Your child is inadequate, (as is their school, district, teacher) and there is no silver lining

I read a great piece by a superintendent in New York on new "test scores" under Common Core exams. I've kept it to read just to myself when I do not see my district in CA, or anyone in the system,  writing anything like this to parents.
You see I'm rather fond of leadership.
Of their role in explaining and formulating.
So when I see it, especially after the past ten years,  I take note.

Here is her piece. (Any time I ask folks to link out I feel they don't. Then I wish I could copy/paste here for them-but my daughter tells me this is not OK. Well now the link isn't linking so I am going to copy it and apologize if I'm wrong.

Commentary on Math & ELA Results

Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder

Over the past several months school leaders have been receiving countless messages from the State Education Department preparing us for the dire outcomes associated with the most recent spate of State testing in grades 3-8 in Math and English Language Arts.  As the date for the releases of the test scores approached, we received many notices of “talking points” to inform our communities about the outcomes, with explanations of new baselines and how these tests do not reflect the efforts of students and teachers this year.  I have rejected these missives because they reek of the self-serving mentality the ‘powers that be’ have thrust upon our students and parents.

Our community is sophisticated enough to recognize a canard when it experiences one.  These tests were intentionally designed to obtain precisely the outcomes that were rendered.  The rationale behind this is to demonstrate that our most successful students are not so much and our least successful students are dreadful.  If you look at the distribution of scores, you see exactly the same distances as any other test.  The only difference is that the distribution has been manipulated to be 30 to 40 percent lower for everybody.  This serves an enormously powerful purpose.  If you establish a baseline this low, the subsequent growth over the next few years will indicate that your plans for elevating the outcomes were necessary.  However, it must be recognized that the test developers control the scaled scores—indeed they have developed a draconian statistical formula that is elaborate, if indecipherable, to determine scaled scores.  I would bet my house on the fact that over the next few years, scores will “improve”—not necessarily student learning, but scores.  They must, because the State accepted millions and millions of dollars to increase student scores and increase graduation rates.  If scores do not improve from this baseline, then those ‘powers that be’ will have a lot of explaining to do to justify having accepted those millions.

If you examine the distribution of the scores, the one thing that leaps off the page is the distance between children in high poverty and children in relative wealth.  While all have been relegated to a point 30 to 40 percent lower than previously, the exact curve is absolutely connected to socioeconomic status—which has been historically true in such testing for more than a century.

The tragic part of this story is the collateral damage—the little children who worked so hard this year, who endured so many distressing hours of testing, who failed to reach proficiency, all because of the manipulation of the scaling.  We will be talking with parents whose children scored level four last year, who now may have scored a level two.  It does not mean much; it only means they are the unwitting part of a massive scheme to prove how these “high standards” are improving outcomes over time.  It is time to pay attention to the man behind the curtain—he is no wizard, but he is wily! 

By the way, if you want to know what curriculum experiences are being promoted for even our youngest learners by the ‘powers that be’, check out curriculum modules on www.engageny.org .  How many of us truly believe that expecting first graders to understand and explain why Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization is reasonable?  How many of us truly even imagine that six year olds should be able to identify cuneiform and hieroglyphics or understand the importance of the code of Hammurabi?  Check it out—then I suggest you let your legislators, and the Department of Education know what matters to you.

As we digest the information and prepare for the upcoming year, please rest assured that Voorheesville remains committed to challenging and cherishing our students.

What she is trying to do is explain something to families about why with the new Common Core tests every kid that looked like they were doing pretty well in an obviously good school, is now going to look like they are failures. As if in crappy schools. I'm shortening but that's the sub-text.
She credits folks with having "canard" in their repertoire, and an understanding of "a fix" in their cultural understandings. Maybe. Maybe not.
I count on neither in my world.

We have one more year before we get to fail the Common Core tests -as things stand.
A year to gain some broad or vague or whatever understandings of the thing and then gear up to teach to the new test. So we can go from everyone inadequate to mostly inadequate. Some want a wait period of a year or two-no one seems to be saying-we don't want this AT ALL. And I don't know why not.

What the public will derive from this, knowing that their children are basically good, is that the public schools are terrible, doing things even more crazy than ever, and then in a period of time we'll close public school, charter it at best, and hand over that which joined us together in common purpose-a strong public system we own- to that which your money can buy-which is now doing no better- but IS NOW run like a business.

And that makes me sad.

It's hard to participate, though I've been "told" "the arts are coming back."
I can't imagine the arts wanting to reappear in such a scenario, because their basis is essentially in conflict, but all hail the return of the arts in service of the test. Perhaps we can coax poetry to serve tests as well. Give this some meter.
Negotiate a deal with dance, music, with literature, so that we can "use" them to take the test.
Perhaps we can elevate something that was eliminated like libraries, by saying that they will help our testing. Maybe the library can be reclaimed as the testing center.

I find myself actually referencing my work by "the scores" now, as in the following I said to Anthony Cody recently, "We had a good year last year, I was doing more math, trying hard AND THE SCORES OVERALL AT MY GRADE LEVEL I THINK WERE UP."

Once I found myself saying this, I saw it for one of the gravest misrepresentations I ever gave-I was trying to relate we had worked hard and learned a great deal and yet my mouth SAID....
A long time ago I caught myself saying this, "He threw up repeatedly and had a hundred and two fever and needed to go home but luckily it wasn't ON the state test and he did finish the section." Of course that was several years ago. Before I was really blogging, and as I was being managed into the "sophisticated" school, district, state and national mentality that we are there to produce scores and do test prep.

This is not "informed by data" this is "exists for data."
And I doubt there are too many left that recall a time when data had just a place in the work.
As I do recall.

How would you explain to parents that a test is coming that makes two thirds of children in a high performing school look like failures, and so children in poverty schools likely will look like they didn't attend a school at all-all they did leveled to nothing?
What would your letter sent out to the community read like-would it be an honest and direct letter about the dismantling of public school?
Would you address the untried nature of Common Core?
Would you jump on board-excited and thrilled by the possibility?
Would you tell folks this is a "window of possibility?"

I don't see any possibility-we haven't addressed the issues that underlie the failure of those in need-the achievement gap- except by testing and insistence on teaching to tests. I fail to see that as particularly effective, data says we didn't do what NCLB stated.
Is Common Core rectifying the things in the appalling economic divide- other than through pressure on teachers through high stakes tests and all day long test prep?
What I saw last time around and started writing about was a very obvious lie. In NCLB it was stated to community that by 2014 all students would be proficient or advanced AND an achievement gap closed. I met no one that thought that could happen- in the funding lack and leadership vacuum in that law-no one had a handbook on how. No one however wrote that in letters home. Look folks-umm.

So I think it is interesting to read a Superintendent writing something to her families by way of preparation for the tanking that she's actually seeing having completed the tests-first round.

Should we address the politics?
Should we talk about the ramifications?
Should we look at the contexts?

What exactly will we "allow" teachers to say about all of this-in the last go round that amounted to telling families what standards their kids HAD to reach. Anything else you were breaking something that risked your job.

How exactly will educators conduct the dialogs of failure?