"Funky Monkey" and Pearson Fail the Test
John Oliver nailed Pearson on his HBO Last Week Tonight show on Standardized Testing. If you have not seen it yet, clink the link and watch it. I laughed a lot but can't really say I enjoyed the show; it was too disturbing. It won't be funny until companies like Pearson are brought down, especially given how they keep failing our children and schools by failing their own tests.
Oliver broadcast videos being used to promote high-stakes standardized testing as fun and showed one particularly bizarre elementary school testing rally in Texas that featured a dancing "Funky Monkey" test mascot. He even had an ersatz "Funky Monkey" live on the show that he banned for bad behavior
During the HBO program Oliver systematically took apart both the national testing regime and Pearson. According to Oliver, American students take on the average over 100 high-stakes standardized tests during their school careers. Often the tests are so upsetting to students that the test instructions actually alert teachers to what to do if students vomit on the test booklets. And a big problem is that despite more than a decade of increased testing and test-aligned curriculum, U.S. students are not performing any better on international benchmark exams.
In one of the best segments of the show, Oliver described how the computer algorithm used to evaluate student performance on high-stakes tests and teacher effectiveness is based on mathematical formulas developed for breeding cattle. If you doubt Oliver, Professor Stephen Caldas of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York did a careful analysis of the New York State "2013-2014 Growth Model for Educator Evaluation Technical Report." Pages 65-67 show the mystery equations used to calculate the future of New York State children. I have a PHD in history and I used to be pretty good in math. The only part of the equations I understood was repeated use of the term matrix which appears six times in the report and three times in that section. I don't want to be alarming, but the movie may be right. We may all be living in "The Matrix."
But there is some hope on the horizon.
Nationally, although final numbers will not be available for a few months, hundreds of thousands of student probably opted-out of the last round of high-stakes standardized tests. In some schools and districts where parents and students were well-organized opt-out rates were well above 50%. In addition, Pearson's contract to write, "Funky Monkey" and Pearson Fail the Test | Alan Singer:
