unc who are as angry as i am but not as outspoken but a lot of them. but it's true that the faculty as a collective just hasn't mustered much energy, and i'm very disappointed by that. i don't have a good answer for it. there are lots of reasons why faculty tend to be reticent but -- >> there's sociology theory called organizational deviance. it happens at universities and industry. it's part of our culture right now. it's really sad. [inaudible] >> that is one of the factors. >> nobody wants that. everybody just wants to be left alone. >> there's 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. ...

hey michael they want somebody who looks like he stood up for them. the degree to what primary voters on both sides motivated by resentment and those people

really don't understand. here's a guy who does understand and that happens on both sides. i don't think that was actually true 30 years ago. the degree to which it's almost exclusively affecting republics and democrats. sunday night. you're watching book tv on c-span2. next we examined the standardized testing in today's education. it cost taxpayers up to $1.4 billion per 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 don't 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. i'm 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. they're 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 wasn't that convincing. i talked to my agent about why and i said nine out of ten kids go to public school and what i'm 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 don't capture what the teachers are trying to accomplish with these other types of experiences and models. that's 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 it's very diverse and independent sector of our society but in k-12, 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 can't 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 what's 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 wouldn't adopted this and vision were well-intentioned.

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 can't 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 didn't have it teachers wouldn't care about these kids and wouldn't have to be responsible for these kids and they would just say as long as the kids are getting breakfast i'm doing my job. i've never heard a teacher actually per pass this so that's 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. we've 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 don't tell you all that much about the individual student.

these test have been used in all kinds of ways that they weren't intended for. it doesn't mean we don't 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 it's 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 we've seen with no child left behind are in no way greater than what we saw before no child left behind happened. there's 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, she's a scholar on assessment, that they don't actually match standards. it's 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 low-wage low-paid workers without proper qualifications. when you have a written portion of the test it's 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 i've 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 they're 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 it's affecting students. that's 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 it's something you're born with and that's not the attitude were

trying to instill and research doesn't support that it's 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 it's 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 they're doing for student achievement. how do we have produced produce accountability that's 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 don't 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 what's been conceptualized as the achievement gap. we can talk about the resource gap, that's really what were talking about. another interesting approach in terms of accountability is looking at long-term factors local factors. now many more states are tracking students starting in pre-k which raises questions about privacy but allows us to ask much bigger picture questions about what makes students successful. that gives us the insights such

as the idea what you need to succeed that are nonacademic skills? it attracts students from school to the workplace. they can provide ironclad evidence about preschool and students throughout their life. we begin by checking students throughout their lifetime. rather than looking at a point in time we could look at longitudinal evidence over a lifetime. we can look at what the community can be doing overtime to help that child succeed. those are some of the accountability issues i talked about in the book. then there's the testing issue. we have a faulty concept of the iq. even if you want to say iq is

real, once you've measured it in one person how is that helping you in terms of that person's education person's education or how you're going to help them learn. we need to learn how they approach learning how to they work over time, there's a lot of interest in what's called self-assessment. 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 and learn over time. there are more things coming into play now that would be possibly giving evidence of student learning over time and that's really what were interested in. i talk in the book about the value of performance-based assessment. students need to have an

understanding of the knowledge their demonstration. there can do group projects to demonstrate collaboration and other 21st-century skills. it's a way of doing school rather than just doing a way of testing. teachers who work in performance assessment school, there are 28 schools that don't give state exams and they have much better results in terms of dropout rates and college persistence. the teacher turnover rate is also very low in the schools because they are very committed and their working as true professionals, collaborating with other schools and developing coursework. i coursework. i talk about technology and how

it could be used to gather broad-based data of student achievement. we have a multiple-choice test that comes from someone who created a conductance meter that could read up pencil mark electrically and grade many pages at once. were still pursuing that model today even though we have the computer and the internet. what is the 21st century model for assessment? it might be mythical but many of our students have an experience of getting formative feedback through games. games teach you how to play them they give you instant information about where you're going and how you're doing and give you a chance to try again and do better the next day. organizations are working on creating games for learning and assessment. they're gaining evidence of student decision-making and

creating models of how students understand higher order concepts. the first version they produced was similar to sin city. you have to place the plow power plants and worry about pollution, jobs, electricity and all these things interacting in different ways. this is a game that is a game that is a test of systems thinking. the idea is if your students have a black box idea are they able to balance the role in different ways to come up with an outcome and also the desirability of the outcome. the game is a basis of a judgment by a human being. what were reaching for the next generation of test is not arbitrary by a machine but information that dated driven teachers and parents can make better decisions about student

learning and where they are in a point in time. that is all well and good when it comes to technology but we know our policy decisions are not based on the best or most available evidence. the question we have right now as parents and teachers and students is what happens next. i've talked to parents and students in the opt out movement who decided the best way to respond to test was not to take them. i talk to leaders and the teacher movement who see it as a much broader debate about how we can put public education in this country and where were going with it. i believe this will be decided at the ballot box as much as it will be in the realm of research. the question is for parents or anyone who has a relationship to a relationship to the teacher, what are you going to do about the test? that's my 30 minutes.

[applause]. >> that was so interesting. i have three kids and they're so different. how i see it from those three little examples is the emotional factor that's involved i think i can't say this child is clearly slower than this child but they're so emotionally different. one of them freaks out with the testing but the weird thing is he tested superhigh on a pacing

but then super low on something else. it makes no sense. >> the social and emotional aspect of this is very important. i'm glad you brought it up. test and zaidi affects 25 to 40% of test takers. that's strong enough to affect the results. what you're really looking at is the performance of people who aren't affected by anxiety and those who are affected by anxiety but are no way worse achievers. achievers. were missing out on a ton of talent and were telling successful people wrong messages about who they are what they're good at. >> i have one kid whose quiet and is very comfortable testing and a superhigh tester but all

three of my kids are in relatively similar grades but for different reasons didn't test the same. >> i talk about negative test talking and how the brain gets stronger like a muscle. both of those things are tips that people can take. those techniques make you better at other things too, not just taking tests. >> don't you almost have to start with the sat and the act? when i think of all this testing i think gosh i hate they're taking all this test, on the other hand they're gonna need a lot of practice once they get up to those big tests and it's so essential to them moving on. >> that's a really interesting point, point, especially since

the author of the common core has moved on to the present presidency of the college board. they've offered a relaunch of the sat to relaunch the state tests. i think it can work ever either way. in some cases the act has successfully integrated itself as, that is the test that students take. for middle school, onward they take a practice test and then they take the sat. it can be a tool to reduce testing when they get parents and teachers on the same page. were just going to give this test and it's going to be the college admissions tests and you'll be directly practicing for that. a performance test in kentucky he they're still taking the

compass which is a pre-act and they're going to take the sat. that helped parents who weren't so sure about the condition to get on board. they felt they would have some measurement of how the students were doing. i will also stand on the other side that there's 800 colleges that have given up the act for admission and have made it optional. there's a large and small colleges, some you've heard of and in some way you could say colleges are in a a market crunch and they're having to be broad-minded in how they look at people but on the other hand you could also say sac's don't predict college performance over and above high school gpa. they're actually not that helpful for colleges but they've been turned into this very handy metric. if you have a kid who's a very terrible tester they don't have to take the sat.

>> i wanted to follow up on social and emotional learning. perhaps another level. i think 11 districts in california are going to be assessed 21% by school culture and 20% for social emotional learning. how are they going to do that with out totally missing the point. >> this is a really interesting question and a huge experiment. i talk about it in the book. the number one instrument schools are using for social emotional testing is a simple survey. students answer it and teachers answer it. it's pretty simple like i'm excited to come to school each day, i feel safe, someone cares about me at school. when you make it high-stakes there's always a chance of gaining the system.

any measurement can be gamed. they also introduced a social emotional measure and introduced social emotional walk-throughs. it became a component not that the punished for this information but they have to integrated into their improvement plan. the metric they work on include very clear things like turnover and behavior issues this is a way of assessing on a personal basis and school in actions are cornerstone of the process in the u.k. there's going to be scrutiny and a lot of interest in developing new tools. they're trying to figure out how do we create that into aim multiple-choice format. i think the behavioral tracking stuff is very valuable.

sick days for students fighting , various behavioral types of things can be very powerful indicators of the overall health of the school. >> the other thing is do you see a tendency to realize that objective testing is not going the way it needs to and we need to go to subjective. can you speak to that? >> we all make assessments every day and we all have to deal with other people's assessments and judgments every day. the impulse toward data is a really strong one in our culture

right now and we're all living our lives by metrics that we don't really understand the quality of the data that goes into those metrics or the logarithms that produce the metrics. it's like were at a medieval level where the coders create these a logarithms and we believe that what they create is real. the solution to that is literacy and curiosity and asking really hard questions about the nature of information that's going into these judgments. honestly there are fair-minded folks who are scientists. if you ask them they will freely admit the nature of something like proficiency. proficiency should've never been legislated for a hundred% of our students. that's absurd. we define it on a a bell curve and the fact that a hundred% of the students are going to pass that is an absurdity and

practice. >> i'm going to read your book. i wondered what kind of examples for younger grades and i feel like that's the right place to start talking about families and show this is what they know. my question is about the pushback from the youngest grades. at my school they have the yearly regular common core standardized testing but not for kindergarten yet. we measure in a different way by what's expected of them. >> i agree with you, teachers of younger children have a really important role to play in terms

of speaking loudly about what science tells us about of elemental. pre-k provides an opportunity to provide what is a high-quality school, assuming you can't believe in the test data you get from four -year-olds. there is a new test for a new test for kindergarten admissions which is an academic material that was never included before. it's unlikely to be valid in terms of what it's trying to do. i do believe there is ability. parents who come into kindergarten, when you have a child they always say children will develop at their own weight and age. what's important is that they're thriving and happy and then all the sudden that rhetoric comes to a halt and if you don't learn to read by third

grade you're doomed forever and won't ever go to college. i hope you buy the book and give it to all the parents you work with. >> i was reading about this thing called a racial button law where the children are in control of their own content because their children and they put content online and the idea is they own their content and could get rid of it. it's being proposed in other states as well but it is here. however it doesn't affect what happens in the rooms of the school so when kids are taking their test the system knows whether their parents are divorced.

