My New york City BK Nation Panel Talking Points for 01/06/16
Dr. Jesse Patrick Turner Professor
of Reading Language Arts at Central Connecticut State University. My BK Nation
Talking Points for a call to action to save our public schools and the children
who attend them. (01/06/16)
On Standards, standardized assessments, and College readiness
On Standards, standardized assessments, and College readiness
In
the nineteenth century America’s academic elites feared American students were
not college-ready. Thus in 1892 The National Education Association created the “Committee
of Ten” to create uniform college admission requirements based on new content
standards using common entrance exams. From the beginning the standards
established America’s wealthy, powerful, and connected were never rooted in
principles of democracy or morality, but on content knowledge measured through
uniformed testing. These are not innovative, or unique, and have a long
history of education reform failures.
Inequality
matters, and we can't test our way out of inequality Let
us include standards obsession with our history of school inequity. In 1896
four years after America’s love for standards found itself further supported by
Plessey v Ferguson. Establishing segregation as the law of the land for nearly
6 decades. In 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education ended jurisprudence
segregation. For the first time in public education history the wealthy, the
powerful and the connected status quo found their policies threatened. Hiding
behind their trusted mantra of “standards and exam uniformity” gave cover to
“de facto” segregation and inequality in our nation’s public schools. With the
passage of the “Every Student Succeeds Act” in 2015, America continues down
that same old 100 years of failed education reforms.
Assessment and education: First Do
No Harm, Second Sit Beside Learner Assessments, and Third All learners Must
benefit from Education Reform Experiments.
Our assessment framework is broken. The
current assessment framework does not need to be fixed we need a completely
new human assessment framework. There are many interesting factors about
America’s love affair with standards and uniform assessments. This love affair
is of course rooted in the power of assessment, evaluation, test selection, and
data-driven instruction. The most compelling part of the narrative lost is a
perspective on the data that really count; namely the health, and well-being of
children. In medicine, doctors and researchers insist on primum non nocere, (first do
no harm). However, in
educational assessment, such ethical requirements seem lost in pressures to
meet standards and make Annual Yearly Progress, (AYP).
If we impose a testing requirement
for high school graduation that ensures a student fails, where is the benefit? State
Exit Assessments like the New York Regents illustrate the data that count how many students met the standard. The data
that really matters needs to be recovered in misdirected attention to standards). What about the
students who passed their entire high school classroom-based assessments? What
about all the students who succeed in gathering all the high school course
requirements? Many empirical studies have shown strong correlations between test scores and factors such as family income, parents' education, single-parent families, and school enrollment. Simply put, children who have two educated
parents who are economically secure are much more likely to do better on the
tests than children who do not have the same assets. Why give an assessment that disfavors the children of poor single-parent
homes?
The Latin root of the word assess, assidere, means to sit beside. Educators who are closest to the child, and who sit beside the child on a daily basis, derive the most informative data. It is essential that these very same educators make the decisions about test selection and evaluation reporting. It is the teacher who can read the social, emotional, physical, cultural, linguistic, and cognitive characteristics of the learner. Human subject ethics for research requires strict adherence to “Beneficence” Research should have a positive impact on all participants in any trial. In 2023, teachers are the ones with crucial professional knowledge and are closest to children in school. What do policymakers, legislators, and administrators do? They ignore the voices of teachers, just like they ignore the voices of children. They bow to CEOs, podcasters, and anyone ready to profit off our children. We not only have Reading Wars, Math Wars, and a never-ending war on the professional knowledge of teachers. Until the center of public education places creativity, joy, inquiry, and love as the center of education, I expect this war on our children, teachers, and local schools to go on.
My conclusion is framed by perceived pressures from NCLB/ESSA’s focus on meeting standards that are not based on the ethical principles of research. Is assessment and evaluation meant to be cold, heartless, and disconnected from primary stakeholders or is it supposed to contain a wellness or instructional component? Is there no court of appeals for children, parents, teachers, and local schools in this new era of accountability? Is the focus of educational reform the disenfranchisement of those closest to our children? We need to study why we are following a top-down assessment model that ignores the patients (students), doctors (teachers), parents, and family. News headlines inform the general public that the United States is in danger of falling behind on international assessments. Policy-makers tell us that the United States test scores reveal we are falling behind in international educational comparisons. The 2010 Brown Center Report on American Education, How Well Are American Students Learning, debunked two myths of international assessments; 1) that the US ever led the world on tests of achievement, and 2) that Finland leads the world in education. According to the Brown report Finland scores near the top on the PISA assessment, but not on other international assessments. Historically the US has led internationally in Nobel Prizes in every Nobel category. The US is near the top in number of patents granted. When policymakers say we are falling behind they are looking at test scores obtained by measuring individual performance to a contrived standard. Contrived Standards and standardized assessments ignore the collection of information based on individual progress, growth, and achievement. Assessment and evaluation rooted exclusively in formal standardized summative measures is too narrow and has nothing to do with actual indicators of economic success or competitiveness.
The quest for a Nation Balanced
Assessment Framework begins by understanding humanity can never be defined by
any standardized assessment.
It is essential to include the voices of all stakeholders;
students, teachers, parents, and pupil services. What we present here is a
balanced assessment framework that views assessment as a photo album of
performance over time, designed to provide a clear, unobscured, picture of the
whole child. Any Balanced Assessment photo album should contain numerous
examples of authentic learning performance indicators. Standardized learning is not an authentic measure of a student’s ability to learn. Standardized measures have
never been indicators of learning ability.
The concept of looking at the whole child is formative, humane, just,
and more likely to yield information that recognizes the potential, innate talents,
and gifts of each child while respecting parents, teachers, and local schools. The
essential question is: When will our leaders start looking at the photo album
of America’s children rather than deficit-driven competitive notions based on
their fears of unpredicted futures. It’s
simple people? Where is the humanity in your standards and assessments?
References
Brown Center on Educational Policy at Brookings (2010). The
2010 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students
Learning? Available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown
Important Additional Resource/links
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law “failed badly both in terms
of its own goals and more broadly,” leading to a decade of educational
stagnation. That is the central conclusion of a major new report marking NCLB’s
tenth anniversary. President George W. Bush signed the program into law on
January 8, 2002. > http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home
For a more intensive of my view on Balanced Assessment see: Jesse P. Turner, John D. Foshay, and Ernest Pancsofar (2013). Toward a More Balanced Assessment Framework. Edited Daniel Mulcahy. Transforming Schools: Alternative Perspectives on School Reform (chapter 6):IAP, Charlotte, NC.
For my role as an activist you can email me turnerj@ccsu.edu, or follow my blog on the web http://childrenaremorethantestscores.blogspot.com/
This audience was full of BK Nation Superstars, parents, and teachers all informed, willing, and able to fight for rights. Notice in the center now Congress Member Jamaal Bowman
Love every single one of them. You can find his more teaching less testing bill at https://bowman.house.gov/_cache/files/8/9/89180377-ee4a-4906-b170-f4ee28d3602e/0D579FD78ABAA89748EA157D3F31CAB1.more-teaching-less-testing-act-bill-summary.pdf Everyone on the panel is still in the fight for the public schools our children, teachers, and families deserve.
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