Does Education Secretary Cardona Recognize the Two Huge Problems with High-Stakes Testing? | janresseger

Does Education Secretary Cardona Recognize the Two Huge Problems with High-Stakes Testing? | janresseger

Does Education Secretary Cardona Recognize the Two Huge Problems with High-Stakes Testing?

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona insists that federally mandated standardized testing will go on as usual in this COVID-19 dominated year. While his decision feels particularly impractical, intrusive, complicated and disruptive in the midst of COVID-19, the decision is of much deeper concern for two reasons.

This blog will take the holiday weekend off. Look for a new post on Wednesday, April 7.

One would like to think that Dr. Cardona is familiar with the huge debate that has consumed education experts and also many parents who have been opting out for years now.  But when Dr. Cardona explained why testing must go on as usual, he didn’t even bother to offer a rationale that addresses any of the reasons experts have insisted he should cancel the tests once again this year. Instead he said we need the tests so that the Department of Education can ensure that federal investment goes to the school districts that need it most. That is such a lovely thought, and if tests were designed and used to gauge needed investment in the poorest communities, it would be wonderful. 

But standardized tests, as mandated by No Child Left Behind and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, were not designed to drive a system of test-and-invest. They are instead the very foundation of a maze of policies at the federal level—and now federally mandated across the states—to identify so-called “failing schools” and to punish them.

The first kind of damage caused by high-stakes testing is pedagogical. Standardized testing and its preparation have deeply affected what happens in the classroom itself. Dr. Cardona’s decision to insist on tests in this schoolyear will undermine what students need most when CONTINUE READING: Does Education Secretary Cardona Recognize the Two Huge Problems with High-Stakes Testing? | janresseger

Education Secretary Cardona stands firm on standardized testing mandate amid criticism - The Washington Post

Education Secretary Cardona stands firm on standardized testing mandate amid criticism - The Washington Post

Education Secretary Cardona stands firm on standardized testing mandate amid criticism

A day after more than 500 education researchers asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona not to force school districts to administer federally mandated student standardized tests this year during the coronavirus pandemic, Cardona said Tuesday that policymakers needed the data obtained from the exams.

Appearing at the 2021 legislative conference of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Cardona said giving school districts flexibility in how and when they administer the exams — as the department has already given — was the right thing to do. “One size does not fit all,” he said.

But he said, student data obtained from the tests was important to help education officials create policy and target resources where they are most needed. When federal funding is distributed to states, he said, “we have to make sure we are laser-focused on addressing inequities that have existed for years. ... Every bit of data helps.”

The Education Department announced this week how much money each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico would receive from the $122 billion in funding for K-12 schools that was included in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

Cardona made the comment during a question-and-answer period at the CCSSO conference when he was asked what he hoped to learn from the exams. His CCSSO appearance came a day after 548 members of the academic research community sent Cardona a letter, urging him to award states waivers from the exams because they will “exacerbate inequality” and “produce flawed data.”

They also urged Cardona to invest in “more holistically evaluating school quality” by “developing new measures of educational opportunities.”

Don’t force schools to give standardized tests this pandemic year, research scholars ask Education Secretary Cardona

Cardona said Tuesday that he would be willing to “reexamine what role assessments” play in education — but not immediately. CONTINUE READING: Education Secretary Cardona stands firm on standardized testing mandate amid criticism - The Washington Post

CURMUDGUCATION: The Trouble With Data

CURMUDGUCATION: The Trouble With Data

The Trouble With Data

Yesterday the Atlantic published an exceptionally helpful piece in the Science section by Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal that offers some excellent explanation of why the nation has dropped the data ball for this pandemic. It's a good read from that perspective. But for education folks, there's more.

In the body of the article, Meyer and Madrigal share some observations about data, and the problems with data-driven anything; these points are important, and should be emblazoned on the office door of every data-driven follow-the-science policy maker and administrator in the country.

1. All data are created; data never simply exist.

Before March 2020, the country had no shortage of pandemic-preparation plans. Many stressed the importance of data-driven decision making. Yet these plans largely assumed that detailed and reliable data would simply … exist. They were less concerned with how those data would actually be made.

Here come the data

Data have to come from somewhere. They have to be created, and then they have to be interpreted. Anyone who assumes that the data are good simply because they exist--well, that's a terrible assumption. Every step pf the data-creation chain, from the testing instrument, to scoring, to score conversion, to interpretation of the score--all of that should be questioned and examined and then questioned again.

But in our high stakes testing era, that has not happened (nor is it happening now). When the state says, "22% of your students are below basic in reading non-fiction," that's not a figure that descended from heaven in a burning memo. It's a number that was created, and everyone ought to be asking how it was created. Starting with a CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The Trouble With Data

CURMUDGUCATION: Election Polling and the Big Standardized Test

CURMUDGUCATION: Election Polling and the Big Standardized Test

Election Polling and the Big Standardized Test

From the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to the Atlantic and beyond, writers weeks after the election castigating the pollsters for yet another less-than-stellar year. But education writer Larry Ferlazzo moved on to another question—”Could Polling Errors in the 2020 Election Teach Us Something About The Use Of ‘Data’ In Education.”

He’s onto something there. Thinking about the Big Standardized Test from a polling perspective helps illuminate why the tests themselves, and the data-driven philosophy in education, have worked out so poorly.

After all, those big “measure everyone” standardized math and reading tests that states are mandated to give every year are similar to opinion polls—they are trying to measure and quantify what is going on in peoples’ heads. And to work, there are several things the data-gatherers have to get right.

Ask the right questions.

For an election poll, this seems simple enough. “Which candidate are you going to vote for?” But trying to fold in other information like political leanings, positions on other issues, the strength of the voter’s opinions—that gets harder.

For math and reading tests, this part is trickier. Imagine, for instance, you want to know if a student can find the main idea of any piece of writing. Could you measure that by asking just a couple of multiple choice questions? How many questions do you think it takes to figure out whether or not CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Election Polling and the Big Standardized Test

CURMUDGUCATION: The False God Data Fails Again

CURMUDGUCATION: The False God Data Fails Again

The False God Data Fails Again

The dream of the Cult of Data is that for any issue, we simply design an instrument for collecting the data, analyze the Data, and select a solution suggested by the Data. Phrases like "data driven" or "data informed" are used to express the assumption that decisions backed by Data are inherently smarter, better, stronger, and wiser than Those Other Kinds of decisions. 

But what if they aren't? What if Data doesn't actually solve anythung?

I've made this point before while writing about the NAEP, the gold standard, America's report card, the test that is supposed to give us data that is clear and clean and objective and allows us to make wise decisions. Except that it doesn't. The Data come out, the arguments follow, and the hard data from the NAEP test settles exactly nothing.

Now here we go again. 

Matt Barnum, my personal favorite Chalkbeat reporter, took a look at a recent gathering of education experts who wanted to look at a simple question- are the gaps in test scores between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy closing? Seems straightforward, and yet...

No one could answer the question. Or, more precisely, no one could agree on the answer. One researcher claimed the gap was growing, another said it was shrinking, and a third argued that it hadn’t changed much in decades.

It depends. It depends on which Data you look at, which data you trust, which data represents what you think it represents. And as Barnum points out, this is a particularly remarkable question to be stumped by, because the test score gap (aka "the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The False God Data Fails Again