Re: Can you answer this??

["George N. Schmidt" <Csubstance@AOL.COM>]

In a message dated 1/30/01 2:04:47 PM, jmward@QWEST.NET writes:

<< How would YOU respond to the snip of our district's e-mail below?


snip


<<I understand your frustration and agree that the WASL is a high stakes

assessment.  High stakes tests are a part of our students? lives.  Many

young people take the SAT test, Civil Service test, the Graduate Record,

or even the drivers tests.>>

 >>

February 1, 2001

Hello ARN:

I'm hoping to reduce my postings, but a lot of new people are getting the old 
run-arounds, and we have to continue to share. Someone should post a general 
reminder that people should go to the Fair Test and NCTE (National Council of 
Teachers of English) Web sites with some of these questions. At this point, I 
carry around the NCTE "talking points" wallet card "My Child Is More than a 
Test Score," and it helps. These are legitimate questions that are posed by 
honest people after they get some dishonest nonsense from the Testocracy. So 
if it takes us a million repetitions of the facts and the truth, we have to 
resign ourselves to that.

www.ncte.org

wee.fairtest.org

My answer to the Testocratic answered (since we don't go off and become 
righteously angry, either in a biblical or Old Wild west sense at such 
condescending jargon) is...

Every "high stakes" assessment or test that is listed in this part of the 
bogus argument for school- and district-based high stakes tests is voluntary 
and generally taken by people above the age of thirteen. No one has to take 
the SAT, GRE, civil service examination, etc. Most of the items of those 
tests are released after the tests are given so that those who wish to take 
the tests can review them. All of those tests are privately administered, 
although some are required (or considered) by government agencies for certain 
activities.

Let's clarify that we are talking about government high-stakes tests 
administered in public schools where the results of the tests are made public 
but the tests themselves are generally kept secret. 

This is a simple but very important first point. All a child has to do in 
most places where high stakes tests are used is go to a private school and -- 
"Bingo!" -- no more high stakes. Should the price of attendance at a public 
school really be that the child be subject to nine years of high-stakes test 
interruptions in her life and education? This is what the Testocracy has 
foisted upon us while we weren't looking and they were chattering away and 
sending out their propaganda. 

What they were saying is: "Don't you want standards?"

What they did was strap every state's public schools into a procrustean bed 
of high-stakes secret tests. We spend so much time listening to what they've 
been saying that we ignored what they are doing. What they are doing is 
testing children and screwing up the educations, lives, and futures of 
children. In some places (like Chicago since 1997, when seven high schools 
were reconstituted), they are also firing teachers and principals based on 
the same sorry stuff. 

The high-stakes tests our sophistical Washington Testocrat is defending here 
are involuntary.

They are being foisted on children from a very young age without (a) parental 
permission, (b) review of the test in the open and in public once it has been 
given, (c) any democratic debate over what its use is eliminating from the 
schools.

When public schools use high-stakes tests, they are being imposed by the 
government. When they are used involuntarily on children as young as seven or 
eight, they are being used in a ridiculous manner that can be dangerous.

Most importantly, for all their claims, the high-stakes tests we're 
discussing here on ARN are unproved. 

This is like testing medicines in the open market on everyone in the 
population. Despite all of the claims that the "standards" are OK and the 
tests are "aligned" with the "standards" and that will result in "better 
schools" -- all of these things, when viewed up close, are lies.

The "standards" generally bear little or no relation to the tests that 
measure them, and the notion that better test scores indicate we have "better 
schools" is the general subject of most of the discussion here on ARN.

No let's consider "The Volvo Effect" from a few analogous angles. "The Volvo 
Effect" is the fact that test scores on standardized tests reflect the wealth 
of families. The more families in a school that can afford Volvos and Lexuses 
(Lexi?), the higher the test scores. Imagine if the government were to issue 
driver's licenses based on the same standard. You can take the driver's test 
if your private automobile is of a certain "quality" or better. If not, you 
can't take the test. It's a high-stakes prerequisite to becoming a licensed 
driver.

Similarly, because very few wealthy families "fail" high-stakes tests, wealth 
has become the door to public school "success." Whever high-stakes tests are 
used, the wealthier schools have great success, and the poorer ones have less 
or little. But if the propaganda machine works, the poor schools are blamed 
for poverty, while the wealth effect on the richer schools is either ignored 
or praised. We have reached the point in Chicago, for example, where a map 
overlay showing the "best" and "worst" schools based on ITBS and TAP scores 
would reflect dollars as precisely as any other standardized test. But all of 
the media and most of the professors are in league with Chicago's political 
and educational leaders in lying about that simple fact. So the discussions 
here are really in never never land.

I have a lifetime of personal experience with this. 

In fact, some of the best schools I worked in during my 30 years in Chicago's 
inner city had the lowest test scores. The kids came to us with very low test 
scores, since, given "The Volvo Effect" (you can predict test scores based on 
ZIP code, wealth being the most significant factor) they were the poorest. 
The scores might go "up" (they almost never went "down") when the kids were 
in our schools (I taught full-time in 17 inner city Chicago public high 
schools before Daley administration, Chicago CEO Paul Vallas, and the Chicago 
Board of Education began the process of firing me two years ago) they 
improved in many areas, including literacy and numeracy.

But the children who attended Bowen High School, where I most recently taught 
(October 1993 - February 1999) had many problems which made test scores the 
most ridiculous way to measure their success or the school's success. For 
example, during the three years before (white, privileged) Columbine High 
School became a brief national obsession, more than a dozen of our students 
were murdered in gang violence outside (often near) Bowen High School. In 
Chicago's inner city, the Columbine is ongoing, but ignored. Between August 
1997 and June 1998, seven of our present (or recently graduated or dropped 
out) students died, murdered. I only watched of them die myself, but I knew 
all of the others because I had been working in gang security as well as 
teaching English.

To maintain that Bowen's test scores should be as "high" as those of 
Chicago's wealthier suburbs (or wealthier communities) is simply ridiculous. 
And to maintain that Bowen's teachers and students should organize their 
school to raise test scores to make our mayor and politicians look good is, 
under the circumstance of the inner city today (and of the ground level 
horrors of the politicians' drug hypocrisies and "welfare reform" 
viciousness) something that should enrage everyone with ears to hear and eyes 
to see.

Our children were doing very well in that traumatic reality. Our teachers, 
too.

Instead of holding "accountable" the society that created such realities, 
society blamed the victims and got away with it through "standards and 
accountability" based on high-stakes tests. 

Justice will one day be done. 

George Schmidt 

  

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