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Not Proficient? Minnesota Attempts to Thwart Standardized Testing Opt Outs

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April 16, 2018

Q: What’s more jaw-dropping than a blizzard in April? 

A: The continued pressure tactics being used against Minnesota families who want to opt their children out of the high stakes Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) standardized tests.

These pressure tactics include the lingering, erroneous threat that students who do not take the annual MCAs will be labeled as “not proficient” just for refusing to comply. Some parents even believe that their children, if they refuse to take the MCAs, will also be labeled as special education students. This is not legally possible, since there is a rigorous process to have a child identified as in need of special education services, but it is evidence of the fear-mongering going on now, as the state’s testing season hits full swing.

New Parent Refusal Form Spells Trouble

In 2017, under the guidance of right-leaning lobbyist groups in Minnesota, including the Minnesota Business Partnership, the state legislature reportedly pressured the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) to come up with a new Parent Refusal form. This is the form that parents are asked (but not required) to fill out if they would like to opt their children out of the MCA tests, given each spring in grades 3-8 and again in high school.

MDE’s opt out form includes language that seems purposefully misleading, if not downright threatening. First, the form included this message for parents:

I understand that by signing this form, my student will receive a score of “not proficient”

MDE then received a great deal of push back against this scare tactic, with parents, teachers and other interested parties calling or emailing them for the truth. Can students who do not take the tests actually be labeled “not proficient”? 

The answer is no. And so the MDE revised its form in the fall of 2017 and added a mildly qualifying bit of info: 

I understand that by signing this form, my student will be counted as “not proficient” for the purpose of school and district accountability….

Still confused? Many parents are. MDE has admitted as much. In an April 4 Assessment Update newsletter, MDE acknowledged that the opaque message shift is not working:

The key change was in the language surrounding the term “not proficient.” Despite the changes to the form, there has been some confusion across the state regarding what will appear on the Individual Student Report (ISR) when a parent refusal is indicated. The student will not receive a score or a message of “not proficient” on their ISR; rather, the ISR will indicate, “[Student Name] did not participate in the test” and include an explanation that the reason the student was not tested was due to a parent refusal (REF-P).

To clarify, students who opt out of the MCA tests “will not receive a score or message of ‘not proficient.'” And, in truth, MCA tests are not supposed to drive high stakes decision-making, at the school or state level. But of course, they do.

Opting Out Means Missing Advanced Classes?

Parents have the legal right to opt their children out of standardized testing, full stop. Despite attempts to scare parents into compliance, there is nothing schools can do to force students to take the MCAs. Unless, of course, they venture into educational malpractice by tying tests to such things as class trips, seats in advanced courses, the right to take music or art and so on.

Just yesterday, a friend sent me a plaintive text message. Hey, it said, my kid’s school is telling me that if he opts out of the MCAs, he won’t be able to take Honors Math next year.

This is wrong, but sadly not unusual. A 2017 article by education researcher, Christopher Tienken, makes this point:

Every year, policymakers across the U.S. make life-changing decisions based on the results of standardized tests. 

These high-stakes decisions include, but are not limited to, student promotion to the next grade level, student eligibility to participate in advanced coursework, eligibility to graduate high school and teacher tenure. In 40 states, teachers are evaluated in part based on the results from student standardized tests, as are school administrators in almost 30 states.

But Tienken, who is a professor at Seton Hall University, has found that “the outcomes of standardized tests don’t reflect the quality of instruction, as they’re intended to.” He and his colleagues conducted an extensive review of standardized test results in multiple states and concluded that there are likely “serious flaws built into our education accountability systems and the decisions about educators and students made within those systems.”

Standardized Tests Don’t Actually Measure Proficiency

That’s because Tienken and his fellow researchers were able to show that, by using demographic data such as family income level, they could accurately “predict the percent of students who scored proficient or above in 75 percent of the schools we sampled.” The conclusion? Standardized test scores say more about where a student lives than what kind of instruction he or she is getting.

And the tests are simply not designed to measure growth or proficiency, though that is the storyline we have all been sold. More from Tienken’s article:

Though some proponents of standardized assessment claim that scores can be used to measure improvement, we’ve found that there’s simply too much noise. Changes in test scores from year to year can be attributed to normal growth over the school year, whether the student had a bad day or feels sick or tired, computer malfunctions, or other unrelated factors.

