And they ignore met, and then in 2011 i started speaking with dan cain of the record and then in 2012 when i was still talking to him, went to president fridays funeral, and i remember mittwill with him in 2010 and i felt really bad when i heard about the president friday and how important academic integrity was to him, and i spoke to my husband chuck about how upset was. He start started a blog. It went viral, and then dan cain said, youre base chris basically on the record now so off to the races we went, and then i met jay at around that same time, and his he personally and his athletic reform group, group of faculty have had my back and although it seems like i have had all this hate, which i have, fans are fanatics i have had many more supporters encouraging me on because many of us know that this is the truth and that we have seen this ourselves. And wed like to do something as well but iland to be in the right place at the right ty time have great support from my husband and family and was able to keep it up and wouldnt have been able too do this book. Without this guy, because im a Reading Specialist and a learning specialist and i can tell stories but he is the writer. So its been you tale good story. Its been a great journey and ive learned a lot. R. As time has gone by you have students who are failing and now you have are those same students passing and what courses are they taking or we cant see the transcripts anymore. They cut us off. They cut him off too. Imagine that. But we know that admissions standards were admissions have been raised a couple of years ago, and so last two years unc admitted fewer still admitting some but far fewer of the truly atrisk students. Something like im going get the numbers wrong but i think 25 were admitted in 2008 whereas in 2012 only nine. I seem to recall those so they do seem to have tightened up the standards. The danger of course, is that this may be just a temporary measure while everybody its looking. They have adopted no hard and fast rules about admissions going forward. And so we have to be vigilant in watching admissions. But which courses are they taking . We really dont know. We cant tell. Were just not close enough to the ground any longer to know what theyre doing. But there have been a couple of academic casualties. Yes. On the football teamworks for the first anytime the history we lost four players, three or four. Thats right. Academically ineligible. My goodness. Getting tougher for them. Last question. Getting the sign. My question is again, i appreciate dish wanted to commend you both for everything you have done. My question is more about the culture at the university that allows this and why havent we seen more professors tenured professors, that step up and actually take a stand on this . Because theyre the ones that we see the universitys if hey a nephew in premed over there, and we have had this discussion. Getting a great education by but the value of the degree obviously has been tarnished. Thats right. I can only agree with you. Faculty are supposed to be the guarantors of the integrity 0 of the institution, supposed to be the watch dog for these sorts of offenses. And the fact that we havent been marching on polk place is a mystery to me. I dont understand it. There are i want to say there are plenty of other faculty at unc who are as angry as i am but not as outspoken but a lot of them. But its true that the faculty as a collective just hasnt mustered much energy, and im very disappointed by that. I dont have a good answer for it. There are lots of reasons why faculty tend to be reticent but theres sociology theory called organizational deviance. It happens at universities and industry. Its part of our culture right now. Its really sad. [inaudible] that is one of the factors. Nobody wants that. Everybody just wants to be left alone. Theres a startling statistic that i came across at the time of a faculty rally a couple weeks ago in front of south building, which is that 59 of faculty at unc are not on the tenure track. The majority of faculty do not have the appreciation of tenure. Both sides are motivated by resentment and the sense of being put upon. Those people really dont understand this. Here is a guy who does understand this, and he is going to stick it to the. Hillary clinton will give her own version command i dont think that was actually true 30 years ago. Always always part of politics, but the degree to which it is almost exclusively the motivating factor. Sunday night at 8 00 oclock eastern and pacific on cspan q a. Year my name is monica golden and we are very happy to welcome anya and her latest book the test. Why schools are processed with standardized testing and you dont have to be. It talks about the failure of american testing in Public Education. In the last 20 years they have dramatically increased standardized testing and they are sacrificing learning in the face of testing. What parents and teachers can do to help. The review recently said with abundant data assembled and assessable format this book is a must read for anyone in the educational system or any parent who has a child old enough to enter preschool. Please give a warm welcome to anya kamenetz. Thank you monica, thank you all for coming. Im so thrilled to be able to visit this amazing bookstore in community. Community. I was here five years ago for my last book and it such a great pleasure to tour bookstores because i love bookstores. Theyre my favorite thing. So i wrote the test to resolve a personal dilemma which was how to educate my daughter. I had previously written about innovation in education and with the help of technology and other kinds of approaches to student centered learning. I wanted to write the same kind of book for education with children and i wrote a proposal for that kind of book to talk about project based learning, social Emotional Learning, maker spaces, the flipped classroom and the proposal just wasnt that convincing. I talked to my agent about why and i said nine out of ten kids go to Public School and what im hearing is that there is not a lot of room for innovation in Public Schools because our schools are being held accountable for the outcome and the test scores dont capture what the teachers are trying to accomplish with these other types of experiences and models. Thats why it feels not very convincing innovation story