A mans habits become his character but its the most intimidating of the christian virtues in a certain way for me because its the work of a lifetime. When you do meet people in that category there is a kind of radiance. David and michael, thank you so much. [applause] [applause] nagl Anya Kamenetz looks at standardized testing in todays education system. The discussion ranges from the introduction of common core state standards to the cost to taxpayers up to 1. 4 billion per year. My name is sub 10 in both passages very happy to welcome Anya Kamenetz and her latest book the test why our schools are obsessed with standardized testing but you dont have to be. The test is about the failures of testing in american schools. Children are more than test scores and in the last 20 years schools have dramatically increased standardized testing testing. In the era of no child left behind and the common core americas schools are sacrificing learning in favor of testing. How we preserve learning a development especially when they want all children to hit the mark. Npr education reporter Anya Kamenetz explores all sides of this problem and what parents and teachers can do to help. The Curtis Reeves recently said with abundant data assembled in the sense of accessible form, excuse me, with abundant data assembled in an accessible format this book is a mustread 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. [applause] thank you monica and thank you all for coming. Im so thrilled to be able to visit this amazing book store and community. I was here five years ago for my last book and its a great pleasure to get to tour bookstores because i love bookstores. They are my favorite thing. I wanted to resolve a personal lemma which was how to educate my daughter. I had previously written about innovations in education that race cost quality and access with the help of technology and other kinds of approaches to student centered learning and i wanted to review a book for education of children. I wrote a proposal for that book to talk about social and Emotional Learning and blended learning and it just wasnt that convincing. I talked to my agent about why and i said you know nine out of 10 kids go to Public Schools and what im hearing is there is not a lot of room for innovation in Public Schools these days because our schools are being held accountable for the outcomes of these limited standardized tests and the test scores dont capture what teachers are trying to accomplish with these other sorts of experiences and models. So thats why it feels like a story here. My agent said maybe you have to write about that. You have to read about the gorilla in the room which is standardized testing. So i set out set out bravely but afraid to combat what i thought would be a very dense project and it turned out to be history, policy and when you write about Higher Education is very diverse independent set her of our society but in k12 this is really america. This is public. This is one of our biggest public expenditures one of our biggest expenditures. Matt. Nine out of 10 schools 15 million children, half of these children are poured. You cant write about school in america without writing about politics and all of these issues come into the testing story in a strong and unsettling way. And to talk about that i need to go back to the beginning to discover the bell curve in its early supplication in what is known as psychometrics in measuring the human mind. I was personally floored to discover how the foundational mind to establish psychometrics Charles Bierman and many many more they did so fundamentally from the conception of intelligence that was fixed hereditary and that is what they called the g. Factor. Its wet turbine called the quotient of iq and they believed everybody had in their brain some kind of microprocessor which given capacity or speed and you measure that he would be able to sort people and then to plan and predict the best outcomes for those people. If that sounds unsettling to you it should because the guy who came up with the foundational figure Charles Darwin the child prodigy pointed to the term eugenics and created many foundational social science techniques the correlation coefficient to measure what he believed was a fixed quality in human beings. And testing, psychometric testing testing was being deployed in many different contexts to sort and correct for differences amongst people. As it established itself in society in america and try to make it a land of opportunity it also remain competitive. The benefits were unequally distributed and that are semantically distributed. The fiction of a meritocracy in terms of testing became a safety valve. They were having this conversation about who gets what in society who gets what resources they can point to educational tests and say they are a task force of people who work hard enough and theyre smart enough and therefore we have no and what is astonishing when you look at the history up to that point after brown versus board of education standardized test took a very different turn and they began to be put forth as an instrument of equity and something that was going to erase the vestiges in the process of desegregating schools. They would use these tests to measure what was now called the achievement gap and the differential achievement of people within different backgrounds primarily lowerincome and minority groups overcome with rigor and hard work. I believe many people who adopted this vision were wellintentioned. There was a strong undercurrent in educational theory and the talk about the fact that we need to raise our expectations. We can become plagued complacent about the hard work making sure every child has what they need to achieve. We talk about why we have standardized testing in why we have no child mind. The number one reason is if we didnt have that teachers wouldnt care about the kids. They wouldnt have to be responsible for these kids and they would just say as long as they are getting breakfast i am doing my job. Ive never heard a teacher professed this but nevertheless this is a