According to the technical manuals published by the creators of standardized assessments, none of the tests currently in use to judge teacher or school administrator effectiveness or student achievement have been validated for those uses…The tests are simply not designed to diagnose learning. They are simply monitoring devices, as evidenced by their technical reports.

The bottom line is this: Whether you’re trying to measure proficiency or growth, standardized tests are not the answer.

Students across Minnesota  are right now being subjected to high stakes standardized testing that limits, rather than expands, their educational horizons. Often, it is students of color and marginalized kids that are used as the justification for all of this ultimately pointless testing. Don’t opt out, parents are warned. If you do, you will be depriving the state of evidence that students of color are not achieving as well as their white peers.

This point of view was offered again recently by education reform lobbyist, Daniel Sellers. In a  St. Paul Pioneer Press article about the “not proficient” dust-up. Sellers, insists, as reformers frequently do, that it is only white, wealthy families who opt out of standardized testing. When they do, he contends, they “hurt students of color by diverting the state’s resources.”

That’s because opt outs will now be counted in the not proficient category of a school, theoretically causing extra resources to be sent to those schools. But this is little more than a laughable scenario intended to shut down the conversation. The Minnesota Department of Education uses far more than MCA scores (which would include the number of opt outs) to decide which schools are truly “low performing” and in need of extra resources.

Testing Costs A Lot

It is more accurate to say that testing diverts the state’s resources away from the schools and students most in need. Standardized tests cost Minnesota over $19 million last year and the federal government only covered one-third of that tab. We don’t have enough school counselors or mental health support, but we’ve got plenty of money to subject students to high stakes data gathering.

We also don’t have enough money to fully fund special education or English language instruction. That means big districts like Minneapolis have to dip into their general fund budgets to cover these essential and mandated services. In Minneapolis this year, this deficit has added up to around $60 million. (That is almost twice the size of the budget deficit MPS is currently wrestling with.)

But we have plenty of money for testing. And it is not just a once per year event. Many students attend schools whose whole identity is built around test scores and data collection. Last week, I sat in on a board meeting at a highly segregated charter school in Minneapolis. I was there to listen and observe, and what I saw, right off the bat, was a whole meeting,  almost, devoted to talk about test scores and whether or not students were “outperforming” the district, the state, or the odds set against them.

We made sure to give the students bottled water and peppermint candy, a school administrator told the board, because that gets their brains going for all the testing they do.

Robotics Before Testing?

There was a fascinating article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday, profiling a mighty robotics team from tiny Greenbush, Minnesota. Robotics is a competitive but highly cooperative endeavor, where groups of kids work together to build robots and solve engineering problems. The Greenbush team is a knock out, winning competitions despite having a high school enrollment of just 135 students.Image result for robotics

Running a robotics team is very expensive; the article says it can cost up to $50,000 per year for supplies, travel and fees. But what the kids get out of it is this: an education that matters. Building robots alongside teammates “‘prepares the students and employees of tomorrow with real, practical skills that are relevant,'” according to Paul Marvin, CEO of Marvin Windows and father of three kids who do robotics.

Could anyone say the same thing about test prep and deep data dives into standardized test scores?

In the article, Marvin, who also lives and works in rural Minnesota, further describes the value of robotics. Kids involved in it have to make presentations, do their own marketing, and, of course, tons of collaborative problem-solving. It is, Marvin states, a “microcosm of the business world.”

This past week, I also toured a private school in my neighborhood. Again, I was there to listen and observe. The students at the school do take the NWEA or MAP test, which is purported to measure growth, but that’s it. Otherwise, they are evaluated through projects and portfolios of their work, along with information gleaned from frequent parent-teacher-student conferences.

These kids exit 8th grade as very self-assured, self-aware students who know how to advocate for themselves, according to the teachers present for the school tour. They also attend a school that costs, up front, $14,000 per year—far more than the per-pupil average for public school kids in Minnesota. If we sent far less of our public money to for-profit testing companies, then perhaps we could do more to make sure all kids are given the time and space needed to find their own passion and purpose.

Standardized Tests: An Effective Racist Weapon?

So why the hostile, threatening language around opting out in Minnesota? It’s clear that the fear tactics being deployed (opt out and your kid won’t get into advanced math) are working. But why? What is the end game? If standardized test scores were the path to greater opportunity for marginalized students, particularly students of color, then wouldn’t we be there by now? 

Consider the words of Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America:

At 100-years-young this year, standardized tests have come to literally embody the American doors of opportunity, admitting and barring people from the highest ranked schools, colleges, graduate schools, professions, and jobs. Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies. However, some of the greatest defenders of standardized testing are civil rights leaders, who rely on the testing data in their well-meaning lobbying efforts for greater accountability and resources.

But what if, all along, our well-meaning efforts at closing the achievement gap has been opening the door to racist ideas? What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism?

–Ibram X. Kendi, October 2017,“Why the Achievement Gap is a Racist Idea”

Further reading:

  1. “The Corporate Plan to Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude by Wiping Out Public Schools” offers a look at why “the corporate-driven war on public schools is not just about money, but also about a vision of society.” 
  2.  “Why You Can Boycott Standardized Tests without Fear of Federal Penalties to Your School” from Fair Test http://www.fairtest.org/why-you-can-boycott-testing-without-fear.  
  3. Opt Out Minnesota Facebook page.
  4. Why are More American Teenagers Suffering From Anxiety?

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Opting Out of Standardized Tests? It’s Still Legal in Minnesota

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December 14, 2017

The Harvard Graduate School of Education recently posted an eye-opening interview with Professor Daniel Koretz, author of The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. His main point: “excessive high-stakes testing undermines the goals of instruction and meaningful learning.”

From Koretz’s point of view, today’s K-12 education system has become overrun by a “naive” devotion to standardized testing. He points out the ripple effects of this devotion, such as the impulse to “game” the system and double down on “boring test prep” in order to toe the testing line. Koretz’s insights will ring familiar to many who have been sounding this same alarm for years.

Koretz also discussed what parents or teachers can do when they realize—as many have—that “testing often degrades instruction rather than improving it.” He advised a “ground level” approach to change by recommending that concerned parents approach their child’s classroom teacher or administrator to ask what “wiggle room” the school may have for getting around onerous federal, state or local testing policies. But nowhere in the interview does Koretz mention that parents can opt their children out of any and all standardized testing, as well as test prep.

Photo: US News and World Report

This may be because, as states get ready to implement the new federal education policy known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), opt outs are again becoming a contentious and federally frowned upon issue—even though the ESSA was supposed to return policy making decisions to local departments of education. (The ESSA required every state to submit an accountability plan; those plans are now in the process of being either approved or denied by the federal education department.) 

Instead, the ESSA brings more pressure on parents, students, teachers and state legislators to bend to high-stakes standardized testing—despite the cost. Minnesota offers a clear example of this. As the 2017-2018 school year got underway, many teachers and parents were surprised to discover a newly revised “Parent Refusal” form provided by the Minnesota Department of Education. This form is intended to guide opt outs across the state, which have risen dramatically in some districts, including Minneapolis.

The initial pages provide boilerplate information for parents about federally required testing and its ties to Minnesota’s notoriously rigorous and independent academic standards. (Minnesota is only one of a handful of states, for example, that require all high school students to take Algebra 2 in order to graduate.) But on the last page of the form, a paragraph all in bold type pulls out every scare tactic in the book:

“I understand that by signing this form, my student will receive a score of ‘not proficient’ and waives the opportunity to receive a college-ready score that could save him/her time and money by not having to take remedial, non-credit courses at a Minnesota State college or university.”

Any parents still resisting are then served a final dose of guilt. Those who choose to opt out, the form warns, may deprive not only themselves but their whole school district of “valuable information” that could cause a potential drag on any local or state attempts to “equitably distribute resources.”

According to a Minnesota Department of Education employee, who was not authorized to speak publicly about this, the form was updated in 2017 for two main reasons. First, during the 2017 state legislative session, lawmakers on the Education Policy Committee passed a law requiring the department to clearly spell out the “consequences” of opting out of testing. Second, the form was amended in order to encourage more compliance with the ESSA law. The ESSA, like its much-derided predecessor, the No Child Left Behind law, requires that states test “at least 95 percent of all eligible students.”

In late 2015, the federal government, in promoting the ESSA, sent a letter to states urging them to “sanction” local schools or education departments that fall below this 95 percent threshold. To force compliance with standardized testing (and test prep, as Koretz points out), federal officials recommended that states threaten to withhold funding, for example, or label students who opt out as “non-proficient,” as the Minnesota form promises to do.

Labeling students as non-proficient has not gone over well with the public, according to the Minnesota department of education employee I spoke with. “People have expressed concern” over the wording on the Parent Refusal Form, the staffer admitted. The employee clearly conceded, however, that—no matter the implied consequences—parents and students still have the right to opt out of the testing.

