.  Who would take over the test administration?
     After assessing the situation in the hall, the covering administrator stepped into the breach.  She stayed with the class for the rest of the morning, overseeing the completion of the day's test sections.  At lunch I stopped by the office to see how she had made out.  I found her sitting at the principal's desk, head in hands, visibly shaken.  It looked as if she had been weeping.  She didn't have to say anything.  I knew what the matter was.
   

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     My feelings about high-stakes standardized testing have never been a secret.  Administering them to students was part of my job description, and doing it made me feel morally compromised.  Not having the courage to stand up for my principles, actually becoming a part of a system that was being used discredit myself and my colleagues by weaponizing data in an attempt to delegitimize public education while at the same time causing emotional trauma to children, made me feel powerless, guilty and complicit.  (That's how systems like this are designed.)   Refusing to allow my own children to be used by opting them out helped, but only a little.

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        Here's an equation.  See if you can guess what it represents:

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     One year I was assigned to administer the NJASK to one of our classified students.  He was a fourth grader at the time.  His IEP stipulated he was to receive the test in a separate room, one-to-one, with all text and questions read aloud and all written responses scribed.  I was chosen to be his test administrator.  The LDTC was asked to vacate her room from 9:00 to 11:30, and it was there we set up shop.  There were actually three of us in the room; myself, the student, and his imaginary friend who stayed under his desk and whom he would occasionally consult.  This went on for an entire week.  Although he answered only a handful of questions correctly (some by lucky guess), he was pretty smart.  He knew he didn't know the answers, but he pretended to try and figure things out.  As much as I encouraged him, and told him that he was putting forth a wonderful effort, I could tell that he knew that I knew that he didn't know much of what was on the test.  I silently prayed he didn't feel he was embarrassing himself in front of me by his performance.  We both did a good job pretending that what was really happening wasn't really happening.  The only way I can describe the experience is to say it was truly surreal.
      

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     Once when I was teaching third grade a kid threw up on his answer booklet.  I had to stop the test administration and call the principal.  The student went to the nurse.  I continued testing and the principal filed an irregularity report.  We had to put the vomited-on test booklet in a plastic baggie and send it back to the state.  I'm not sure what they did with it.  The student had to take a make-up.

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     When New Jersey implemented its regimen of testing every single child every single year from grades 3 through 12, the test developed for use was called the NJASK (New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge).  The summer before the test went "live" I sat for a week in a conference room at a hotel in Monroe with a bunch of other elementary school teachers from the state.  Our job was to read through stacks of booklets containing student responses from the pilot version and, using that as a guide, set cut scores for proficiency.  I was proud to have been selected for the task.  It was an important job, and we took it very seriously.  Towards the end of the week we provided our cut score numbers to the Department of Education and ETS overlords who had been monitoring our work.  They told us to go back to the drawing board.  Why?  Because given our numbers, "Too many students would pass."  It was then I realized that the entire exercise had been a farce.  They could have just set the cut scores themselves.  They were using us as cover.  I protested, and refused to participate in re-setting the cut scores.  After the work was finished, they asked for three volunteers to go before the state Board of Education and present the findings.  I volunteered along with two others.  Guess who didn't get picked to go.

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     Remember that equation?  Here's what it means:

      The project of using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers has been discredited.   We've known this for a long time.  The sordid underside of testing industry's scoring practices has been exposed.   We've known that for a long time too.  For a teacher, the results come back too late to be actionable.  And even if they didn't, they still wouldn't help, because if something was wrong I'd have little idea why.  If there is value in using them to evaluate larger populations, then sampling would do the job just fine.  It just isn't necessary to test every single child.  To paraphrase Stephen Krashen, when you go to a doctor for a blood test, he doesn't take all your blood.  To understand why it continues, follow the money.  Billions of dollars have gone to line the pockets of test developers, curriculum and test-prep writers, publishers, and providers, computer software developers and tech companies tasked with bringing school wireless capacities and other technologies up to standardized testing requirements (and of course providing continuing tech support).  This is all in addition to those school operators who profit from the corporatization of education when public schools are shut down.  Thought experiment:  If you had billions of dollars to spend on education, how would you spend it?