dilemma we have. We have these tests. They have spare limitations as an educational instrument. Assessments are tools that teachers use every day for feedback about learning to diagnose and to help students direct their efforts and they have teachers direct their efforts. The issue we have right now is standardized assessments in reading and we have known for a long time if you talk to the folks they will tell you that testing is used in a way was never intended for. It was never intended to be used as the sole fulcrum on which we base decisions on when schools open and close and what teachers lose their jobs even whether or not they are promoted as one great success. Standardized achievement tests are barely optimized for looking at the population and institutions over population. Dont tell you that much about the individual. However testing is for all kinds of ways they are intended for production and we dont declare an action mode data about performance in every single school. In order for school to prove they will need that information. The impact right now is not just the expression of getting rid of them but the question of whats going to replace them. After the first half of the book i spent time on how the arguments impact teachers and how they impact families and how it impacts diverse schools better in more danger of being sanctioned with no child left behind. Obviously we are wasting money on these tests because the money that is spent is not going toward learning that they improvements we have seen in student achievement are in no way greater than what we saw before no child left behind happen. Theres no evidence no child left behind has effect in making achievement gap smaller or improving international standings. And i talk about the common core and the common core test students are taking right now the fact that they were touted as a huge improvement. Many teachers have come to see value in the standards that the tests themselves are not enough of a departure. The independent panel of experts at Columbia Teachers College that review these assessments concluded that they do represent an improvement but nothing like what is needed and Linda Darling Hammond collaborated to me that they dont actually match the standards because its impossible to produce a graded tests that cost 30 to administer and have to assess deeper learning. If this is the error we are running into again and again that in our system where we believe its going to be more scientific to optional eyes any tests but the more tests we have the lowerquality each test becomes. We have a situation right now where individual items are written by lowwage lowpaid workers and as well when you have a written portion of the test its graded the same. So the more that the more attention we put on these tests the more problems we get because we are trying to cheap out by adding too many tests onto the roster. A new study has come out showing a large open School Districts across the country how many tests would you guessed students are taking standardized tests alone from kindergarten through 12th grade . 113. Between 10 and 30 is the highest we have seen. They had 33 oneyear so these tests are not only being delivered by the state. The mandates are following districts as well because when you attach high stakes to a test for School District going to want to administer a test. A pretest a posttest a diagnostic test the benchmark test and so there are many approaches to the tested are taking none of which are completely clear to parents and not so much to teachers as well. So i want to talk a little bit about the solutions that i address in the book and then go to questions. I found everyone single one is different. People focus on different areas of the problem. I want to spend plenty of time on the questions. When i talk about the future of testing testing i ive located in two parts. We need a better accountability system and the accountability systems mistakes are attached to the test. Under no child left behind annual state tests are tied to school we are positioning closure. They are increasingly tied to teacher evaluation. They are tied to funding decisions that affect the state and the money is being held over states in many ways by the federal government to agree to certain things. In some ways thats the most detrimental because we know how students form an attitude around learning and the fact that they are making school about these tests really inculcate the mindset and going back to something you are born with. So you know there are many detrimental effects to the testing but without the stakes that would be that much more an annoyance. Thinking about it due accountability come if you care about accountability and i think its fair to care about accountability the proposals are now to authorize no child left behind on the republican side. They are talking about basically eliminating federal standardized testing requirements and going back to a situation about what theyre doing for student achievement. Some people feel that thats too high a degree so how do we produce accountability and balance . One proposal i talk about in the book is they talk about resource accountability or reciprocity and accountability. Why do we just hold our schools accountable to the outcomes of the dont pull their districts, both knowing that Family Income and zip code is such a massive factor in determining students and only 14 states attempt to equalize rich and poor districts. Most of the time we tolerate disparities and then we expect the schools to have the least to work the hardest to overcome what has been conceptualized as the income gap. You could just as easily talk about the other gap. Another interesting approach in terms of accountability is looking at longterm factors looking at local factors. Now tracking students from prek into the workforce raises questions in terms of data but it also gives us the ability to ask much Bigger Picture questions about what makes students successful on its back longitudinal commission that gives us the insight such as the idea that the ability to succeed