here. My agent said you need to write about that. You need to write about the growler in the room which is standardized testing. So i set out bravely but afraid to combat what i thought would be a very dense project in terms of history policy. When you write about Higher Education its very diverse and independent sector of our society but in k12, this is really america. This is public, this is one of our biggest public expenditures. Nine out of ten schools and 50 million children, half of these children are poor and you cant write about School Without writing about politics race politics, race and class. All of these issues come into the standardized testing story in a really strong and unsettling way. To talk about that you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the discovery of the bell curve in its earliest application and whats new in psychometrics, the science of measuring the human mind. I was really personally floored to discover how the foundational mind to establish psychometrics by Charles Peterman and many more, they did so fundamentally from a conception of intelligence that was fixed, hereditary and unitary. That was an experiment called the g factor and it was what Charles Turman called the interpretation iq. They believed everybody had a brain like a microprocessor and if you could measure the speed of your brain you could sort people. Then you could plan and predict the becks outcomes for those people. If that sounds unsettling to you it should because the guy who brought us this foundational psychometrics model also coined the term eugenics. He measured what he believed was a fixed quality in human beings. Psychometric testing became employed in many different contexts due to short and correct for differences in people. As we try to make this a land of opportunity it was also very competitive. The benefits in our society were unequally distributed and still are. The idea of meritocracy determined by testing became a safety valve. Were having a conversation conversation about who gets what in society and who gets what resources and you can point to educational tests and that therefore the people who are the smartest and work the hardest. What hardest. What really kind of astonishing is if you look at the history up to that point, after standardized tests, now called achievement tests it took a very different turn and they began to be a put forth as an instrument of equity. They use these tests to measure what was called the achievement gap and the differential achievement from people from different ink income and race. It would be overcome with rigor and hard work. Work. I believe that the many people wouldnt adopted this and vision were wellintentioned. There was a strong undercurrent in educational theory in the 60s and 70s that talk about the fact that we need to raise our expectations and cant be complacent about the hard work of making sure that every child has the resources they need to achieve. When you talk about why we have standardized testing and no child left behind, and argument you will hear is if we didnt have it teachers wouldnt care about these kids and wouldnt have to be responsible for these kids and they would just say as long as the kids are getting breakfast im doing my job. Ive never heard a teacher actually per pass this so thats an opinion put on someone else but nevertheless this is the idea. This is a dilemma we have right now. We have these tests, we have severe limitation with these instruments. Assessments are tools that teachers use every day to give feedback about learning and to diagnose and help students and direct their efforts and help teachers direct their efforts. Assessments are not the problem. The issue we have is standardized assessments of only math and reading. Weve known for a long time that when you talk to the folks at the big Test Companies they will tell you that these test are being used in a way they were never intended for. They were never intended to be the sole boko haram on what we based decision on what schools open and close, what teachers lose their job, and whether or not students are ready for one grade to the next. Especially not that. They are used to look at a population a population but they dont tell you all that much about the individual student. These test have been used in all kinds of ways that they werent intended for. It doesnt mean we dont need data about the performance of every single student in every single student. We very well may need that for a school to improve. The impact that were have right now is that its not just that were sick of these tests i want to get rid of him but what should replace these tests. I spend the first half of the book going through the arguments against against testing and how they impact teachers, students families and how diverse schools are more in danger of being sanctioned in the no child left behind. Were wasting money on these test because the money is not going toward improving teaching and learning. The slight improvement weve seen with no child left behind are in no way greater than what we saw before no child left behind happened. Theres no evidence that it has had any beneficial effects in making this student achievement gap smaller or increasing our international standings. I talk about the common core and the common core test that students are taking right now. The fact that they were touted as a huge improvement but the tests themselves are not enough of a department departure. The independent experts that reviewed these assessments concluded that they do represent an improvement but nothing like what is actually needed. They elaborated to me, shes a scholar on assessment, that they dont actually match standards. Its impossible to produce a machine graded test that cost 30 for 30. This is what were running into time and time again where were trying to optimize our system to many tests. But tests. But the man more test we have the lower quality each test becomes. They are written by lowwage lowpaid workers without proper qualifications. When you have a written portion of the test its graded by the same type of person. Someone who was hired from craigslist. The more attention we put on these tests the more problems we get because were trying to cheap out by adding too many tests to the roster. In the time since ive published the book a new study came out showing an urban District Across the country. How many students do you think standardized tests were taken from kindergarten through 12th grade . 