What might be hardest to opt out of, though, is the nation’s long-standing insistence on using standardized test scores as a gatekeeper to higher education. In an October letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, University of Minnesota library employee Robert Katz wrote that, last year, 670 African-American students applied to the university’s highly regarded business school, but that “the U rejected 94 percent of them.” Why were so many African-Americans rejected? Katz argues that it is due in large part to the “administration’s use of standardized test scores.” The university, he says, has a new policy that requires incoming freshman to have an ACT score of 28—a score he says is “achieved by only 10 percent of test-takers nationwide.”

Black students tend to score lower on the ACT than their white and Asian-American peers, Katz writes, but not because they are less intelligent or capable. The ACT is a “flawed test,” he claims, and does not accurately reflect merit, intelligence, or a student’s likely college GPA. Using the university’s own data, Katz points out that students who come in with a 28 on the ACT tend to achieve first-year GPAs in the same range (B+ to A-) as those who come in with lower ACT scores.

The University of Minnesota’s new call for higher ACT scores means “African-American students are being turned away at a higher rate than 10 years ago,” Katz concludes. Rather than creating steps toward more equitable forms of assessment, federal education policy encourages states like Minnesota to punish those in K-12 and higher education who might want to resist the dominance of high-stakes standardized testing.  

UPDATE:

A parent who read this blog post on Facebook says that she had previously reached out to the Minnesota Department of Education, complaining about the “not proficient” language on the state’s Parent Refusal Form. Here is the response she received from an unidentified staffer:

The woman at MDE who replied to me via e-mail said this, “For a student who does not participate, they will receive an Individual Student Report that says, ‘NA’ for Not Attempted. For accountability purposes, students who do not participate are included in a district’s total testing population, and since they did not participate, they cannot be included in the count of students who demonstrated proficiency on the assessment.” She also told me the form had been updated on approximately November 27. Here is the new language on the form, “I understand that by signing this form, my student will be counted as “not proficient” for the purpose of school and district accountability…”

This seems to indicate that individual students will no longer be labeled “not proficient” by the state, but that anyone who opts out of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments will still be lumped into that category. Some enterprising lawyer should look into whether or not it is legal to label students who do not take a test–which is their right–as “not proficient.”

*This post originally appeared on The Progressive magazine’s Public School Shakedown site.

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Minneapolis Parents Choose Community Over Testing

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April 24, 2017

In early April, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published the results of a new online survey, completed by parents with kids in the Minneapolis Public Schools. The results offer a surprising revelation: most parents in the city do not choose schools based on standardized test scores.

Like many public school districts across the country, Minneapolis has had to focus in recent years on regaining its “market share,” in an era of ever-spiraling school choice schemes. Another Star Tribune article, this one from 2015,  laid the district’s challenges bare in the headline: “Thousands of Minneapolis children leave district for charters, suburban schools.” Thirty-six thousand students in the city attend the Minneapolis Public Schools, but, the article showed, more than 17,000 school-age kids do not.

The recent survey suggests that it isn’t test results, that induce parents to switch schools. Molly Leutz, a Minneapolis parent portrayed in the most recent article, said that test scores “didn’t even cross (her) mind” when looking at schools for her young daughter. Instead, word of mouth among parents, as well as “diversity,” ranked high on Leutz’s list. In the end, she chose to send her daughter to their neighborhood public school.

Other parents echoed Leutz’s priorities. Sixty percent of the 2,000 survey respondents based their decision on two factors: after-school opportunities (and other enrichment programs) and the “makeup of the student body.” These results further reflect studies done with parents in other communities, such as New Orleans. In 2015, National Public Radio education reporter, Anya Kamenetz, published a story showing that New Orleans parents—who live in what is supposed to be the most “choice-filled” city in the United States—do not put academic factors first.

“Parents, especially low-income parents,” Kamenetz found, “actually show strong preferences for other qualities like location and extracurriculars” when choosing schools for their kids. Despite the efforts of outside education reform interests, which have sought to create a network of New Orleans-style charters in place of neighborhood schools, “distance matters a lot” to parents there. This implies that, when it comes to school choice, community and convenience outweigh perceptions of test-driven success.

The Minneapolis survey also found parents ranked old-fashioned techniques such as report cards and parent-teacher communication much more highly than standardized test scores for “gauging student success.” Parents also believed that “hearing from a child” was more important than test scores “when grasping how a child is performing in school.” Perhaps even more compelling, the Minneapolis survey indicates that white and Asian parents were far more likely than black, Latino and Native American parents to “look to” test scores.

