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The Great Selective Testing Bubble

John C. Thompson - Parents for Music and Arts

NAACP, Equity Matters
"The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was largely a social struggle for access. The continuing civil rights struggle that has evolved and moved into the 1990s and beyond focuses more on equity."

Office of Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education
"The mission of the Office of Civil Rights is to ensure the equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous envorecment of civil rights"

Arne Duncan, March 8, 2010
"We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement."

Arne Duncan, April 9, 2010
"I believe education is the civil-rights issue of our generation...and why arts education remains so critical to leveling the playing field of opportunity. We all know that unacceptable disparities in arts education between low-income and affluent districts continue to persist."

Barack Obama, July 5, 2007
"The ideal of a public education has always been at the heart of the American promise...Don't tell me the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test."

Arne Duncan, April 9, 20110
"Almost everywhere I went, I heard people express that curriculum has narrowed, especially in schools that servce disproportionate numbers of disadvantaged...A well-balanced curriculum is too vital to students and our national character to let teaching of arts and humanities erode."

Linda Hamilton, excerpt from "The Right to Learn"
"...the more paperwork teachers are asked to do, the less time they have for teaching; the less time for teaching, the less learning occurs..."

NAACP, "A Call for Action" "Resource equity in public education is indeed the next most important civil rights island to be conquered. By spending public edication monies in a fair and equitable manner, we can ensure that minority students are not shortchanged academically."

Emily Alpert, Voice of San Diego, June 7, 2010
"The student and her friends joked about being the 'stupid class,' so she didn't bother to work hard at school. 'I didn't think I had to try because I was below average anyway,' the eighth grader said."

Tom Horne, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, excerpt from "Schools Matter" blog, June 13, 2007
"It has led to a sanity-resistant racist and classist testing practices that pile more reqard on the already priviledged, while blaming teachers and the children themselves for not correcting the inequalities that are sustained by a persistent avoidance of reality by those with the resources to actually alter that reality..."

Jennifer Mueller, Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, Winter 2001
"The ones who bear the brunt of the punitive consequences of high stakes testing are the students...Similarily, the question is not one of lowered - or even varied - expectations for any population of students, but the misue of an invalid instrument [test] to reinforce negative and false stereotypes...High stakes will reflect the economic ability of students' families to provide private tutorials and preparation devices."

Justice Elena Kagen, U.S. Supreme Court, Senate confirmation hearing, June 30, 2010
"Senator, I hope I know that the principles of Brown v. Board are still relevant today. The idea of equality under law is a fundamental American constitutional value."

Christopher Knaus, "Still Segregated, Still Unequal" from the National Urban League, 2007 "Federal assessments are not required for critical thinking, art history, biology or anything specifically related to participating in democratic society, and NCLB provides incentives to eliminate such curricula from "failing schools". Incrasingly absent from low-income urban schools across the country are creative, flexible curricula that allow students to express themselves outside the arena of whether or not what they say is on the test."

Diane Ravitch, education historian, author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" "No nation with successful schools ignores everything but basuc skills and testing."

Jennifer Mueller, Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, Winter 2001
"Tests should be a means, not and end in-and-of themselves."

Kevin W. Riley, Principal, Meuller Charter School
"I confess. I was a party to denying our kids. We received our test scores from the California Standards test a few weeks ago and we danced for a while because we knew our students had done so well.. We now have an Academic Performance Index of 835 which represents a growth of 320 points over the last ten years. And in California, edging above 800 is the name of the testing game. And I wondered: how long can our teachers keep that pace? And now that the AYP bar goes up another 10 points in California...how long can a school keep it up? We all but eliminated science. And social studies. There was so little music. Hardly any arts. Limited time for physical education (Yes, I know it is required by Ed Code). We didn't have dances on the blacktop like the year before. Or teams. Our students were not asked enough to think critically or creatively. They did not ponder the engineering difficulties of the gulf oil crisis, let alone the long term impact on the natural ecosystems there. They didn't discuss the politics of unemployment or global warming or the conflicts of the culture world-wide. There were no science fair entries or models constructed of the California Missions. They did not solve 'real' problems at all. But they did plenty of practice problems and sample test items that had been released by the California Department of Education so that kids can prepare for the CST. And it paid off in our API. And I confess. I feel like we robbed them, in many ways, of the joy of learning."

Christopher Knaus, "Still Segregreated, Still Unequal" from National Urban League, 2007
"NCLB has continued a separate and unequal educational system while shifting the debate from unequal schools to how to measure such schools...Expansion of definitions of academic skills beyond math and English....Important subjects such as art, music, history, biology, speech and soecial studies must be included in the fabric of schooling...Expansion of assessment to include multiple measures of academic success. Research has shown that in order for assessment to effectively guide school efforts, it must reflect a wide range of student skills and provide a foundation from which to teach."

Walt Gardner's Reality Check Blog - Education Week, August 23, 2010
"Leave it to the British to teach Americans about their common language. A report by the Institute of Education on more than 100 internation studies found that obsessing on performance on standardized tests is counterproductive to learning about the subjects evaluated by these tests."

Gary Orfield, Professor of Education and Social Policy, Harvard University, 2007
"I believe that the basic reason that policymakers are ignoring this research is political - it makes them sound as if they have higher standards without having to do anything about it exceptto flunk students. The more perplexing thing is how the media continually treats this as if it is a new and important idea without seriously examining what is known about the subject."

