relative to policing the boosters? which is the primary source -- >> policing the boosters. a good question. >> that's an interesting question. mary? >> we don't really -- thank you. we don't really get into that. although we have had conversation inside the last few weeks about how we really have -- it's still evolving for us. we studied this and following everything that is happening nationally and talking to arne duncan, the secretary of education in conversations with all these people. lots of conversations going on out there. is it really possible to connect academics to athletics? in other words you have to be academically eligible, which maybe doesn't answer your booster question per se but if we make this connection go away, and we say, you can be a college student, you can also play

division-1 profit sports but we'll separate those and we're going to pay you we're going to give you benefits, maybe make you an employee like the northwestern football team its suggest. we are waiting for nlrb to rule. maybe these booster issues would goo away. then the scholarship issue goes away and all these perks go away. so it's hard to really -- it is a complex business problem. >> you're getting to the -- money corrupts. >> i think it's fruitless to try to control it so it's better several the relationship. that's my opinion. but mary is getting there. >> what? >> the immensity of the problem in big-time college sports where would you locate yourselves on the spectrum from optimistic to pessimistic insofar as significant movement

toward a solution? >> i'm optimistic because i'm in it to win it, as the ncaa says. and i think that we're riding a wave right now that is pretty positive. as michael housefelled who fought opanon case he said the door is open a little bit to fix this. we have to take it off the hinges. it has to come all the way down and we're still a was away from that. but big money, corrupts, and there's a lot -- there's television contracts out three years so that's a problem but the conversation is alive and people are getting involved, are you as optimistic as i am? >> not quite but we both have high hopes for these class action lawsuits could which

bring change, especially the mccants ramsey lawsuit which takes aim at the educational defrauding of athletes. we have high hopes and we'll see how it goes. if you read our book, it's kind of a downer -- but in the conclusion we do try to sound some sunny optimism there. >> that was my part. >> yeah, right. i don't know how many questions we have time for. i'm sorry. who is next. >> i think this gentleman has been waving at me. i don't know if the waving works. >> the reason for not getting your job back they should welcome you back because you're doing the right thing. >> i don't really think that our differences at this point are reconcilable yet. but i believe that some day they will be and i have hope also, and i'm optimistic some day i'll be invited back. people are inviting to us come. we'll be at carolina in april in

a classroom. so there's an interest to hear from us, and i think once the story gets more legs legs and once the national conversation continues and court cases move forward, think that the university will perhaps recognize me as somebody who belongs. i'm a tarheel. i'm a tarheel, and always be one. we raid our kids on the campus mitchell husband, chuck, is here. we live three blocks from the carolina inn. our kids come home and go on franklin street, and they love it here and we're not going anywhere. so i'll just wait it out. i have ha few good years left. >> i've seen two people with hands um for quite a while. >> my question has to do with, was there a moment at which -- if you could explain that moment or did it occur over a longer time when you realized i've got

to act. what that was like. >> that's kind of an easy question actually. wouldn't you say, mary? it was immediately in the wake of the martin report. we were fuming -- the governor jim martin released a report in december of 2012 in which he famously declared, this is not 0 an athletic scandal, it's an academic scandal, limited to one department, and we were on the phone with each other within seconds, or mary was at the meeting, and if you see -- one-half the documentary schooled you'll see her crushed by the announcement of the governor's and -- >> i had a really nice jacket on. but i was really upset. >> i was crushed. i watched it online, and i was not knocked breathless and by the end of the day we decided, we're writing a book because it

was clear towels at that point that the university had no intention of disclosing what had really happened in chapel hill. they were going to keep as tight a lid on it as they could and we were determined the truth would be told. it had to be told because this story was just too important. so. >> before that i actually was talking dish left the athletic department in 2010 six months ahead of marvin austin's famous tweet where everything blew open and started out as impermissible benefit width the party in miami tweeted about. and then like some kids shouldn't be allowed to go to party and get free drinks. how insane. and then the academic problems were uncovered during that investigation, and i remained silent except that i talked to general counsel in 2010 that they pretty -- i talked to them and they ignore met, and then in 2011 i started speaking with dan

cain of the record and then in 2012 when i was still talking to him, went to president friday's funeral, and i remember mittwill with him in 2010 and i felt really bad when i heard about the president friday and how important academic integrity was to him, and i spoke to my husband chuck about how upset was. he start started a blog. it went viral, and then dan cain said, you're base chris -- basically on the record now so off to the races we went, and then i met jay at around that same time, and his -- he personally and his athletic reform group, group of faculty have had my back and although it seems like i have had all this hate, which i have, fans are fanatics -- i have had many more supporters encouraging me on because many of us know that this is the truth and that we

have seen this ourselves. and we'd like to do something as well but iland to be in the right place at the right ty time have great support from my husband and family and was able to keep it up and wouldn't have been able too do this book. without this guy, because i'm a reading specialist and a learning specialist and i can tell stories but he is the writer. so it's been -- >> you tale good story. >> it's been a great journey and i've learned a lot. >> r. >> as time has gone by you have students who are failing and now you have -- are those same students passing and what courses are they taking or -- >> we can't see the transcripts anymore. they cut us off. they cut him off too. imagine that. but we know that admissions standards were -- >> admissions have been raised a

couple of years ago, and so last two years unc admitted fewer -- still admitting some but far fewer of the truly at-risk students. something like -- i'm going get the numbers wrong but i think 25 were admitted in 2008 whereas in 2012 only nine. i seem to recall those -- so they do seem to have tightened up the standards. the danger of course, is that this may be just a temporary measure while everybody its looking. they have adopted no hard and fast rules about admissions going forward. and so we have to be vigilant in watching admissions. but which courses are they taking? we really don't know. we can't tell. we're just not close enough to the ground any longer to know what they're doing. but there have been a couple of academic casualties. >> yes. >> on the football teamworks for the first anytime the history we

lost four players, three or four. >> that's right. >> academically ineligible. my goodness. >> getting tougher for them. >> last question. getting the sign. >> my question is -- again, i appreciate dish wanted to commend you both for everything you have done. my question is more about the culture at the university that allows this and why haven't we seen more professors tenured professors, that step up and actually take a stand on this? because they're the ones that -- we see the university's -- if hey a nephew in premed over there, and we have had this discussion. getting a great education by but the value of the degree obviously has been tarnished. >> that's right. >> i can only agree with you. faculty are supposed to be the guarantors of the integrity 0 of

the institution, supposed to be the watch dog for these sorts of offenses. and the fact that we haven't been marching on polk place is a mystery to me. i don't understand it. there are -- i want to say there are plenty of other faculty at 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. ...

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 i