Gaming the systems

and other imponderables, such as...Is it a game if it isn't fun?

Oh my goodness, have we been under the weather at our house. I think finally everyone is mostly on the mend. But this has accounted for my missing the last two weeks here.

I hope everyone is well at your house. I’m sure you’ve seen the news about the first coronavirus case in CPS, a staff person at Vaughan, a small special needs school which will be closed this coming week. Be wise and vigilant, and think about hanging out at home with each other this weekend. I’ve been stress-baking this gorgeous sourdough bread and look forward to maybe playing some of our favorite games: Love Letter, an elegant little card game for 2-4 players, Tokaido, a very pretty road trip game set in Japan, the ubiquitous Ticket to Ride. Anything but Settlers of Catan, which I refuse to play on account of it’s an absolute crashing bore and I can’t bring myself to care about hexagons of wheat (I know, I’m alone in this in the world. I also hate Les Miserables). Or Pandemic, which has always been sketchy, but now could not possibly qualify as entertaining.

Friends, for many years I’ve railed against excessive testing. You have, too. We’re drowning in it in Chicago. Well, only our public school kids. They get in the range of 12 to 15 standardized tests per year—the IAR (new version of the PARCC), Dibbles, REACH, NWEA MAP, the list actually goes on and on. You can see CPS’s positively dizzying assessment calendar right here. Our private school kids are not subject to excessive standardized testing—they’re scarcely tested at all. Instead they are assessed as they go, by their teachers—in fact, the way you and I were when we were little.

Railing against testing has been hard because of course the money is with the testing companies—it’s anywhere from a $1.7B (a 2012 figure) to $16B a year industry (a breathless 2015 market research report with forward-projecting profit estimates to 2019). The rhetoric too—those companies’ lobbyists helped complicit politicians develop arguments that are ludicrous on their face, but have somehow taken such a strong hold that hardly anyone even bothers to question them.

Standardized testing makes children smarter, or anyway, we have to worry that they’re getting stupider without the tests; consequently, the harder and more numerous the tests, the smarter the children. Standardized testing tells us how excellent teachers are, and if students do poorly on the tests (it does not matter if they are disabled or malnourished or homeless), their teachers are obviously bad and probably should be fired. Standardized testing tells us which schools are succeeding and which are failing: if your kids do poorly, your school should be punished by getting its funding yanked. Standardized testing, in fact, is tantamount to a new civil rights movement, and to deny children their right to be assessed, and assessed a lot, is to stand with bigots.

Somehow. Here is where we are. Have been for many years.

But suddenly, we might be in a new place. We’ve stumbled through some kind of portal into reality. Those absurd rhetorical claims outlined above begin to take on a leering, funhouse-mirror aspect. The tests themselves begin to look less like trusty suppliers of reliable data and more like a con man’s complicated swindle.

This is because of last week’s big story, now forgotten old news in the wake of so much else. Outgoing CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler issued a report on testing…irregularities…on the NWEA MAP throughout the district. It looks bad. It looks like some schools have been, how can I put this—gaming the tests. But this cannot possibly come as a surprise: a school’s very existence, a teacher’s actual employment, depend a great deal on standardized test scores. I’ll be the last to blame schools who gamed this thing. In a district that has been hell-bent on shuttering schools—or, in CPS parlance, removing poor performers from the portfolio—schools may be counted upon to do what they must to survive.

The fix—as Mike Klonsky points out in Small Talk (2/27/20)—is not that the responsibility of monitoring tests be removed from teachers and given to an outside entity, as the IG recommends. The fix is kicking the NWEA MAP—and most of the other standardized tests—to the curb. The fix is ending our entanglement with this grossly profiting industry whose lobbyists raise a hue and cry about failing schools, push for assessments, win the contracts for creating the assessments, fill up our schools with not only the tests but also the prep, then create laws that require schools to meet annual testing benchmarks to keep the cycle, and the profits, going in perpetuity. If we can see all that clearly, then it’s possible to see the reality about the whole system: racist in origin, subject to abuse, and indicative of little more than a school’s or communities resources. It becomes clear that the whole system has to come down.

But there’s little we can do about this here, now, in CPS. Just two things. One, you can fill out this CPS survey, designed to collect feedback about their school quality ratings policy (SQRP). You have to freestyle it a little to wedge in meaningful opinions about testing, but it’s worth a try. And two, if you have school-aged kids, you can participate in the Opt Out effort that’s cranking up in advance of spring “testing season.” Keep your eyes open for more on this. Chicago families used their power against the PARCC with their magnificent opt outs by the thousands, and it’s gone. We can do the same with the MAP. And maybe even all the rest.