A look at testing in the "pre-No Teacher Left Unblamed era". A retired administrator speaks out.

[madfloridian]

Your Kid Is Being Bullied - But Not in the Way You Think

Dr. James Arnold is retired. Was Assistant Principal at Shaw HS, Principal at Shaw in 2001 and Superintendent of Pelham City
Schools in 2010. He is a published author, has written 7 children’s books and contributes
regularly to the Atlanta Journal and Washington Post on educational matters.

He's also a blogger and recently started his Twitter feed

I remember these days he talks about when standardized testing was used as a tool by both parents and teachers to help guide the students' progress.

Right now your child in public education, from kindergarten through their senior year, is being bullied. Bullied by accountabullies that will tell you the only way public schools and public school teachers can be held accountable is through more and more standardized testing and data driven instruction and data points and data walls and data analyzation and more and more data until they finally prove that testing your kid is necessary and required but testing their kid in a private school is not really important. What?

Almost all of the tests I took during my educational career were teacher -made tests. You remember; those tests that individual teachers constructed designed particularly for the students in their classes that covered a well defined content area or subject. That was back when teachers were trusted and allowed to teach without legislative and Federal over the shoulder intrusiveness. The scores we made on those tests, believe it or not, ended up being a significant part of our grade at the end of each grading period.....

...... Students in the pre-No Teacher Left Unblamed era generally took one or two standardized tests during their educational careers. The Iowa Test of Basic Skills was widely used, but the scores did not define the student or the teacher, and parents may have privately done the happy dance when their kids were in a top percentile but did not hang their heads in shame when their progeny were scored on the wrong end of the bell curve because - this is hard to believe - the information was private and not open for public discussion. No attempts were made to shame students or teachers into higher levels of performance. Unbelievably, the information was sent home to parents, but, more importantly, used by teachers to denote where improvements in instructional focus might occur. There is little chance of that happening today with our post-mortem assessment mentality where the tests are given at the end of the school year and results returned far too late for teachers to affect any sort of learning focus from those results. There were no “gotcha” moments when scores were announced because, well, scores weren’t announced.

Well those days are gone, but it's good to see administrators as well as teachers realizing there really is bullying going on now as far as testing goes.

And it's not going to get any better. In fact Arne Duncan has come up with some theories of his own about all the problems testing will solve.

Dr. Arnold had a guest column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about that new policy.

Guest post at Atlanta Journal Constitution. The 'bizarro" state of American education today.

[Stargazer99]

1. what amazes me is the ignorance in this nation

Children experiencing poverty, emotional damage from malfunction parents have a hellva time learning. So what does this nation do? Increase poverty, use charter schools (which steal from public school funds). Testing!!! What does that have to do with CRITICAL THINKING?????. God forbid we should have a country that has individuals that think on their own!! The powers that be might have more difficulties pulling off the crap they do. Start providing education, decent living conditions, mental/emotional help. You say why should I pay for other people's needs? Because we are all human and many are in great pain. Is that all you can think of is your own welfare? No wonder this world is in a mess.

[madfloridian]

2. Great rant.

Thanks for getting how serious this really is.

[Xyzse]

7. Absolutely agreed.

[CrispyQ]

3. I remember something called "Achievement Tests."

I graduated HS in '75. We had achievement tests in 6th & 9th grades. It was two and a half days of testing, filling in little oval circles. We never found out the results of our tests & every student dreaded them. I always filled in "B" if I didn't know the answer to a question. On the last day of testing I was so sick of it & it was a science test, so I filled in all the B's & turned my test in in five minutes. I was sent to the principals office & lectured but I didn't care. My mother was concerned it would impact my ability to get into college, but it didn't. I've always wondered what those tests were for.

Now it sounds like they do them every year. Public education has really changed. Very telling that they don't want a testing environment for their own privately educated kids. They want public education to turn out sheep.

[madfloridian]

4. You should have christmas-treed the answers..

Just kidding really, but it would have been harder to spot than all B's.

I had a lot of kids do that. Picture a tree's branches in the order of the multiple choice blanks. They would go from A to B to C..and so on. Like a tree's branches. They were through with the test before most got started.

[CrispyQ]

5. I was not an out-of-the-box thinker.

[madfloridian]

6. ....

[ctsnowman]

8. I never thought I'd

see the day when teachers were turned into scapegoats to pillage the commons.

[madfloridian]

14. Neither did I.

But we are seeing it now.

[americannightmare]

9. Testing is a nowhere train...

Testing only shows how good a person is at taking tests. It's about cramming and fleeting memorization. Meanwhile, students in France, in order to graduate from lycee (their equivalent of high school) must write a philosophical essay; their exam is the essay, not a useless multiple choice test. That's how you acquire critical thinking skills, through reading, writing, and reflecting. And some people still think we have the best education system in the world.

http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/french-students-debate-mandatory-philosophy-exam/

[madfloridian]

11. Your link to the philosphy debate is fascinating.

I loved philosophy. I had two of the greatest professors who tossed stuff at us we thought was so irrelevant....but then drew it back together with only a few loose ends. Those loose ends were ours to figure out.

It challenged the mind. I had a Scottish professor who only had to look at us to make us shiver a little. He had no tolerance for narrow-minded thinking. I still see his beard and steely eyes and hear his thick accent.

I could win hands down on essay tests, but I never got the hang of multiple choice. I always thought the question was meant to trick or distract, and I got a lot of answers wrong because of it.

[americannightmare]

17. The fact that you excelled at essay tests...

and not at multiple choice makes the point rather well, doesn't it? You were challenged by those great professors and there was no going back to useless memorization.

[Octafish]

10. THE PROBLEM: Public Education doesn't get the money it NEEDS.

So, rather than FINDING (cough taxes) and spending what's needed (often to make up for what the kids aren't getting at home from birth to the time they show up at school), society blames the teacher.

Great formula.

[madfloridian]

13. They picked their enemy early on. 1980s Reagan's Nation at Risk.

You have to have an enemy, a scapegoat, if you are going to start a war...don't you know? This time it's teachers without resources to fight back.

[daleanime]

12. K&R....

[madfloridian]

15. Thanks...

Banging my head.

[madfloridian]

16. I like the term he coined..."accountabullies"

Accountability has become accountabilism administered by accountabullies whose primary goal is the destruction of public education, and through that destruction the privatization of that system which will allow public money to be spent on privatization efforts.

So true.