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 i