Re: [UC] It's Testing Season!

[Glenn moyer]

-----Original Message-----
From: Wilma de Soto
Sent: Mar 3, 2014 2:31 PM
To: "univcity@list.purple.com listserv"
Subject: [UC] It's Testing Season!

Dear Neighbors and especially Parents of School-Aged Children:

Thought it would be interesting and informative for people to know exactly HOW these High-Stakes Standardized Tests are scored and by whom.

http://monthlyreview.org/2010/12/01/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-test-scorer

Thanks Wilma.  It's an important view of the true picture.  Here is a good and related interview from Noam Chomsky.  Notice the parallels between the sabotage of university level teaching and the attacks against public school teachers.  It's important for all of us to see how many aspects of our society are under attack from the same neoliberal forces, using the same tactics.  

www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/28/on-academic-labor/

I met a couple teachers from the Chicago union last summer and discussed the pseudo-science being used in teacher evaluation.  It's very important to expose this psuedo-science racket used to attack teachers and public education.  As all teachers know, the plutocracy wants to de-professionalize teaching of the working classes.  They want teachers to be technicians delivering a single curriculum, which will make a few academics filthy rich, just like in the testing industry.  The arbitrary evaluations and centralized lesson plans must be seen as a carefully crafted "one two punch" against teachers and public education

Since I was part of the attacks to de-professionalize social service providers in the 1990s, I understand how this pseudo-science works.  The arbitrary methods of "evaluation" are designed to give most teachers D's.  Teachers must expose that these gimmicky evaluation techniques are not valid and reliable.

But the unspoken pieties behind these simplistic "gotcha" methodologies must also receive the contempt they deserve!  What is the primary purpose of an evaluation for any professional?

An evaluation is meant to be the greatest most anticipated time for a new professional!  It is the time for a professional to get quality feedback from more experienced peers, as the professional undertakes a lifetime of ongoing development. Any good evaluation system for professionals does not need any gimmicky system for quick evaluation.  At most, such quick but profitable evaluation techniques would be the least important aspect of a quality evaluation for any type of professional!  (This intuitive understanding of evaluations is a forbidden topic among the school reform academics.  Their entire package of sabotage quickly falls apart when you simply shine the light on this forbidden concept of evaluation.  What they hail as the greatest sophisticated advancement using market techniques is quackery at its very foundation!)

Teachers must show that the very foundations of the school reform movement are laughable quackery.  Don't defend yourselves against the arbitrary evaluations, but go on the offensive!  It's also important to show the impracticality of the centralized curricula in the classroom.  These manuals are written by academics, who don't have real classroom experience.  It's important to show why these impractical centralized lesson plans should be laughed at, and would harm students and teachers.

Although it was effectively buried, I coauthored a paper that exposed the arbitrary evaluation techniques used to give drug treatment providers and programs D's for their work.  The trick of the plutocrats is to declare a sabotaged profession a failure, because the practitioners are lazy and coddled.  Turning them into technicians is thereby justified.  And so is the centralized intervention or curricula to be jammed down the throats of students and teachers.

Those who experience this de-professionalization become quickly burnt out and demoralized. We have had a problem retaining teachers for decades.  That indicates a problem with the structures of the profession, and not a problem of too many "bad teachers" as the academics and plutocrats claim.

Teachers!  Don't defend against this nonsense.  Show this nonsense and pseudo-science, as the deceptions these are designed to be!

Standing with teachers and students,

Glenn  

 

It's bad enough teachers do not get to see the tests or know how their students did on them; well at least not while we are still teaching them that is.  Scores that is school rankings are not delivered until months after testing and by then most of us do not teach these children anymore, so these tests cannot affect instruction as claimed except for cutting programs for more Test Prep.

What's worse is that the fate of students, teachers and the decisions to close neighborhood schools are ostensibly dependent upon these test scores.

If you have school-aged children, this is important information as to how your child will be judged as a success or a failure.-Wilma

Below is an excerpt:

"Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies. Some of us scorers are retired teachers, but most are former office workers, former security guards, or former holders of any of the diverse array of jobs previously done by the currently unemployed. When I began working in test scoring three years ago, my first “team leader” was qualified to supervise, not because of his credentials in the field of education, but because he had been a low-level manager at a local Target.

In the test-scoring centers in which I have worked, located in downtown St. Paul and a Minneapolis suburb, the workforce has been overwhelmingly white—upwards of 90 percent. Meanwhile, in many of the school districts for which these scores matter the most—where officials will determine whether schools will be shut down, or kids will be held back, or teachers fired—the vast majority are students of color. As of 2005, 80 percent of students in the nation’s twenty largest school districts were youth of color. The idea that these cultural barriers do not matter, since we are supposed to be grading all students by the same standard, seems far-fetched, to say the least.

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