Up North Progressive
Politics and commentary for Northern MichiganM-STEP Replaces MEAP But Will Be Replaced By Something Else
Sunday , 30, November 2014 Section 16 8 CommentsThere are two reasons teachers give students tests:
- To find out if the students learned the content taught.
- To find out if the teacher was effective in teaching the content.
It has nothing to do with the teacher wanting you to feel stupid or they enjoy torturing kids with tests. There’s important information there that the teacher needs. What happens in the classroom next depends on how well the class did on the test.
Contemporary standardized testing however does neither of these things. These tests are designed to force teachers to teach students how to take the test regardless of learning objectives, and then penalizes the teacher and school who didn’t groom their students to the test in order to earn a proficient score. What does this test have to do with what’s happening in the classroom? Nothing.
Standardized tests are used as weapons today by politicians who want to dismantle the public school system. Education laws such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core State Standards are designed intentionally to make it difficult for schools to effectively do the work they do so well. Corporatists realized the billions spent on education could be making profits for them, and the lobbying checks flowed to politicians who then lied to the American people that public schools are failing. Desegregation in the 60’s and 70’s also contributed to Republicans insisting public schools were broken.
The Michigan State Legislature voted that the state couldn’t use the Common Core aligned test, which caused the Michigan Department of Education to scramble up a new test for this year only. Never mind that the MDE had already spent years and lots of money developing a test to replace the MEAP. The tea party-infested state legislature, you know, the taxed enough already fiscally responsible guys, cost us taxpayers more money when they decided that test couldn’t be used. Because it’s Common Core. Because that’s bad. Even though they have no idea why it’s bad, except they read somewhere it makes kids gay. Yes, that is a parody news website. Apparently the tea party is too stupid to understand parody.
School districts in Michigan will have another new standardized test that will only be used once. The MEAP can’t be used anymore, and the Common Core test is illegal, so what do we use now? M-STEP.
M-STEP stands for Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress. It does not rely on Common Core for testing criteria, required now by the US Department of Education, and the test is taken online. This will be a big change for Michigan schools. While other states in the country have been using an online test for years, Michigan’s antique MEAP test was still a paper test that cost the state millions more than other states to administer. Schools who don’t have the technology available for students to take the new test had until November 21, 2014 to apply for a waiver and receive a paper copy of the test.
The state had 9 months to cobble together what normally takes 3 years to develop. This means Michigan could be in violation of the US Department of Education’s requirements for the 11th grade test, which requires a performance task for students to complete. With M-STEP the performance task will be voluntary.
But wait, there’s more! The State legislature also required a 9th and 10th grade test in addition to the 11th grade test beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, and intermediate tests in grades K-12. So yes, the Michigan Department of Education has to develop another test according to the wishes of the Michigan State Legislature, and it can’t be aligned to Common Core.
Summative assessments take years to develop. They require professional test writers, time to perform field tests and gather data on test results before coding anything into the computer or printing on paper. Michigan schools must administer this test in the spring, but haven’t received anything from the state to prepare students. The results of this unknown test will be used in evaluating teacher and school performance, as required by law, and the state may be in violation with the feds anyway. That means funding for Michigan education could be in jeopardy.
School districts in the state are concerned that the test won’t accurately assess student achievement, that it will make it impossible to track progress in the long term, and the differences in the tests will cause problems with schools being evaluated properly. Anyone who makes a living in statistics will recognize this is a nightmare. Parents frustrated with their local schools can always opt their children out of taking the test. Students frustrated with being tested excessively will have yet another test to take this year, and then a new one for next year. They’re the ones least served with this mess the state created for our schools.
Standardized testing assesses nothing and is designed to punish schools. This is what happens when corporations think they can run schools better than professional educators. The only necessary school reform is where we kick politics and profiteers out of the education system and return them back to what they’re supposed to be – institutions that educate our children.
Joel DeHaan says: derp derp derp derpy derp herps derps
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Up North Progressive says:
Class can’t be that boring. You need to pay attention and stop messing around on school computers.
Teacher says: The practice test for the MSTEP is identical to Hawaii’s Smarter Balanced state test. What company is making this test?
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Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. They are also doing M Step for this year. http://www.smarterbalanced.org/
ALilWacked says: You do realize that Common Core principles stem from the liberal progressive left in Washington. If Michigan refused to adopt it, they would have been penalized by refusing federal funding for education. Lets just not blame republicans, as the democrats are just as guilty…
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Common Core does not come from the progressive side of politics at all. Look at the people who support Common Core: Jeb Bush, Rick Snyder, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other corporate reformers determined to put an end to public ed.
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LMartin74 says:
You don’t have to be a Democrat to be a crony capitalist progressive subject to lobbyist whims. Both sides in Washington D.C. have that cornered and are happily selling the American people out. I say this as a former (thank God) longtime rabid Democrat, who is NO fan of (establishment) RINOs.
Matt says: In Chicago, I had to give one class a performance task at the beginning and end of the year, grade them myself, and then report the scores so that the administration could use that as a part of my evaluation; in addition, to a college readiness test and about 4 principal observations. On top of that we knew that the CCSS based test was coming, so we had to write our own tests to “help” the students start the process of “preparing” for that test. The problem I had with this inundation of “data” driven instruction and evaluation is that it was being misconstrued as statistically sound and completely unbiased by people (like my principal, who did all of my observations [so unbiased right?]) who have no idea how to handle statistical variation, sample size, etc. This is an obvious failure to the teachers and the students, since test/evaluation scores could drop slightly which would effectively indicate no gain NOT negative growth.
Obviously, the goal is for every student to show growth, but I had students, for example, that would get a 17 at the beginning of the year and a 16 at the end of the year. They would be disappointed in the drop, get really bummed out and feel unsuccessful. I would have to try to explain to them that the tests aren’t exactly the same and that there is something called standard deviation which accounts for un-explainable variation. This is never accounted for where I worked, no one ever even considered mentioning it to the principal. My principal was obsessed with breaking down test data, which is definitely useful but by no means the end all be all of determining success in the classroom. Data is only as useful as the time you have to collect it properly and analyze it correctly to inform a re-teach.
The two analogies that sum up my experience with all this crap is “building a plane while it is in the air” [seems like the case with this Mstep test] and “getting the rug pulled out from under you” or “the old switcheroo.” I would constantly have to create stuff as we were going and then change course when the wind blew and changed the goal.