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     When I found the central office administrator behind the principal's desk that long ago spring,  I wanted to ask, "What did you think went on?  How exactly did you think all that data got harvested?"  But I didn't.  She had witnessed something sad, disturbing, and frightening, and I felt bad for her.  I guess it was her first time.   All I offered was, "Well, now you know."          

     

Commencement Address

     My daughter graduated from high school last month.  (I told you not to worry so much.) Several days before the end of the final term, she brought home her cumulative folder.  It contained absence records, consent and registration forms, proof of residency, various permission slips, and, of course, report cards and standardized test scores.
     I could brag about many of her school accomplishments.  And I don't mean to show off, but here's one I'm especially proud of:

Grade 7 PARCC report.

   
     Determined not to have our children used by the testing-industrial complex, and inspired by a visit to Washington, DC, where as a family we attended an Occupy the DOE protest and a march to the White House, we made the decision in 2013 to opt-out of our state standardized testing.  We faced pressure from the school, the district, and the state, but our minds were made up.   The superintendent refused our request to have our daughter moved to another room to read, study, or do schoolwork.  She sat at a desk in a classroom hour after hour, day after day, as the rest of her classmates filled in bubbles and wrote constructed responses in their test booklets.  (That first year we learned an invaluable lesson; even if you have no intention of taking the test, you need to actually crack the seal on the booklet.  Day one she had left the book unopened, and we were informed that when the week of testing was over the district would insist she sit for that day's make-up, missing actual instructional class time.  As if we needed any more proof that the system was completely out of control.  Of course now things are different and I'm not sure what the computerized equivalent of cracking the seal might be.) 
    She was bored and self-conscious, but children have suffered much, much worse in displays of civil disobedience.  The following year she did it again, and my son, two years ahead of her in school, did the same.  My hope was that the opt-out movement would grow, ultimately reaching some type of critical mass.  I pictured the entire corrosive system as a giant monster with an insatiable appetite for data.  Data was its fuel.  Data was its sustenance.  It needed data to live.  Withhold the data and the monster would die.  As the years went by the movement did grow, as more students elected to opt out.  And the district softened its policies.  They provided rooms for the refuseniks to read and study while their classmates were testing.  But the critical mass I had hoped for never materialized, and the insanity continues.
     In recent weeks New Jersey has moved to eliminate some of its testing requirements, and I can't help but think we played a small role in making that happen.  Yet federal law still requires that all children starting in grade 3 be tested each and every year.  States can work around the edges, lessen the number of testing days and change the name of the assessment, but the monster still lives, feeding off the data generated by the sweat, tears, and humiliation of hundreds of thousands of children.  They won't be mine.

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     The truly educated become conscious.  They become self-aware.  They do not lie to themselves.  They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good.  They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick.  They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business.  Thought is a dialogue with one's inner self.  Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked.  They remember who we are, where we came from and where we should go.  They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power.  And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconscious.  The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. 
     ....We must fear, (Hannah) Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the structure of blind obedience.  We must fear those who cannot think.  Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

     

Chris Hedges

Why the United States is Destroying Its Education System 
April 11, 2011

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     The path to graduation wasn't always smooth.  Classified the summer between grades 4 and 5, by the time her middle school career was over she would, by sheer force of will, work her way from a self-contained class to a resource room to full declassification.  And despite the continued protestations from the state and the district, she would never take the PARCC.  The earth continued to spin on its axis and circle the sun.  She went to class, did her homework, and took an untold number of school quizzes and tests.   She became a bat-mitzvah, danced, got her driver's license, and worked 20 hours a week as a server in a retirement community dining room (no cash register.) She has attributes that no standardized test can measure, like courage, persistence, and empathy.  What could a PARCC score have possibly told me about her that I didn't already know?  That her teachers didn't already know?  What could taking it possibly do for her except reinforce the notion she was a less than adequate student?  Whose interests would be served?  Ultimately, who would care?  Not any of the six universities that were happy to have her enter with their freshman class.

      I told you not to worry so much.