is nonacademic schools skills. That comes from tracking students from high school into the workforce. Preschool projects famously provide ironclad evidence about highquality effect on young people throughout their lives. Thats achieved by tracking data throughout their lifetime. We could use longitudinal evidence to track that as a schools and district performance over lifetime and what we as a community can be doing to help that child succeed. So those are some of the features of accountability and talk about in talk about in the book and then theres testing itself. We know we have a faulty concept concept, faulty construct this idea and even if you want to say maybe its a natural variation of human intelligence but so what . Once you measure than one person how does that help give you any information terms of how you rank to help them learn . What we really need to know is how they approach learning what is their motivation and how do they work with their time there just right now in selfassessment to the idea of all the small pieces of feedback or formative assessment that teachers give them a classroom on a daily basis that they could somehow we would get a much richer picture of learning over time and there are programs that are coming into play now that would possibly be giving broadbased overtime and trajectory of learning over time time. So i talk in the book about the value of why its important for students to have an understanding of knowledge and disciplinary reach search projects and Group Projects that allows them to get 21st century skills and performancebased testing is a to school and not just testing testing and testing can be integrated into the learning process. Teachers in new york city which has 28 high schools adopted state exams have much Better Outcomes in terms of dropout rates but the key metric i find interesting is that the teacher turnover rates are lower because teachers are committed because they are working as True Professionals and creating designing achievement assessments and collaborating with other teachers. Finally i talk about other Ways Technology continues to gather broad taste evidence of achievement. We have multiplechoice test which comes from the fact that if someone invented a meter that could read a graphite pencil and electrically score many test pages of once and we are still pursuing a model today even though we have the internet. What is the 21st century model for assessment . It might be mythical but the idea is many of our students havent experienced getting formative feedback to gain 10 games teach her how to play them and games if you information about where youre going and how you are doing. Games try to get you to try again and do better the next day. New york city is working on creating games for working games and assessment. The games gather information on decisionmaking and different models of how students understand higher order contacts. The first version is like sin city. This particular game heap place the power plants and you have to worry about pollution and have to worry about jobs. You have to worry about electricity and all these things that interact in different ways. This is a game that is a test of thinking. The idea is your students have a black ox idea and are they able to balance the role of different variables to produce an outcome and also a desirability of that outcome. So the game is the basis of a judgment because what we are reaching for in the next generation of test is not an arbitrary verdict rendered by a machine but information that a teacherstudent and parent can use to make better decisions about learning and where they are at a point in time. That is all well and good when it comes to technology though we know our policies are not based on the best available evidence. The question we have right now for students is what happens next . I have talked to parents in the fcat movement who decided the best way to respond to test is not to take them and i talk to leaders in the Teacher Movement to see testing as a focal point about a much broader debate about the issues in this country where we are going with it. I do believe this will be just as much decided at the ballot box as it is in the realm of research and developing accountability so the question is for anyone who has kids in the School System are any relationship to a teacher at all what you going to do about the Current Situation . Thanks so much. [applause] i have three kids that are so different and how i see it from an example from the 99 percentile tester in the 20 percentile tester is the emotional factor involved. I cant say this child is clearly slower than this trial but they are so emotionally different. He tested superhigh on a pacing or speed thing but then superlow on something else. It makes no sense. The social and emotional aspect of this is very important im glad you you brought it up. Test anxiety affects 30 to 40 of test takers strongly enough to depress a result. Its how we interpret test results because what youre really looking at is the performance of people who arent affected by anxiety and those who are affected by who anxiety who are in no way less achievers so where was missing out and giving people wrong messages about who they are and what they are good at. [inaudible] i have one kid who is quiet and is very comfortable testing testing and definitely superhigh tester but all three of my kids relatively the same great but for completely different reasons. Mindfulness techniques can help with negative self talk and anxiety that comes in and distracts people while they are trying to solve a problem and so can learning about rope mindset and the fact that brain gets stronger with practice of the muscle. There is research on that in both of those things took a stepbystep tips. The other great thing about those techniques as opposed to traditional test is students taking tests. All of this dont you almost have to start with the s. A. T. In the a. C. T. Because when i think about this testing testing i say i hate that they are taking these tests. On the other hand they are going to ne