One of the late Gerald Bracey's best articles: "Keeping an Eye on the Unregulated Testing Industry"
He was one of the most outspoken educators, and he was not afraid to go after those who are hurting public education.
He passed away in October, and that makes one less voice for public education.
He wrote about the unregulated testing industry that is making a fortune off the students of our nation. They are doing better now that they have an advocate in the Department of Education who wants more testing, and wants it tied to teachers through newly formed databases.
But there is no one monitoring the design of these tests. No teacher is allowed to see them before the test, and no one is supposed to question the scoring. It's a real legal battle indeed for a parent who has concerns over the scores.
This is Gerald Bracey's article from March at Huffington Post.
Keeping an Eye on the Unregulated Testing IndustryThe media assume that tests are valid and accept the claims made for them. If tests say American schools are lousy (they don't but fear mongers use them that way), then it must be so.
In fact, tests are so much a part of the educational air we breathe, we probably don't think of them as needing regulation. Just like we didn't think about regulating the quality of peanut butter--until recently.
Testing often tries to put on a white hat as part of the educational enterprise, trying to help kids succeed. In reality, the test companies are as full of greed and avarice as the financial sector or any other part of the economy. We don't notice it because...there is no regulation. Test companies make enormous claims for the ways in which their products will help your kid, or your school or your district. Is there any research to back up these claims? No. Are there any sanctions for overstating what the tests can do? No. Companies are totally free to claim whatever they wish.
The relationship between those who make tests and those who use them is way too cozy. In most other industries, such relationships would be banned as sources of conflict of interest.
Our nation's kids are being passed, failed, evaluated all too often on one test which is formulated in secret and graded the same way.
There is a great example in a Dade County, Florida, blog about how the FCAT gets to the classroom to be the major judge and jury of your child.
FCAT: Russian Roulette for students, teachers and schools?A report published in September, 2009, by the Office of the Inspector General of the United States Department of Education records the findings of a year-long audit of Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). And those findings are not pretty. The 41-page report is
linked here (pdf), and can be read at your leisure. I just did so myself. I wish I could say I was shocked by what was contained within those pages, but it was actually nothing more than confirmation of what I had already read about the standardized testing industry in Todd Farley's book Making the Grades, in which he recounts his personal experience and observations working for fifteen years in the standardized testing industry--for NCS, which later became NCS-Pearson, now Pearson, with whom the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) currently has a contract for the administration and scoring of the FCAT...a $254 million contract.
..."The FLDOE contractor reviewed in the federal audit was CBT/McGraw-Hill, who was under a $131.9 million contract. The audit covered the FCAT administered in the 2007-2008 school year.
Perhaps the most disturbing finding of the audit was that out of 50 randomly selected test samples, 9 scoring discrepancies had been found, mostly as an apparent result of scanning errors. If each discrepancy were found on a different answer booklet, that would mean that (at least within this random sample), 18% of tests were scored inaccurately. Even if each inaccuracy were only one question, sometimes that one question can make the difference between passing and failing; between a student being promoted from the third grade to the fourth; between a student being able to choose an elective and learn about something interesting to him or her, or getting stuck in an Intensive Reading or Math class for the year.9 out of 50 randomly selected samples had scanning errors. Not good.
The FLDOE countered that it had a system in place where all twelfth-grade retakers were rescored manually if the failing score was within 25 points of passing. Nonetheless, they have no such system in place for third-graders within 25 points of passage, and passing the FCAT makes the difference between a third-grader moving up to the fourth grade or being forced to repeat a year...which can make a big difference in a child's life, as any parent (or child, or teacher) could tell you. Furthermore, while perhaps that manual recheck might save the diploma of a twelfth-grader, it would not save a ninth-, tenth- or eleventh-grader from being placed in an Intensive Reading or Intensive Math class for the year (often for yet another year) rather than taking an elective. Electives can be especially important for students who are not strong in traditional academic subjects such as reading and math, as they allow the students to learn something they are interested in--often skills that could be valuable to them after high school, such as carpentry, mechanics, culinary arts, JROTC, nursing, or that provide important cultural growth and personal satisfaction, such as visual arts, drama, music, dance, or foreign languages.
About the scorers of the tests:
The audit found that, despite FLDOE contract regulations that all handscorers have a Bachelor degree in the relevant field of study being scored, MI (Measurement Incorporated--a subcontractor of CBT/McGraw-Hill) failed to verify its employees' qualifications; as a result, tests were being scored by 17 individuals (of the 647 employee files reviewed) who should not have been scoring tests. Apple One, a hiring subcontractor of CBT, administered a basics skills test to its new hires, which they were theoretically required to pass in order to work; however, the audit found that 14 of 72 employees had not passed the test, yet were still working.
The scoring contractor tried to charge the Inspector General for the audit. The OIG finally had to go and get the materials themselves....the company still billed them.
To add insult to injury, the contractor CBT impeded the audit by refusing to turn over the requested test booklets, demanding a $3,750 payment to provide them. The Office of the Inspector General finally had to subpoena the materials, upon which CBT still sent an invoice for a $3,750 payment to provide the tests, claiming that their contract with FLDOE did not require them to provide materials for a federal audit; ultimately, CBT allowed the OIG to remove the tests from their storage facility themselves. When the OIG did so, they found many problems with the storage and records of the tests.
Ah...your tax dollars at work.
Gerald Bracey's recommendation in his article posted above was to go the
Fair Test site. It is a good one. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, universally referred to simply as FairTest, tries to keep an eye on the industry. Its goal is to end misuse of standardized tests of which, there is today far, far too much.
Our government is not doing it, that is for sure.
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