The article does not delve into why this may be true, but it does stand to reason that parents of kids who tend to score the highest on standardized tests—i.e., white and Asian-American students—may place more value on such outcomes. White and Asian-American students also, statistically, tend to be wealthier than other students, and standardized test results often reflect a student’s socioeconomic status.

In 2013, a survey of parents in Georgia by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (a conservative think tank that typically favors charters) also showed that a majority of parents identified non-academic factors as the primary reason why they chose one school over another. The Georgia survey was done to support the concept of tax-credit scholarships (also known as “neovouchers”), used to send more students to private school.

In a way, the effort backfired. Less than 10 percent of parents said they looked for “higher standardized test scores” when selecting a school. Instead, things like smaller class sizes, safety and a “better learning environment” mattered more. Currently, many states are in the throes of preparing school accountability plans, as required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. While the transition to the Trump administration has brought some uncertainty for this new education policy, so far, it will allow states to move away from an over reliance on test-based measures of success.

Survey results such as the ones from Minneapolis should, if taken seriously, help policymakers understand that school choice systems built around standardized test scores may not be as important as having a safe, welcoming school in every neighborhood, where relationships and teacher-parent communication rank high.

–Originally published by The Progressive on April 20, 2017

Opt Out Numbers in Minnesota High Schools Skyrocket

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March 11, 2017

As testing season begins in full force across Minnesota, publicly available data from the state Department of Education indicates a striking trend: the number of high school juniors refusing to sit for the state and federally mandated MCA tests is growing–rapidly.

Sidebar: In order to qualify for federal Title funding, Minnesota is required to give annual, standardized tests (MCAs) to public school students in grades 3-8 and 10, for reading; grades 3-8 and 11 in math, and science in grades 5, 8 and once in high school (English Language Learners are given many additional ACCESS tests each year, K-12). Although the state is required to give the tests, parents and students in Minnesota have the right to refuse to participate in them.

The Monticello, MN schools recently canceled science in favor of MCA test prep

In 2016, 2,227 high school juniors opted out of the MCA tests statewide. That’s just a drop in the bucket, compared to the 55,975 students who did take it. But it is more than three times the number of eleventh grade students–694–who opted out of the MCAs in 2015. 

This is a startling jump, taking place in schools and cities as diverse as suburban St. Louis Park, rural Pine City and Minneapolis. (The examples below pertain only to the Math MCA tests for high school juniors.)

In 2016, ten Pine City juniors refused the MCA tests; that’s a small but significant bump up from the three students who refused the tests in 2015. At St. Louis Park High School in 2016, 66 juniors opted out. But in 2015, just one student refused the MCAs.

An eye-popping 209 juniors at Minneapolis’s Henry High School opted out of the math MCAs in 2016. That’s a huge leap from 2015, when just eleven students refused the tests. Only seven percent of Henry’s 1,100 students identify as white and eighty percent live in poverty, according to federal standards. This might help poke holes in the story that only “suburban moms” and white, wealthier kids are pushing the opt out movement. And, across town at Roosevelt High School, 98 juniors opted out of the math MCAs in 2016. Like Henry, Roosevelt is not a majority white school and almost seventy percent of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Over at South High School–Minneapolis’s largest and most diverse–so few students took the MCAs in 2016 that there are simply blank spaces on the Department of Education’s spreadsheet for the school. That’s because, when fewer than ten students take the tests, the data has to be blocked out for privacy reasons. In 2015, 306 students–or nearly ninety percent of eligible juniors–at South did not take the tests. (The city’s Washburn High also had 81 MCA math test refusals in 2016; in 2015, there were eleven.)

Minneapolis’s two smaller high schools–Edison and North High schools–had very few opt outs in 2016 and 2015 (0 at North, both years), while Southwest High School has had large and growing numbers of opt outs–191 in 2015 and 251 in 2016. High schools in St. Paul are also reporting an increase–often from zero up to double digits–in the numbers of students refusing the tests, but the opt out movement appears to have more legs in Minneapolis.

Point of confusion: In Minnesota, districts can set their own graduation requirements, and, reportedly, some are putting MCA scores on high school transcripts to indicate whether or not a student is “college and career ready.” A student’s MCA scores can also be used, per Minnesota statute, as part of a course grade or as a way to try to avoid being placed in remedial classes in college. Students, however, still do not have to take the MCA tests (test refusal can be noted on a transcript as well). Most college-bound high school students undoubtedly choose to focus their energies on either the ACT or SAT test, even as more and more colleges are becoming “test optional.”