John L. Benham, Ed.D, Counterpoint
"A financial crisis always exposes an educational philosophy."

Alhambra USD Board President, January 6, 2010 "The foundation of academic success is based on the core academic subjects, specifically in math and English."

Ed Amundsen, special education teacher, Sacramento, CA
"We spend millions developing and administering a test, we prep kids for it and we still hear from businesses that kids don't have the job skills because what they learned was how to take a test."

Jay Heubert, High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion and Graduation
"One test does not impose learning anymore than a thermometer cures a fever."

Renee More, teacher, Teach Moore Blog
"The goal of education is not to produce great test takers, but to prepare tomorrow's citizens."

Campbell's Law
"Whether under the outgoing ESEA/NCLB punishment, or new ESEA Blueprint's inequitable cometitive-funding, the Unequal-Access Rule prevails: What gets tested, gets taught; what is not tested gets unequal or denied access. Teachers are under career-threatening pressures of time constraints and selective testing accountabilities. This increasingly produces teaching to the test; while students of advantage learn, the disadvantaged are learning how to take tests. Teachers face high-stakes conflicts of interests daily, and are trapped in the middle of a system bankrupt of equality that denies and discriminates against its most vulnerable students."

Arne Duncan, April 9, 2010
"Low-income students who play in the orchestra or band are twice as likely to perform at the highest levels in math as peers who do not play. In James Catterall's well-known longitudinal study, 'Doing Well and Doing Good By Doing Art,' low-income students are art-rich high schools were twice as likely to earn B.A. as low-income students at arts-poor high schools...English language learners are art-rich high schools were also far more likely than their peers at arts-poor high schools to go onto college. Is it any surprise then to learn of the large impact that arts education has on student achievement and attainment, especially among disadvantaged students?"

Johnny Thompson
"Dances of the Imagination do not evolve without a whole-child education. Selective testing has decimated intellectual growth, creative potential and critical thinking. It has suffocated students' spirit and self-esteem, social and emotional balance, growth as well as curiosity and imagination. It is poisoned the natural love of learning and motivation to succeedin education and life, especially for the disadvantaged."

Jane Alexander, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts
"Children learn better with arts as part of the curriculum. They learn all their subjects better. They're more engaged. Student attendance goes up. The child is happier; the teacher is happier."

"The American College Testing Service compared the value of four factors in predicting success after high school. 'Success' was defined as self-satisfaction and participation in a variety of community activities two years after college. The one yardstick that could be used to predict later success in life was achievement in school activities [such as music, sports, debate, drama]. Not as useful as predictors were high grades in high school, high grades in college or high ACT scores."

Arne Duncan, April 9, 2010
"For decades, arts education has been treated as though it was a novice teacher at school, the last hired and first fired when times get tough. But President Obama, the First Lady and I reject the notion that the arts, history, foreign languages, geography and civics are ornamental offerings that can or should be cut from schools during a fiscal crunch. The truth is that, in the information age, a well-rounded curriculum is not a luxury, but a necessity."

Anthony Cody, teacher, August 15, 2010
"In education, we were told we would enter a new era of 'mutual responsibility,' stop spending the year preparing for bubble tests, and stop blaming teachers for all the problems in our schools...At first, we were dismayed, when cruel practices of NCLB were extended. Did they not understand what they were doing? Could they see this was not consistent with our shared vision? So we wrote, we organized on Facebook, we lobbied and we spoke by phone with Secretary Duncan. It has become clear they know exactly what they are doing, and nothing we say matters."

Joan Schmidt, "Instead of pitting one subject against another, look at the comprehensive needs of students in the context of education the whole child."

Martin Luthor King, Jr.
"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and critically. Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of education."


All examples may be caused or aggravated by selective standardized high-stakes testing, which is amplified by the Uequal Access Rule and teaching to the test:

1. When government(s) do not distribute core academic all funds with equity, which incude The Arts.
2. Attends any public school in California where each week is 2 hours shorter and funding is $2,131 less per pupil that the national average. This disproportionately hurts students of disadvantage.
3. Does not have a highly qualified and effective teacher for each core subject. This includes not having any music or arts teacher at all because access is being denied. State education funding requirements, codes and Williams Settlement are being violated in the state of California.
4. Has below "proficient" API rating in English and/or math testing scores, which profiles and segregrates by interventions such as remediation (repeated subject). Government-endorsed selective testing and inequtable competitive funding causes deficient separate educations" from the denial of access to arts and other non-tested core academic curricula. Even students of socioeconomic advantage are increasingly vulnerable, which has created a whole new class of academically disadvantaged.
5. Is denied access to arts as a result of scheduling conflicts.
6. Has insufficient family economic resources to enroll in after-school and summer pay-to-play programs, our to outsource privately tutoring of arts, reading or math.
7. Has weak family educational support and.or family instability regardless of socioeconomic status.
8. Is trapped in a crowded urban school with denied access to arts and a well-balanced curriculum.
9. Is already in a school with access to arts and a well-balanced curriculum, but is required to attend another school under "diversity assignment," without similar high standards and equal opportunities.
10. When local property owners are unable or unwilling to vote for a supplemental arts education parcel tax.
11. Is denied classroom or library resources for maximum learning. This includes arts utilized as tools to integrate and improve English and math skills, as well as testing scores.