they don't take into account good days or bad days or that we know the kids going through a tough time. the concern is and i think there are laws being proposed but as technology starts coming into the school system this is a bigger concern, especially with identity theft and misuse and mishandling of information. >> thanks for bringing that up. this is an enormous issue and it's going to get much bigger before it goes away. it's not just for student, but student privacy is at the forefront of the overall privacy issue. some of the best minds in the world are working on student

privacy because these are our children and it really matters. california is considered to have the strongest law. this law will be modeled by others and it's in the house of representatives right now. it tries to follow on what some of california law does but not all of it. the student privacy issue isn't just about testing. although testing is an important one because there's consequential information about the students performance. here the potential issues there's different issues about students and schools collecting data and the agencies they work with. there's the concerned that it will be stolen or mis- used or used for identity theft or use to make money. then there's commercialization which is my students data is available to a third party vendor who will use it for

advertising products. products. my student will be advertised to win she's doing her homework or what's very difficult to defined in some ways in commercial misuse is schools have already outsourced things to a third-party vendor. whatever goes into a for-profit vendor is going to be used to improve the product itself. the more people that use google or google docs, the better it becomes so in some sense we've already turned our students information into commercial gain.

thirdly, i think most to the point of what were talking about here is privacy of my student but in the sense that he has a permanent record. the information stored in my kid is going to be used to make decisions about him in a way i can't control it. you can see this in predictive analytics. predictive analytics is what target uses to try to tell us your pregnant before you do. they look at your searches and then sell your products. predictive analytics and schools is, i look at the data and i have a low income kid and they have this grade and middle school and so i believe they are at risk to drop out. now you look at the data and you make a decision or prediction

about a kid and that prediction could be used to help them and intervene on their behalf. it's also inevitably shaping the beliefs about that kid on any professional who looks at that file. so the file is going around and when teachers are giving information about their student they are led to believe that the students are really gifted, then they treat the students differently and the students achieve more. the impact of having this information on the student the readout at the bottom said this kid is a potential dropout. that is the kind of question that the law is so far away from getting at and even in the court of public opinion there's a lot of division about where is this helpful, when is this helpful, should they be forgotten should they be able to tear up this record when they leave high school. is it non- personally identifiable and can we change policies to reduce dropout rates. it's totally complex and fascinating and a little scary as well. it depends where you're sitting, it's extremely scary.

>> say it's 25 years from now and you're on a book to her with the test sql, what would you be talking about? >> i would love to be talking about how the next generation of assessment really opened up her eyes to each persons capabilities and each student would be graduating with a robust record of their own learning that they control and they could qualify to a future employer. that schools would be robust and embrace creativity and use dashboard conductivity to figure out what really motivates them. if i could magically call up the sum of all papers i wrote in first grade through high school i would have such an interesting

record of my own thinking in my own skills as they evolved and my own interests. the power of the data is really in how you use it. >> i don't i don't know how they deal with standardized testing but in learning competency models, master's mastery is there some synergy between that model and incorporating that into standardized testing? there is and it's a very odd alliance. i'm getting interest in this book from companies that believe they are the ones that will reduce the burden of testing by making it invisible. they talk about invisible integration.

they want to do an experiment that would do away with state tests in favor of five questions a a day. five question a day for a year knowing zaidi, this is a low steak game and the importance of the question could change from student to student to get a more adoptive model. you can you can cover many topics in many ways to learn more about what they know, and they're also looking at as a next level to this, could a teacher create an activity that would satisfy that question or that construct such that you wouldn't have to ask these given questions but you can have a teacher created assessment. it takes a really, some of the software doesn't necessarily

make for better teaching and learning but when you get these mines on a problem, as long as you have unified mines i think there's interesting potential there. >> i didn't realize that a lot of this is about how much can i know but it's not how much are you teaching me to think or to see that and think about it this way, and this way way, and this way and bring this in. is there anything that's developing that part? >> test creators have been in credibly creative and coming up with rubrics to define what that means. and what i mean by that the oss and world war ii was trying to figure out who would be a good spy. they created a several day long battery of tests. there was one that there was one

that someone had to build a box and they had two helpers. one of the helpers was a incompetence dude stooge and one was a jerk. they had tools and was incredibly stressful. very few people pass in the time allotted and the test was really about could you not lose your cool and wail on the other people. you had a come up with a cover story and keep it for several days, t