Districts in the metro area and beyond also reported large numbers of opt outs among eleventh graders in 2016. Examples: last year, Hopkins High School had 158 refusals, up from zero in 2015; Wayzata High School had a tiny number of opt outs in 2016–just 12, out of 786 eligible juniors–but that’s up from zero opt outs the year before. Blaine High School, a large, suburban school north of the Twin Cities, saw 100 MCA refusals in 2016; Burnsville High School, south of the Twin Cities, had 30.

Not much of a crowd–except when you consider that zero Burnsville students and only three Blaine juniors refused the MCAs in 2015.

This week, the state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor released a report on standardized testing in Minnesota. The report noted that the state spent $19.2 million on testing in 2016, with one-third of that paid for with federal dollars. Ninety percent of this tab went to the companies such as Pearson that produce the tests and help the state assess test score data. 

The auditor’s report revealed a number of problems with standardized testing in Minnesota, including the conclusion that the legislature has piled too many tasks and expectations on the MCA tests in particular. MCA scores are now expected to show proficiency on the state standards, as well as growth (through the addition of test questions that push students above or below grade level) and a student’s “college and career readiness.”

From the state report on standardized testing (page S-4):

The Legislature has required MDE to develop tests and report test scores in certain ways. Some of these requirements are ill-advised.

State law requires that the MCAs include questions above and below a student’s grade level. However, due to federal requirements, MDE has been unable to use these questions in calculating most of the test scores it reports. As a result, statewide tests have been lengthened for all students without much benefit.

Dolores Ramos, 16, right, joins dozens of Highland High School students in Albuquerque, N.M., as students staged a walkout Monday March 2, 2015, to protest a new standardized test they say isn't an accurate measurement of their education. Students frustrated over the new exam walked out of schools across the state Monday in protest as the new exam was being given. The backlash came as millions of U.S. students start taking more rigorous exams aligned with Common Core standards.
Albuquerque, New Mexico high school students; AP photo

State law also requires MDE to report a score based on the MCA describing each student’s progress toward career and college readiness. But such scores for elementary and middle school students are methodologically problematic. Projections extending far into the future have a high level of uncertainty, and some of them are likely to be wrong.

MCA tests scores are also used in teacher evaluations (per state requirement) and, in some districts, to evaluate principals, too. Another key finding from this report? Across the state, “Many principals and teachers do not feel prepared to interpret much of the testing data reported by MDE.”

In response to this, at a March 5 presentation of the auditor’s report, Republican state representative Sondra Erickson (who has served on ALEC’s education task force) suggested that perhaps teachers need more training in how to interpret test data.

If more students continue to refuse the tests, perhaps such further training will not be necessary. 

The level of testing nonparticipation among high school students in Minneapolis Public Schools has reached the point where it is no longer appropriate to endorse the test results as a valid measure of districtwide student learning.

–Office of the Legislative Auditor’s 2017 report on standardized testing in Minnesota (79)

Meanwhile in Minnesota: “Lack of school counselors have experts worried,” as the state has no mandate to fund counselors or maintain a certain number per student.

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No Glitch Grit: Minnesota suspends Pearson tests

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Uh oh. 

Image result for opting out of testing
But tests should be!

There will be no MCA testing today in Minnesota. Like so many schoolchildren who can’t sit still, the tests have been suspended.

Naughty, naughty, naughty.

The super high-tech $38 million online only delivery system for the MCAs has been behaving badly, by seizing up and freezing and otherwise not allowing the testing high season to define the school day across Minnesota.

Now, teachers and students will be like estranged family members forced to look at each other across the Thanksgiving table:

Who are you again? How do we know each other? What do you want from me?

Without mandatory marches down to silent computer labs, what will teachers and their scholars in training do all day?  Get to know each other, or something?

What’s the point?

I wonder if these suspended Pearson tests will be punished harshly, under a zero tolerance policy, especially since this latest episode of techno-glitches is far from the company’s first offense:

January 2015: Pearson, MN Dept. of Ed sort through testing breakdowns 

May  2014: A history of Pearson’s testing problems worldwide

April 2013: Pearson fails the test, again and again

Is there a prison for these bad tests, their flawed online delivery systems, and the gigantic beast of a company that packages and sells all of this? Some kind of debtor’s prison? Haven’t they promised to help us, the all important taxpayers, hold our schools accountable? And haven’t they failed us one too many times?

