Thompson: Florida Test Controversy Previews Common Core Crises

In "FCAT Debacle: Why Public Awareness Matters," EdSector's Susan Headden recounts what she describes as "the latest fiasco in standardized testing." 

An emergency session of the Florida Board of Education dropped cut scores on the state's new writing test as 4th grade proficiency rates fell from 81% to 27%.  Headden predicts that "districts are going to have to get used to these rude surprises." The 46 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards will have just two years to get ready for their far tougher challenge. The tests will not just assess basic skills, but deeper learning, critical thinking, analysis and high quality writing. 

Follow the links that Headden provided and the enormity of the task becomes clearer.  And it becomes much more obvious that accountability hawks, including Headden, still do not understand the mess that contradictory "reform" messages have created.

For years, accountability hawks denied that test-driven accountability would result in a narrow focus on teaching basic skills to bubble kids. But, in the Washington Monthly's special issue on the next wave of testing,  Headden's "A Test Worth Teaching To" started off with a great description of  the “teaching to the test” which "fundamentally degrades the whole project of teaching and learning." She acknowledged that, "Even reformers who believe in the broader project of standards and accountability seem to regard the matter of narrow-minded test prep as an embarrassing fly in the ointment."

Now, teaching to "a test worth teaching to" is seen as the answer to teaching to the lousy test mentality.  My reading of the Florida rush to Common Core is that it was assumed that the old tactic of coercing schools to "work harder" would also make students "work smarter." From the classroom to the state house, there seemed to be a faith that being "tougher" on educators and students was the path toward more engaging instruction for analysis and synthesis. 

In another link provided by Headden, Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinal reported that Michigan and other states saw similar drop-offs when standards were raised  but, still, the declines in 4th, 8th, and 10th grade writing test results were shocking.  Postal explained that flawed communication was part of the problem.  A writing teacher said, "teachers understood that the new standards would be "tougher,"  but "obviously we were a little out of touch with what the expectations were."  Commissioner Gerald Robinson even speculated that 4th graders did so poorly because they "might not have realized their essays would be scored in a stricter way." 

Florida addressed their self-inflicted wound by merely dropping the cut score used for grading schools from a "4," so that a "3" became a passing score. But, in another link, the Tampa Bay Times' Jeffrey Solochek wrote that the writing test "is typically considered the easiest and the one with the fewest consequences for individual students."  If raising standards on an easy test is so difficult, what does that say about the prospects of intimidating  schools into better performance on truly challenging assessments?  

It is theoretically possible that even more ratcheting up of stress on schools can prevent "an unmitigated disaster" as Florida and others implement Common Core.  On the other hand, you cannot intimidate students into doing something that they don't know how to do.  For instance, Education Week's Andrew Ujifusa reported that two-thirds of the 37% of sophomores who passed were on the bubble, earning the intended minimum passing score of "4."  A back of the envelope estimate of those results (1/3rd of 37%) would produce a rough guesti-mate that only one in eight sophomores are ready to tackle the higher writing standards. 

Even if the challenge was simply moving students on the bubble to the other side of the cut line on a primitive standardized test, such numbers should provide a wake-up call. The challenge of mastering qualitatively different standards is qualitatively different than the challenge of improving scores on old-fashioned tests in a less lenient manner. 

Despite her many profound insights into the challenge of implementing Common Core, Headden still  seems to be whistling by the graveyard.  As is often the case, she accurately diagnosed the causes of  reform failures, explaining that, "relaxing cut scores on tests of basic skills (in this case grammar and punctuation) serves only to perpetuate the sorts of lies that we have been telling our children for years— that they are proficient in essential subjects like math and English when in fact they are not." 

Headden wrote, "The public is understandably fed up with testing."  But then she seems to pretend that parents, voters, and the business community are education policy wonks. If they "understand the goals of the new testing program ... they will be more likely to give it the support it needs to succeed."

Headden, rightly, argued for better tests, and better professional development, but they are the easiest of our challenges.  In an age of accountability, the tendency is to see "tougher" as the only definition of  more "challenging."  But, teachers can only teach problem-solving after receiving an unambiguous guarantee that our jobs, and our bosses' jobs, do not depend on bubble-in gimmicks.  If Common Core is going to be more than just another silver bullet,  teachers and students will need a respectful learning climate.  Inner city teachers and students can learn to excel with the college prep curriculum that is offered in many elite and selective schools, but we cannot do so until our schools have an environment that allows for higher levels of learning.

But, I do not want to end on an argumentative point. Susan Headden stresses the importance of high-quality assessments and professional development, while I stress the need for concrete improvements for conditions on the ground.  While I question her continuing faith in the potential of high-stakes tests, Headden is correct in predicting, "It is virtually certain that when the Common Core tests become the measure of proficiency across the land, scores in some states will plunge."

When scores plummeted this year in Florida, I would ask, why was that seen as a problem?  If stakes were not attached, the drop-offs would have been seen as growing pains as the state raised its standards.  Were those tests not used to grade schools, there would have been little need to lower the proficiency bar.  If we want Common Core to succeed, and I do,  should we not see such setbacks as a part of a shared challenge and explicitly repudiate the use of its assessments to punish?- JT (@drjohnthompson) image via. 

