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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > May > 04 > Entry
You heard it first here
I just can’t help but say, “we told you so.”
In the past two days, the testing industry’s stress fractures have begun to break loose in a series of stories from major newspapers.
But if you’re a regular reader of the Dayton Daily News, you knew this would happen.
The hot news of the day sounds a lot like our award winning series from 2004 about the problems of standardized testing in the NCLB era. Back then we said:
One question is whether the testing companies can keep up with the demand without compromising quality. Already, there have been embarrassing errors.
And this, which includes a remarkable quote from Ramsey Selden, vice president of a major U.S. testing company:
The mandates are squeezing the handful of companies that supply virtually the entire nation with standardized tests. Just seven companies account for 85 percent of the test-building market, with industry titans Harcourt Educational Measurement in Texas, Minnesota-based NCS/Pearson Educational Measurement and CTB/McGraw Hill in California handling two-thirds of the workload. “All of the companies are running at capacity or beyond it,” Selden said. “Companies are bumping into each other and competing against each other for the same people.”
If they were running beyond capacity two years ago, what’s happening now? As you might expect, a lot of bad things.
The Hartford Courant wrote Thursday about another major scoring problem, this time on Connecticut state test by Harcourt, one of the testing industry big dogs.
The problems, which have happened to Connecticut before, have enraged the state’s education commissioner, Betty Sternberg. Here’s an excerpt from the Courant story:
The latest problem is another sign of strain on an overburdened testing industry, Sternberg said.
Scoring problems have cropped up across the country. Only a year ago, Connecticut dumped another testing company that ran into numerous delays and scoring problems on a state test for elementary and middle school students. More recently, a test contractor reported erroneous scores for thousands of students who took the SAT college entrance exam last fall.
Some educators fear that the testing industry will be strained even further as Connecticut and other states undergo a broad expansion of testing under No Child Left Behind, which calls for a shake-up of schools that fail to meet standards.
“It’s not a problem peculiar to Harcourt,” Sternberg said. “Mis-scoring tests, having delays - there’s no company that hasn’t had something happen in those areas.”
The issue has caught the attention of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who met recently with testing industry executives about the industry’s capacity to handle the growing volume of tests.
Meanwhile, some New York lawmakers are fed up with scoring problems and may vote to regulate testing in the state, the New York Times reported Thursday.
Then on Friday, the Times reports that there aren’t enough test experts around, which has created a bidding war among the companies for the experts that are out there. New psychometricians are leaving graduate schools and walking into high-paid, high-ranking jobs with little experience.
The Times piece on test experts reminded me of a story one of our test industry sources told us when we were reporting the series. The source was consulting with a small state (think South Dakota, Wyoming, etc.) that was considering bids from testing companies to create and score its new state tests to comply with NCLB.
The consultant described how small teams from the testing companies gave presentations. It was embarrassing, he said. The teams couldn’t answer many of their questions. The bottom line was that the test companies, focused on big states with lucrative contracts like California, New York, Texas or Ohio, send not the B or C team out to the small states, but the rookies — inexperienced recent graduates.
Our source said the capacity problem pushes more inexperienced people into key posts, just one of many problems now evident as the industry buckles, as predicted, under the weight of NCLB’s testing requirements.
OK, so we’ve been writing for two years that these problems would come, and now they are here. The interesting thing is to see lawmakers and state officials — even U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings — now beggining to demand improvements. But there are no easy solutions to the problems of capacity in the test industry.
On the other hand, if you’re good at math you might consider a graduate program in psychometrics. If you can get the degree, you can’t lose.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Comments
By Rick
May 7, 2006 5:59 PM | Link to this
Oldprof, Iread the site at cgood and publicagenda, both good sites. In the public agenda article I found a reference that many teachers felt that school administrations did not back up the teachers enough in matters of discipline and that discipline suffered; no examples were given. Neither of these two articles discussed parents interfering with grading. I was not able to access the other two sites.By Oldprof
May 6, 2006 7:38 PM | Link to this
Gosh, Rick, ever hear of “google”? OK, I’ll do your research for you: http://cgood.org/schools-newscommentary-inthenews-161.html http://www.publicagenda.org/press/pressreleasedetail.cfm?list=58 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/02/AR2005060201593_pf.html http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/07/12/parents_rule/print.html Of course, those are public school cases. Charter schools, whose continued existence depends on warm bodies in the seats and who lack the legal resources of the publics, will be even more vulnerable.By Rickl
May 6, 2006 11:04 AM | Link to this
Oldprof: I must say, I agree that parents should not be allowed to prevent fair grading or discipline in the classroom. Could you give some examples?By Oldprof
May 6, 2006 9:48 AM | Link to this
Well Mary, I don’t think much of any politician who continues to favor programs that aren’t working as advertised—like charter schools and vouchers. Your own bias seems to be derived from the idea that parents are invariably accurate authorities about what education should be and who is competent to provide it. Susan Bodary has publicly stated otherwise; parents in school choice decisions do not use a sound evaluation of educational quality as a basis for the decision. Come now, who is most likely to know what a child is capable of learning, and how to teach it—an elected official, an average parent (in Ohio, a person with no education beyond high school), or a fully-qualified teacher? (By the way, have you even SEEN a powerful teacher’s union lately? Outside of a history museum?)By Mary
May 6, 2006 7:59 AM | Link to this
Old prof,I take it you do not think that much of Husted. Maybe he is also listening to parents. When it comes to children and education, parents cannot wait until the teacher or the system is proven otherwise incompetent. There is a lot of defensive driving necessary to navigate a child through the system. Government mandated reforms seem to be the only counterforce to powerful union interests. That might be your basic beef. Admit it.By Oldprof
May 5, 2006 10:17 PM | Link to this
Rick, that’s a rather warped view of history you have there: the government-mandated reforms started 40 years ago, not “only a few.” Education over the past 40 years has deteriorated to the point of rancidness. Educrats are precisely the people who are advising the policians (what, you think John Husted goes and asks the teacher of the year what policies should be in place?). Now, if you LIKE criticism from parents, I guess you’re a happy camper what with the helicopter moms not only preventing fair grading and effective discipline in the schools, but now even going to complain when their little boy gets reprimanded by the boss in the first job. No, I’m not advocating “god” status—just a return to good old presumed-competent until proven otherwise authority.By Ted
May 5, 2006 10:11 PM | Link to this
Rick: Please explain why you think education “has improved in recent years with all the top-down mandates.” And do you really think parents now have more power over their children’s education in the current test-obsessed atmosphere? My hunch is you haven’t seen the inside of a K-12 classroom anytime recently. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.By Rick
May 5, 2006 7:00 PM | Link to this
To answer Oldprof’s question: Education has improved in recent years with all the top-down mandates because what the educrats sold us was horse manure. They said our children were getting a good education but that turned out to be a lie. Oldprof wants the teachers to be gods in their classrooms exempt from any criticism especially from, Horrors! parents!By Mary
May 5, 2006 12:42 PM | Link to this
Just goes to show again that we need to pay constant attention to mundane infrastructural needs. So many times people are just paying attention to the now and the glamorous. Testing experts are not the only experts we lack and not our only crisis.By Oldprof
May 5, 2006 11:22 AM | Link to this
Bottom line: will we get more education with more top-down mandates from politicians for whom “education reform” is a sound bite? Or would we save money if we stripped away the hierarchy mandated by state and federal policies, and just trusted the teachers and principals as we once did? Note that everyone who observes schools says that almost all of the professionals there are hard-working, concerned, and motivated; compare that to the attitudes you’re now seeing in the standardized-measurement monopolies.