113. Between ten and 30 a year. Thirty was the highest we saw except for one state that had 331 year. These tests are not just following the state. There following the district as well. They want to do a pretest, a posttest, a diagnostic test, a benchmark test. There are many test that students are taking, but none that are completely clear to parents and often not to teachers as well. So i want to talk a little bit about this position i i talk about in the book and then open it up to questions. People focus on different aspects of the problem and it depends on what people are coming in with so i want to open it up to questions. When i talk about the future of testing i look at it in two parts. We need better accountability and better assessment. The stakes attest to the test, right now in no child left behind theyre tied to school closer closure, teacher evaluation, closure, teacher evaluation, funding that affects states and the funding is being held over the state by the federal government to get them to agree to certain things, and its affecting students. Thats the most detrimental effect because they have a mindset a mindset and attitude around learning and the fact that were making school about these test implicates this mindset. Where students feel like its something youre born with and thats not the attitude were trying to instill and research doesnt support that its accurate. There are many detriments to testing but without them it would be much more than an annoyance. Thinking about having to do accountability. If you care about accountability and i think its they are to care about it, the proposals in congress to authorize no child left behind are talking about eliminating federal testing requirements and going back to a situation where states have to submit a good faith statement about what theyre doing for student achievement. How do we have produced produce accountability thats balance . One proposal i talk about in the book is talking about resource accountability. The idea being that why do we just hold our schools accountable but we dont hold the districts and state accountability for the input into the school. Only 14 states even attempt to equalize and make the funding progressive. Most of the time we tolerate these disparities and expect the schools that have the least to work the hardest and overcome whats been conceptualized as the achievement gap. Whats been conceptualized as the gap. You could just as easily talk about the resource gap. Thats what we are talking about. Resource accountability is one way of looking at it. Another interesting approach in terms of accountability is looking at longterm factors, looking at a factors. Now many more states are tracking students from prek into the workforce. This raises its own questions in terms of data and privacy and ask your questions about what makes it an successful in that longitudinal information, that gives us the insights such as the idea that half of what you need to succeed his nonacademic skills social and emotional skills from high school into the workforce. The preschool project famously providing ironclad evidence about the effect of highquality preschool on students throughout their lives. That was achieved by tracking students throughout their lifetime. Instead of asking questions about the teams proficiency at an appointed time we could loot use longitudinal evidence to talk about schools performance as students course over their lifetime and what the community could be doing to help that child succeed. Then theres testing itself. We know we have a faulty concept concept, a faulty construct this idea of iq and even if you want to say maybe its real there is a human intelligence but so what . Once you measure that in one person how is that helping to give you any information in terms of that persons education or how you are going to help them learn. Them learn. We need to learn how they approach learning how to they work over time, theres a lot of interest in whats called selfassessment. This is an idea that of all the small little pieces of feedback or formative assessment that teachers given a classroom on a daily basis, if we could somehow chop that up we would get a much richer picture somehow we would get a much richer picture as to learning over time and there are various types of Software Programs that are coming into play now that would be possibly giving really broadbased evidence of Student Learning over time and trajectories over time is what we are interested in. So i talk in the book about the value or foreign space to assessments and why its important for students to have an understanding of the knowledge they are demonstrating and research and Group Projects that allow them to demonstrate skills of Communication Corporation and 21st century skills. Testing is inherently integrated into the learning process and teachers in new york city which has 28 high schools that dont give state exams have much Better Outcomes in terms of dropout rates and College Persistence but the key metric that i find convincing is the teacher return rates are somewhat slower because teachers are committed to this way of teaching and learning because they are working as to professionals. They are collaborating with other teachers across different schools. Finally i talk about technology and otherwise ways that technology can be used to gather broadbased evidence. We have this 19th Century Technology the multiplechoice tests which comes from the fact that someone that did a meter that could read a graphite pencil and electrically score many test pages at once kind of the cotton gin of standardized testing. What blood is a 21st century model for assessment . I call it because it might be mythical but the idea is many of our students have an experience great experience of giving former feedback through games and games teach you how to play them as you play. Games give you instant information about where you are going and how you are doing. Games offer the chance to try again to do better the next time and organizations like and the city are working on creating games for learning and assessment where the game is gathering evidence by students decisionmaking and creating the models of how students understand the higher