Can we counsel Pearson out of our public education system?

Oh wait– I almost forgot:

“Pearson has aggressive lobbyists, top-notch marketing and a highly skilled sales team.“

What a surprise. There is always money for Pearson, and always money for test coordinators and test prep and special Spring Break Academy test prep sessions, even as Minnesota legislators contemplate just how little money they can get away with spending on E-12 education in the state.

Unfunded special education mandates? Who cares?

Growing child poverty rates? Not our problem. 

But Pearson? Pearson? We can’t live without them! And they’ll probably be really super mad at us for suspending their tests.

At least, if our Gopher State scholars drop out of high school in droves because they get suspended too many times, or because they can’t hack learning in a classroom of 45, or because they have failed to find the pursuit of rigorous standards thrilling, they can take Pearson’s GED test someday.

Bonus section! Read all about it:

K-12 superintendents and college administrators alike struggle to boost enrollment, raise graduation rates, improve academic outcomes — and to do it all while cutting costs.

In this atmosphere of crisis, Pearson promises solutions. It sells the latest and greatest, and it’s no fly-by-night startup; it calls itself the world’s leading learning company. Public officials have seized it as a lifeline.

“Pearson has been the most creative and the most aggressive at [taking over] all those things we used to take as part of the public sector’s responsibility,” said Michael Apple, a professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

–from Stephanie Simon’s 2015 Politico piece about Pearson, “No Profit Left Behind”

Anna Ed Justice

Portrait of a Young Test Taker

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Testing, from the inside out: The following sketch of a young test taker grew out of a conversation I had recently with a school employee. 

She is six years old and in first grade. English is not her first language, Spanish is. But, she is lucky enough to go to a school in Minneapolis–a neighborhood public school–where she will be  taught in Spanish for most of the day, until she is almost ready for middle school. 

Image by artist Ricardo Levins Morales

When it is testing time at her school, though, she is tested only in English. And it is almost always testing time at her school, where many of the kids are poor, non-white, and non-native English speakers. The school has many homeless students, too.

In the fall, near the start of the school year, she took the MAP test, which is an optional, district-chosen reading and math test that is supposed to show “growth,” or how much a student’s MAP score changes during the course of a school year.

The MAP is only done online, and on her first day in the computer lab, she looked at the screen, where the reading test was cued up. In English.

There were paragraphs of text in front of her. She started to cry. 

“I can’t read!”

No one could help her. The testing proctor is not allowed to read the text for her. Her classroom teacher is also not allowed to share any information with her about the test or how to take it.

She is six years old. She can’t read in English yet, or in Spanish.

The test proctor said, “Just do your best.”

The little girl gave up, and started clicking on answers, just to get through the test.

Her teacher will be evaluated on the girl’s test scores, even though the test is in English and the teacher and child work together in Spanish, as a way to ease bilingual children like her into later academic success.

In the spring, the child will take the MAP test in English again.

She also took another test just for English language learners during the winter, called the WIDA test. The WIDA test is a federally mandated test given to all ELL students–from kindergarten through 12th grade–in English. It has to be given to everyone, including students in an Autism or special education program, unless there are extreme circumstances. 

Poster by Ricardo Levins Morales

“It is kind of painful to have to give it to every kid,” says the test proctor. The test takes hours.

Starting in third grade, the girl will take the MAP test in the fall, another optional, district-selected test in the winter called the OLPA (a Pearson-owned prep test for the MCAs), then the ELL/WIDA test, and finally the MCAs. The OLPA can be taken more than once, and it often is.

The assessment guide that comes with the OLPA describes the test this way:

The Optional Local Purpose Assessment (OLPA)…provides a risk-free environment for students to familiarize themselves with online testing and provides teachers with information to target instruction before the reading and mathematics tests used for accountability in the spring.

If she is a “bubble” kid–whose test scores show that she is close to scoring in the proficient range–she will get extra test prep and coaching, in terms of how to improve her score. If she can move from meeting to exceeding expectations on the statewide MCA test, then her school’s numbers will look better. Her teacher’s evaluation score will improve, and the teacher’s principal will look more “effective.”

“It’s all about the cut score,” says the proctor.

What is your testing story? Tell me at sarah.lahm@gmail.com.