Lauren Cohen comments on her “testimony” never heard by Cuomo
Mis-Education Commission from our last post as faux educators from
Students Last and E4E get priority.

Your kind words help keep me going, Norm. The Education Commission
did not choose to hear my testimony, nor Carol’s. They did however hear
from $tudentsFirst’s Anna Hall and not one but TWO representatives of
E4E (with nearly-identical testimony – tenure protects ineffective
teachers, the teaching profession suffers because teachers remain in the
classroom for 20+ years, the state needs to impose an evaluation system
on any districts that have not approved one)

The most baffling part is why this nonsense continues to surprise me.

…and that was after security stopped us because “no more people
[were] being allowed upstairs” (even though somebody already inside had
just texted that there were plenty of seats). Then a uniformed guard and
a beefy guy in a suit came down and announced that people “on the list”
could go up. I handed him my ID, and he took a cursory glance at the
list and informed me I wasn’t on it. “Yes I am! I can see my name on it!
It’s right there!” I pointed to my name and he flipped the script to,
“oh, only people on THIS part of the list can go up…” Then Suit Guy
raised his voice and ordered me to leave the building and get on the
line that was still outside. After a couple of minutes of Uniform Guy
barking at us to make our line single-file, they announced that they
would let us inside 5-at-a-time.

One of the more demoralizing mornings in recent memory. (Up there with Day 3 of the 3rd grade ELA test.)

Lauren Cohen
Elementary Educator and member of Change the Stakes

I am submitting this testimony on behalf of the Change the Stakes
campaign. We are parents, teachers – both current and retired,
administrators, college professors, students, and other citizens who
share a concern about the effects of high-stakes testing. We may not
share the same relationship to the education system, but we are united
in our disquiet about how children are affected, and will continue to be
affected, by this testing obsession. One of the mission statements of
this Commission is to examine what is in the best interest of children -
not what is in the best interest of testing companies, policy makers,
children/schools as a business model; but students as human beings
–young and open, curious, spirited and eager human beings whose natural
inclination leans toward learning, which is not measured by test
scores, but enhanced through interactive, meaningful, explorative and
rich curriculum.

At a time when schools across the state are underfunded and cutting
resources, we see exorbitant amounts of money being spent on testing. I
refer not only to the $32 million contract offered to Pearson, but to
decisions made at the school or district level. When test scores are
used to grade and rank schools, schools must pour an unacceptably high
amount of their limited financial resources into improving those scores.
A parent in our group reported that his child received two brand new
test-prep books from the school, along with a note from his teacher
begging parents to donate glue sticks and hand soap. Many similar
schools can’t afford to keep their art teacher or librarian. Often,
instead their priority has been to deploy teachers as “assessment
coordinators” and “data specialists.” If we want to improve student
learning, we should focus our schools’ human resources on working with
children directly.

I taught 3rd grade for four years, and an informal experiment on last
year’s class illustrates the importance of treating learners as human
beings rather than as data points. I gave Book 1 of the 2009 3rd grade
NY State English Language Arts test, available on the NYSED website, to
my class at different points throughout the year – September, December,
March, and June. If I were an effective teacher, all students’ scores
would go up, and I’m proud to say that most of them did. Some students
did well the first time I gave the test at the end of September, leaving
them with little room to show “progress.” A few students did poorly
every single time I gave the test, even though they had moved up reading
levels and made visible strides in their written work (Those were the
students who tended to misunderstand the question being asked – a few
kids with diagnosed speech/language delays fell into that category). But
here is the most interesting part: no student was consistent in
multiple-choice questions they answered correctly or incorrectly. This
inconsistency has grave ramifications for educators who use test data to
determine instruction. Question #5 measures whether a student can infer
character emotions from text. Johnny gets that question wrong in
September, correct in December, then wrong again in March. Do we believe
that Johnny learned the skill of inferring character emotions from
text, and then lost it? Of course not. The test is a snapshot of each
child for one hour on one particular day.

We worry about how high-stakes testing damages children’s self-esteem
and their attitudes about school and learning. The way the testing
program has been conducted and the stakes have been intensified has had
consequences for students: test anxiety; children becoming ill over the
exams; the way they are being labeled/sorted/tracked from an early age;
the reinforcement of convergent thinking; and the real danger that the
emphasis on doing well on the tests will stifle children’s joy of
learning and spontaneity. During this year’s testing sessions, one of my
third graders spent twenty minutes crying hysterically because he had
spilled some water on his test. He was genuinely terrified that he would
be left back because he had “ruined” his test.

We are concerned about how basing teacher evaluations on test scores
deforms the student-teacher relationship. Some of the most valuable and
effective educators are those who work compassionately to build bonds
with the most hard-to-reach students. These educators have the ability
to see the positive in students and to recognize the progress they make
as learners and citizens. What will happen to these students when a
teacher’s job depends on maintaining high test scores? Will they become
“unwanted” by teachers who fear poor ratings? How will we recruit new
teachers as stories propagate about the arbitrary nature of value-added
measures – the “worst” math teacher in New York City being a teacher of
gifted children at the Anderson School, the teacher who received a
rating of 96 one year and 7 the following year without changing her
methods, the 5th grade teachers in affluent neighborhoods where parents
pay for tutors to inflate children’s 4th-grade test scores for middle
school applications. What message does it send to children when their
own teachers feel powerless?

Donald Campbell, a founder of the field of program evaluation, found
that attaching high stakes to evaluation led to the distortion of the
processes being evaluated. High-stakes testing creates an incentive for
schools to narrow the curriculum to focus more on test preparation.
Untested subjects are pushed to the side, or even canceled, so that
students can have more periods of reading, math, and drilling for the
exams. It alarms us that the solution proposed by PARCC involves testing
more subjects, including early childhood and the arts.

Preparation for standardized tests often bears little resemblance to
the subjects that the tests supposed to measure. Reading and math are no
longer about applying those subjects in authentic contexts, but about
“test-taking skills.” Experienced teachers consider the test a genre in
itself: to succeed, students need explicit instruction in navigating
the items: looking for cues that may give away the correct answer;
recognizing trick questions, along with the kind of “right” response the
item writers expect; working backwards from the possible answers on
multiple-choice items to the reading passages on which the options are
based.

On the open-ended questions that require students to produce a short
or extended written response to solve a math problem or respond to a
text, the highest-scoring written responses are usually not the ones
that show thinking, insight, or creativity; the highest-scoring
responses are the ones that follow the prescribed structure and
regurgitate the relevant text details. Students are molded to earn more
points by answering narrowly in a prescribed mechanistic way. Children
must be taught to check their prior knowledge, imagination, and
flexibility at the door; and they must be repeatedly reminded that the
test-scorers don’t want to hear their thoughts and ideas. The tests
measure a very limited type of academic success, one that we agree is
important; but it is damaging to insist that this one type of success is
the one that matters most—simply because it is the easiest to measure.
While some people see the testing and accountability movement as
“improving our educational system,” we argue that it is actually
deteriorating the system. Children are receiving the message that test
scores matter more than learning, and in the process they are
discouraged from creative thinking, risk-taking, and collaborating with
peers. Children who believe that every question has a “correct” answer
will not be prepared to grapple with the nuance and complexity of the
real world.