order concepts. The first version they produced was a game called city. In this particular game you have the power plants and you have to worry about pollution and you have to worry about jobs and worry about electricity and all these things interact in different ways. This is a game that is a test of a systems thinking. The idea is your student has a black oxide via of a causes b and are able to balance the role of different variables producing an outcome and the reliability that outcome. Evidence is the basis of a judgment by human being. What we are reaching for is not an arbitrary verdict rendered by a machine that information that datadriven teacherstudent parent can use to make debtors decisions about Student Learning and other point in time. That is all well and good when it comes to technology but our policy decisions are not based on the most available evidence. I talk to parents and students in the opt out movement. They decide the best way to respond to test us not to take them and i talked to leaders and a teacher of movement to see testing as a local point of a broader debate about how we support Public Education in this country and where we are going with it. I do believe this is going to be exciting at the ballot box as it is in the realm of research and accountability so the question is for parents and for anyone who has kids in the School System or anyone who has any relationship to the future at all what are you going to do about the testing situation . Thats my 30 minutes. Thanks so much. [applause] any questions . It was so interesting. They have how i see it from those examples 99 tester and 20 testers the emotional factor thats involved. I cant say this child i have is clearly slower than this child that they are so emotionally different. One just freaks of the testing that he actually tested the weird thing is he tested superhigh on the pacing type or speed thing but then superlow on something else. It makes no sense. The social and emotional aspect of this is way important and im glad you brought it up. Testing affects 40 of test takers strongly enough to depress the results so its a hugely overlooked chapter and how we interpret results. What we really look at is the performance of people who arent affected by anxiety and those who are affected by anxiety who are in no way worse achievers or are will be worse another contest. We are missing out on telling successful people wrong messages about who they are and what they are good at the. I have one kid who is quiet and is very comfortable testing testing and superhigh tester but all of my kids relatively get the same great but for completely different reasons. Mindful next techniques can help and anxiety that comes in distracts people while they are trying to solve a problem. Learning about rough roof mindset in the fact that the brain gets stronger with exercise of the muscle. The other great thing about those techniques as opposed to some traditional test is they make you better at other things besides tests. Dont you almost have to start where the s. A. T. And the a. C. T. Because when i think of all this testing i say i hate they are taking at least test. On the other hand they are going to need a lot of practice once they get up to this king of all tests and is so essential later on. Thats a really interesting point especially since the author of the common core has moved on to the presidency of the College Board and has now offered a relaunch of the s. A. T. To further integrate the state tests with the s. A. T. S. I think it can work it away. In some places the a. C. T. For example has successfully integrated itself as that is the test. From middle school to take a practice test and then they take the s. A. T. And that can be reduced testing testing when it gets parents and teachers on the same page. It can be a tool to reduce testing if its getting parents and students and teachers on the same page. We are just going to give this test is going to be a College Admissions test annual be directly practicing for that. A performance Testing School in kentucky overhauled their curriculum in all the students care about is the performancebased assessments that they are still taking comp this which is the prea. C. T. That was something that help parents who werent sure about the transition to get on board. They said okay we are going to have some measurement on how they are doing but on the other side there are 800 colleges that have given up the a. C. T. Being optional. The test optional admissions 800. There are colleges he occurred up on the list, very renowned colleges. In some ways you could say colleges are in a market crunch and they are having be broadminded in how they look at people but on the other hand you could also say s. A. T. s dont predict College Performance over and above high school gpa. So they are not that helpful for colleges that they have been turned into this handy metric. If you have a kid who is a terrible tester the s. A. T. They are not doomed to take the s. A. T. They dont have to. To followup on social Emotional Learning and perhaps another level i think 11 School Districts in california are going to be assessed. 20 of School Cultures and 20 for social Emotional Learning. How are they going to and how are they going to do it without totally missing the point . This is a great question and its a huge experiment. I talk about it in the book so thanks for asking. The number one instrument that schools across the country are using for social emotional climate is a Simple Survey and its an amatory questions that students answer and teachers answer and they are Pretty Simple in terms of im excited to come to school today. I feel safe at school. Theyre somebody at school he cares about me. When integrate the state into the and accountability formula and make it high stakes their to chants of gaming the system. Any measurement can be undermined. They instituted what they called social emotional walkthroughs so it became component not the schools are going to be published for this information but they have to integrate into School Improvement plan and the metrics they work on include very clear things like absenteeism turnover and behavioral issues but with the walkthrough does is its assessing on a personal basis similar to what is done in the u. K. Were School Inspections are a cornerstone of the School Accountability