Comments

[Rosemarie]

Common core is an end around the constitution period. There is to be no national set of standrards developed by the federal government and yet, here they are developed by, hmm, an educator? No just a guy with some sick agenda that telling kids that no gives a crap what they think should be a teacher's agenda and that 3rd graders should be in tears when learning to comprehend difficult tests. And no, we don't want better standardized tests. The experiment has failed. PRIOR to NCLB and the testing driven madness, public schools were closing the achievement gap according to NAEP scores (but we can't have that!), teachers knew how to assess students (we used to be trusted to think, create, evaluate, and communicate to students and parents), and we were using real literature ( textbook companies didn't like that), and we were looking to Demming in the way we ran our schools. We definitely can't have that. Now the corporate reformers, who do not send their kids to public schools, have found ways to stifle teachers, narrow the curriculum, and drain the schools dry in an effort to MAKE MONEY of of public education dollars. Whoopie. My father laughs everytime he hears, "how we will know how our students our doing without these tests"? As he says...I saw report cards, papers, projects, etc. And we had amazing electives, extracurriculars, and respected teachers.Like private schools do now and I don't see anyone freaking out because those students don't take 27 high stakes tests a year (as required of Florida 8th graders). Teachers are and have always been highly trained...we know how to teach, but that's been taken away in favor of scripted curriculum and the focus on stupid skills required for tests. Nothing about these tests gives me as a parent a shred of useful information about my child. None. And if we parents know that, what is wrong with you and everyone else.

[Rosemarie]

Sorry...many errors above as typing on phone.

[Mary]

John, I do have something I want to contrubute to this discussion, but may I use your column for an experiment?

Alexander has "banned" Caroline in SF from commenting on his column, because he didn't like her bringinfg up the question of organizational allegiance in his discussion of the political machinations behind Duncan and Obama's support of the parent trigger. (I know, that's pretty funny)

I posted a comment, asking him to ban me also. I wanted to see if he'd take the comment down. I wondered if I'd be banned on your columns, as well? Here is what I posted:

"Quick, Alex, ban me too. Yes, "motivation" matters in education policy debate. Rick Hess so famously pointed it out, when he said "We're all implicated" in the expose of targeted journalistic subsidies.

For instance, the Gates Foundation's major contribution to education is "advocacy" spending. That means paying people (through grants, hiring, or organizational interest leverage) to lobby, write, legislate, and advocate for specific education policies. Those facts aren't in doubt, and the motivation of the core of advocates mobilized by all that money should be discussed.

Murdoch spoke publicly about the $500 billion "funding stream" of US public education, and he hired Joel Klein to make him a profit from it. He purchased a venture start-up from a member of the Education Week Board of Directors for $600 million. wireless Generation that makes its profits from contracts in the "accountability" and oversight industry, and Klein's motivations need to be considered in discussions of the policies he imposed on New York City during his tenure as a corrupt public servant.

It's "your" blog, and your byline. Your background as a congressional staffer for the education committee gave you familiarity and contact with lobbyists, and you've discussed that yourself in your columns. You're not an educator, or an expert on education itself by any stretch of the imagination. You have a job promoting a particular agenda. If you want to claim you're on a moral crusade, whose motives are sacred, then ban all of us who disagree.

Please, though, leave this post up as a warning for other people who might wish for the honor of being banned."

[Mary]

Now, we can move on to the much more important question of the Common Core.

John, you write, "The tests will not just assess basic skills, but deeper learning, critical thinking, analysis and high quality writing."

No, they won't "assess" deeper learning, critical thinking, analysis, and high quality writing. Your claim shows the Common Core for what it really is, though, and sounds a dire warning. This is a testing core, not a teaching core.

I just went through a year of professional development, required of all out science and history faculty, in teaching to the Common Core literacy standards. You're retired, so you might not know that there is nothing whatsoever deep, or critical, or high quality in the actual testing parameters. We're being mandated to teach a new set of text-processing skills, divorced entirely from meaning or purpose, which will result in higher assessment scores on machine-scored writing samples in our disciplines.

For instance, here's the "CHOMP" strategy for processing a stimulus item. Have students Cross out the small words, Highlight the big words, Organize the big words into a Map, and Paraphrase the stimulus by creating sentences which shuffle the word order.

In the last testing frenzy, I think the Data-Masters were blindsided by their corporate education-partners' inability to mechanistically raise the bubble-test scores. Even with proprietary "aligned" materials, iron-fisted organizational control, and insane focus on the scores, the processes involved are so toxic to children's intellectual development they can't EVEN find the right bubble, when it's all they've been taught to do.

You're making the same mistake again with this newer, even more psychotic product line. It's backwards-engineered to build an empire of total control, on the rubble of the US public education system, after it's been destroyed by their current insane "accountability" demands. It outlaws teahchin, reading, or writing to any actual purpose. It subsumes all disciplines into a long, narrow test-prep for idiotic, empty machine scoring. One Core, to rule them all.

[Sarah]

Ultimately, I think the problem (Mary is correct in saying this) is that it becomes a system of relying upon a test to assess student learning. Attaching stakes applies stress to the student population, affecting ability, invalidating results. Of course, the issue then becomes “how do we finance assessment of other, more accurate means?”