Competency Based Testing: ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’

Towards the end of the Wizard of Oz, while Dorothy and her friends are being addressed by the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, the dog Toto runs off to the side, pulls back the curtain, and reveals a man operating cranks and levers. The Wizard orders them to “pay the man no attention” but has to give up when he realizes he has been seen for what he really is.

In a similar manner the wizards of education– the same entities that gave you Common Core– are now trying to convince parents, teachers, and communities that they want to reduce testing and do away with testing as we know it by replacing it with something called “Competency Based Testing” (CBT).  CBTs are being ‘sold’ to the public as a better way to assess our students and their teachers. However, the public has looked behind the curtain and realized on their journey down education’s yellow brick road that they have been tricked and are about to be tricked again.

Formative Assessments are used by teachers to help determine where their students are at in understanding a concept; teachers also use data from formative assessments to help them adjust curriculum, assignments and content so they can better meet students’ needs.  Who benefits from formative assessments? Teachers and students.  There is no grade promotion or punitive consequence associated with the results of formative assessments. Data is used so that teachers teach what is necessary and students have an opportunity to spend time only on what they need to learn. Legislators have decided to seize this valuable tool, relabel formative assessments “CBTs” and use them as high-stakes tests that will determine students’ promotion and teachers’ evaluations. Legislators, along with curriculum publishers (a.k.a. textbook companies), and lobbyists are selling these CBTs as the fix to high-stakes testing.  These people– the same people that promoted high-stakes tests in the first place– are telling us they have the solution. Really?

Many parent groups are already lining up to voice their concern about CBTs.  United for Florida Children founder Laura McCrary recently wrote, “I am going to be blunt here.  If parents don’t wake up and take a stand right now, this year, we will only have ourselves to blame.  Ask yourself this.  How do you see education in four to six years?  I can promise you it won’t be the friendly teacher- driven classrooms we are seeing today.  Changes are being made from the top down right now as you are reading this, and it isn’t pretty.  It is called Competency Based Education (also known as Competency Based Learning, Outcome Based Education, Personalized Learning, and Performance Based Education to name a few).”  Please read the rest of her column which gives a great deal of background and information on CBTs: https://unitedforflchildren.com/2016/02/18/competency-based-education/

Here are two recent articles regarding concerns of CBTs by Dr. Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education: http://dianeravitch.net/2016/02/04/warning-digitized-instruction-data-mining/ and http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/23/peter-goodman-the-next-battleground-competency-based-education/

Florida Stop Common Core Coalition a statewide organization by parents, grandparents, teachers, small business owners, and concerned citizens voice their concerns about CBTs: http://www.flstopcccoalition.org/blog/concerns-about-competency-based-education.htm.

So how fast is this issue developing?  On Friday, March 25, 2016, Florida Governor Scott signed into law The Competency-Based Education Pilot Program. The bill creates a Competency-Based Education Pilot Program through HB 1365 and sets up a five-year pilot program in certain Florida counties with the goal of letting students advance through school if they can prove they’ve mastered what they should be learning.  This means these CBTs are replacing the Florida Standards Assessment (Common Core assessment) that the legislators themselves passed into law.  Will CBTs be testing Common Core standards? Yes, the pilot Florida CBTs will test Florida Standards, which are Common Core standards.  Again, the legislators are trying to mislead the public. They want to give an illusion that they have done away with testing.  They haven’t; they have done something worse.  They are taking an excellent classroom tool—formative assessment—bastardizing it, and calling it Competency Based Testing.

What the legislators should be doing when it comes to Florida public education and state -mandated testing is stopping the regulation and over-regulation of public education. If the Legislature truly wants to reduce the number of mandated test students take then they need to do just that.  Right now the Legislature claims that they have reduced the number of mandated tests. Really what they have done is reduced state- mandated tests in some cases, but then required that teachers’ evaluations are based on their students’ test scores. The Legislature can claim they haven’t mandated the test, but they in reality did mandate that a test be used.  The Florida Legislature has for a number of years asserted that for private businesses to grow more jobs and for businesses to be more successful, more deregulation of mandated laws needs occur.  Yet these same legislators take the very opposite approach when it comes to public education.  It is a testament to our public schools that they have succeeded over and over operating under the most stringent of laws.

Many of the most successful countries in the world in math and sciences have learned that for education to be successful teachers (not politicians) need to be at the center of learning and assessments.  It is time that Florida’s next generation of Legislators take this same approach. We have seen behind the curtain and are not impressed.

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