process. I have no doubt as social and Emotional Learning grocers going to be interested in developing new and german trader talk to folks at the atp s. That are trying to figure out how to in a multiplechoice format. I think the tracking stuff is pretty valuable. Just making that an outcome metric by itself sick days for students fighting expulsions and various behavioral types of things that can be powerful in the Overall Health of the school as a system. Detests always have to be on paper . That seems to be what you are saying in and the other thing is do you see a tendency to realize objective testing testing is not always the way that we have to Start Testing the subject . Can you speak about that . This is the very core point of what you are saying because we all make assessments every day and we all have to deal with other peoples assessments and judgments every day. The impulse toward data is a really strong one in our culture right now. We are all kind of living our lives by external metrics that we dont necessarily understand the quality of the data that goes into those metrics or the nature of the algorithms that produce the outcomes of the metrics. I feel like we are adding in terms of these scribes who are coders and they create algorithms and we all believe that what they say is real. The solution to that sometimes the solution is better data and sometimes the solution is letters and curiosity and asking the hard questions about the nature of the information going into these judgments. Information thats going into these judgments. Honestly there are fairminded folks who are scientists. If you ask them they will freely admit the nature of Something Like proficiency. Proficiency shouldve never been legislated for a hundred of our students. Thats absurd. We define it on a a bell curve and the fact that a hundred of the students are going to pass that is an absurdity and practice. Im going to read your book. I wondered what kind of examples for younger grades and i feel like thats the right place to Start Talking about families and show this is what they know. My question is about the pushback from the youngest grades. At my school they have the yearly regular common core standardized testing but not for kindergarten yet. We measure in a different way by whats expected of them. I agree with you, teachers of younger children have a really Important Role to play in terms of speaking loudly about what science tells us about of elemental. Prek provides an opportunity to provide what is a highquality school, assuming you cant believe in the test data you get from four yearolds. There is a new test for a new test for kindergarten admissions which is an academic material that was never included before. Its unlikely to be valid in terms of what its trying to do. I do believe there is ability. Parents who come into kindergarten, when you have a child they always say children will develop at their own weight and age. Whats important is that theyre thriving and happy and then all the sudden that rhetoric comes to a halt and if you dont learn to read by third grade youre doomed forever and wont ever go to college. I hope you buy the book and give it to all the parents you work with. I was reading about this thing called a racial button law where the children are in control of their own content because their children and they put content online and the idea is they own their content and could get rid of it. Its being proposed in other states as well but it is here. However it doesnt affect what happens in the rooms of the school so when kids are taking their test the system knows whether their parents are divorced. They dont take into account good days or bad days or that we know the kids going through a tough time. The concern is and i think there are laws being proposed but as technology starts coming into the School System this is a bigger concern, especially with Identity Theft and misuse and mishandling of information. Thanks for bringing that up. This is an enormous issue and its going to get much bigger before it goes away. Its not just for student, but student privacy is at the forefront of the overall privacy issue. Some of the best minds in the world are working on student privacy because these are our children and it really matters. California is considered to have the strongest law. This law will be modeled by others and its in the house of representatives right now. It tries to follow on what some of California Law does but not all of it. The student privacy issue isnt just about testing. Although testing is an important one because theres consequential information about the students performance. Here the potential issues theres different issues about students and schools collecting data and the agencies they work with. Theres the concerned that it will be stolen or mis used or used for Identity Theft or use to make money. Then theres commercialization which is my students data is available to a Third Party Vendor who will use it for advertising products. Products. My student will be advertised to win shes doing her homework or whats very difficult to defined in some ways in commercial misuse is schools have already outsourced things to a thirdparty vendor. Whatever goes into a forprofit vendor is going to be used to improve the product itself. The more people that use google or google docs, the better it becomes so in some sense weve already turned our students information into commercial gain. Thirdly, i think most to the point of what were talking about here is privacy of my student but in the sense that he has a permanent record. The information stored in my kid is going to be used to make decisions about him in a way i they look at your searches. Predictive analytics in schools is look at the data and i have a kid coming in from a Migrant Worker community and they have this grade and middle school so i believe that they are at risk to drop out. Now you look at the data and you made a decision or prediction about a kid in that prediction could be used to help them to intervene on their behalf. Its also inevitably shaping the beliefs about that kid on behalf of any professional that looks at that file. So this file is following you around. Well know that when teachers are giving informations about their students they are led to believe for example the students are gifted then they treat the students