What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard.
It's testing season in California, as this graph shows:
It's going to be a busy spring! And you can get a picture of the next three years here:
The list at the bottom tells you what these kids, their teachers, and their schools have to go through every year. Shit, the testing window for four of them never closes. And in my school our administration hired test prep consultants to make us develop five extra tests to get kids ready for, you know, the other tests.
Data is bullshit for several reasons. These tests produce useless snapshots of a student's state of mind on a particular day. They are developed by people who don't know students and certainly have never met yours. The "data" they generate is neither reliable nor valid and arrives too late for immediate action even if they were. Finally, we begin today with how data is used.
If there is no plan for meaningful analysis of what "data" is produced, and no plan for action based on that analysis even if it took place, which it doesn't, then data is bullshit.
I've got a lot more to say on why you should not take these tests seriously--and why you should never use them to evaluate your students or your teaching (that job will eagerly be done by the testing fanatics), but I'll just close this installment with the following short excerpt from my book, Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide.
Data is Bullshit.
My friend Rebecca reminded me recently that data doesn’t have to be bullshit. It’s really about how we use it. And I’ll even admit that not all data is bullshit. For example, as I’m writing this, the Chicago Cubs have averaged four hits and two runs per game over the last seven games, of which they have lost six. That is significant and actionable. I’ve stopped watching them for a while and I feel a lot better.
Data can be useful in schools, too, but it depends on what kind we’re talking about. If we’re talking attendance, we can and do make calls home to find out where a student has been when they have not been on Zoom or in school. Schools are pretty serious about that because their paychecks depend on it. Another example is reading level data which can be useful for teachers as they work to assemble appropriate materials and devise plans to address each student’s specific needs.
On the other hand, if the data comes from a standardized test you are required to give and you don’t get the scores back until after your students have left your class or the class has left that area of study, or if the tests don’t measure what they say they measure, or if they measure something of no value to your students--often because the something is unrelated to your instruction because you know your students and they tragically do not, then data is bullshit.
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As my friend Nick would often say, “Right now, there is a third grader who can’t read.” That’s the data part, if we’re keeping score. “What’s our plan for that student?” Of course there wasn’t one. There isn’t one. Bullshit. Testing is easy. Fixing things is hard.
If there’s no schoolwide plan to address issues revealed in the data and no time carved out to analyze the data and formulate a set of strategies (maybe during one of the thousand “not this again” PDs), then the school is profoundly unserious about data and is not advancing the interests of students but simply using the testing for some other purpose.
The true purposes of data collection might include “accountability” (rewards and punishments) or advertising (competition for students) or political advancement (see how they turned that district around!) or the support of the testing-industrial complex and its bazillion jobs inside and outside actual schools and school districts.
But in the end, the answer to all the questions is money.
Now those profiteers and hucksters and fanatical true-believers will never stop pretending that theirs is "important work." They will offer to help with analysis and remediation and "standards based instruction," and all it will cost is bags of cash, tons of time, and everything you know about teaching kids.
They will never stop bullying. They will never stop lying because their career advancement, their political futures, their paychecks depend on it.
That does not mean you have to believe them.
Next time we'll get into some of the details regarding the tests themselves and share ideas for resistance. I'm sure many of you have developed strategies for minimizing the damage. If you have any good ones, please share.
Great post from Diane Ravitch's blog on standardized testing.
There is nothing that we do that is worse for our students than this ridiculous year-round testing. Anyone who has spent a single day in a classroom post-pandemic can see that students have regressed. We need to spend time on instruction and remediation. We don't need to spend endless hours on standardized tests, just so kids can hear, for umpteenth time in their brief lives, that they are "not proficient".
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