By Joseph Ray Lavine.

A co-founder of the Network for Public Education addressed the ineffectiveness of current U.S. standardized testing and teacher evaluation standards in a speech at the University Chapel, at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, last Wednesday.

Anthony Cody, who also writes the education blog Living in Dialogue, spoke to a crowd of concerned students, teachers, administrators and parents and voiced his opposition to educational reform programs such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top and Value Added Models.

These programs, which have garnered billions of dollars in government funds over the past 12 years, perpetuate inaccurate representation of student achievement and teacher effectiveness, Cody said.

“There’s a fiction that the high-stakes tests are raising the bar for our students,” Cody said in the speech. “This is not raising the bar. This is lowering expectations for our students, for our schools, and for our teachers.”

Programs like Common Core, RTTT and VAM exist in large part due to funding and advocacy from The Gates Foundation, which has prioritized a “measure to manage” principle, Cody said. The foundation, led by Bill and Melinda Gates, spent over $200 million to promote the Common Core standards.

It also worked closely with education secretary Arne Duncan and his staff during the creation of RTTT, a $4.3 billion contest for grant money that pressured states to adopt high standards and at one point highlighted the Common Core standards by name, according to the Washington Post.

“The fact is that the entire system is being changed and perverted and diverted into a measurement system,” Cody said. “Learning is being calibrated.”

Cody, who spent 24 years teaching high-needs schools in Oakland, California, said the flaw in these high-stakes standardized tests is that they do not measure a student’s true capacities for success.

Cody said that when he does workshops for teachers, they list critical thinking, collaboration and perseverance as qualities of their “ideal graduate,” but none of these qualities are measured by standardized tests.

What’s more, Cody said, is that Georgia and most other U.S. states are using these standardized test results as a significant indicator on teacher evaluations. These evaluative models, or VAMs, make it easier for principles to fire teachers that are deemed ineffective. The problem with these models, however, is that there are many variables that affect student performance, Cody said, and too much weight is being placed on test scores.

“Often it will be stated that teacher effectiveness is the largest in-school variable affecting student achievement, and that technically is true, but when you realize that that teacher variation only accounts for 10%, then you realize that there are so many other factors affecting student achievement,” Cody said, citing a study by the American Statistical Association.

Dr. Jim Garrett, who brought his Social Studies Education class to the Cody lecture, was in agreement.

“Statisticians will say that it’s between 1 and 14% of academic gains that can be attributed to the teacher, and the rest of it is all the surroundings… community, home, resources, property values, funding, etcetera,” Garrett said, referring to the same ASA study. “So when you think about that, it paints a much more complicated picture of how people learn and what it means to get a good education.”

One of Garrett’s students, who is student-teaching at Mill Creek High School, said that even though student teachers can’t be fired based on test scores, the weight of the evaluative model still affects her teaching.

“Oh absolutely it does [impact my teaching],” Laurel Christopher, a social studies education and economic major, said. “It’s just the difference between teaching for understanding and teaching for the love of learning and then teaching for a test.”

Christopher talked about how that must affect her students at times.

“Rather than having a well-rounded view of the subject, you’re just like, ‘I need to remember to ask these 50 questions that I know are going to be on the test on Friday,’” she said. “It’s sad, it really is. It’s hard to even get excited about that, and even more, it’s hard to get the students excited.”

Cody said that in addition to placing unfair stress on teachers, an evaluative framework also limits a teacher’s ability to grow because they are likely to “hide their weaknesses in an evaluative structure.” He pointed to collaboration among teachers as a more effective way to hold teachers accountable.

“If you have a truly collaborative, trusting cooperative environment, then people become willing to share and be vulnerable about where they need to grow,” he said.

Cody pointed to New Highland Academy, a high poverty school with a lot of English learners in East Oakland, as an example of how teacher collaboration can function.

“They have solidified that faculty, drastically reduced turnover, dramatically increased student performance, and they did this without having any onerous evaluative system,” he said. “They did this with the intentional support and space to learn together.”

In his speech, Cody also supported an overhaul of the standardized testing system and promoted a student assessment strategy more focused on Project Based Learning and the creation of student portfolios. These methods would give teachers more flexibility to design courses and would require students to demonstrate more critical thinking within the community.

“We should expect our teachers to be capable of the intellectual work of defining and designing the program that will elevate their students,” he said. “We should expect our students to be able to create original work that reflects their capacity in academic disciplines.”

Cody acknowledged the common opinion that such programs would fail without proper accountability and offered an alternative to the current notions of accountability.

“I think part of the problem that we’ve gotten into is that we’ve got this idea that monitoring needs to be a very top-down hierarchical process,” Cody said in an interview with the Red & Black. “I think we need to create mechanisms for parents and students and community members to monitor what’s going on in their school… rather than trying to engineer an accountability system that attempts to manage that from Washington D.C.”

In addition to the “measure to manage” principle, Cody said the Gates Foundation also prioritizes the role of technology in improving schools, and it has partnered with Pearson to provide America’s classrooms with more digital resources. Cody worries that this technology movement, dubbed “personalization,” will decrease the role of the teacher in a harmful way.

“This person-less personalization is very limited… This idea that we are going to put a device between the teacher and the student and mediate learning through that device… is baloney,” he said. “Students thrive on human relationships with one another and with their teacher, and no computerized device can replace that.”

Cody said that despite the NPE’s constant efforts to push back against the current evaluative structure, such a movement “is going to require more strength than we currently have.”

Cody pushed the audience to doubt the current systems in place.

“I think it is time to start resisting this entire program,” he said. “It is time to start questioning the fundamental theories on which this program is based and [start] challenging it.”

The Network for Public Education will hold a national conference in Chicago on April 24-26.