Review of MAKING THE GRADES by Todd Farley
Todd Farley, author of Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry (PoliPoint Press, 2009) leads us through a world that is at once outside of teaching and its very lifeblood.
Our Dark Lord.
In Making the Grades, Farley chronicles his 15-year rise through the standardized testing industry (STI); from lowly day-scorer to muckity-muck with a big expense account to high-paid consultant. In 1994, Farley started scoring written tests for $7.75/hour in Iowa City, IA. Eventually he worked his way up to six-figures for part-time consulting work. The American Dream.
On his way up the ladder, Farley sees and describes for us countless examples of how the disorganization, ineptitude and just plain lies behind the scenes of the STI should seriously compromise our faith in its test results. He seems to hope and believe that, as he climbs the ladder, he will someday find justification or rationale for the shenanigans he’s witnessed on the way up. But he finds none; at least none that will make you feel good.
From bottom to top, Farley’s book is a story of short-sighted, often not-so-smart people, whose only motivation is to get these tests scored and make numbers look like what they need to look like. People wandering through a maze of ignorance, incompetence, and arbitrary rules that might change at any moment. Their jobs are to score tests. The rest of us use the results to collectively judge our schools, teachers, and children. And all of this takes place in order to produce huge profits for companies that score tests.
YEAH!!!
In addition to allowing daylight and fresh air to sweep into the stinky basement of the STI, Farley also gives us funny descriptions of people and recounts some seriously absurd and hilarious conversations about rubrics and data. I particularly enjoy the way he describes people. The characters that animate the ranks of the day-scorers reminded me of the people I used to line up with back when I was selling my own plasma for beer money.
Addicts. Foreigners. Slackers. Losers. Dummies and Dreamers.
From a teacher’s perspective this was an interesting and funny read because Farley uses all the same language and describes all the same problems with rubrics that teachers have. They box us in. How do I really know the difference between a 4 and a 5? A brilliant writer who didn’t follow the rubric but actually did quite a lot more will fail?
All this is frustrating for teachers, but we end up with the scores we need…am I right?
Farley and the people around him also did what they had to do to get the numbers they needed. The important difference between what Farley was doing and what we do in our classrooms is in distance and scale. Distance: If I tweak my interpretation of a rubric in the middle of grading a stack of papers, it’s with kids I talk to every day. Scale: As a teacher, if I create a horrible rubric or make a horrible decision about a rubric, I could really only marginally affect about 200 people at a time, at most.
Mr. Farley spells out for us how ineptitude and greed have together scored hundreds of millions of exams. A huge scale at long distance. Errors and misjudgments multiplied down the line; mistakes upon mistakes used to label children, teachers and schools; falsification of data. And maybe all this for a question that didn’t make sense in the first place.
I recommend it. It’s a serious book about an important issue that is written by somebody who is both knowledgeable and funny. What else do you want? Go buy it.
Mr. Teachbad
ps — I sort of like the book review idea for the blog. If you have something you’d like me to review, send me a copy. Maybe it’s your book or something you think didn’t get the exposure it should have or you missed when it first came out. (Here is a review from a while back on See Me After Class by Roxanna Elden.) If you send me something, there is no guarantee I will like it or review it on the blog. We’ll just have to wait and see if people start sending me books.
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It is a very important book; I read it right before the Common Core drafts started coming out, and immediately sensed that the ELA standards were meticulously crafted to make them easier for computers to score constructed responses and essays.
I also recognized the cast of losers and freaks from my days doing temp work, and they are hilariously portrayed in the book.
I loved “Making the Grade.”
And that “See Me After Class” book was awesome.
Three other favorites:
1. “The Great Expectations School” – Honest, realistic first-year memoir by Dan Brown.
2. “Reluctant Disciplinarian,” – Hilarious classroom management guide by Gary Rubinstein
3. “Tested” – A portrait of an elementary school trying to bring up its test scores, by education reporter Linda Perlstein
No. I don’t want to read it because it would make me angrier and sadder and more pissed off than I am right now.
We are in the throes of PSSA prep(PA standardized testing for juniors) here in Philadelphia. I have fucking posters all over my classroom walls (not my choice) and this week was instructed to hang a nifty poster with count-down sticky notes for me to update every day: 38 school days until the PSSA . . 37 days . .)
The kids don’t give a crap and seem sleepily amused that I’m saying “Next week we’ll work on [fill in artificial reading "skill" here]
bottom line: the kids have it right. These tests don’t really mean a rat’s ass and have *no effect on their lives whatsoever.*
But hell, if it will get our Asst Superintendent her gold ticket to a new/better job (her days are numbered as we look for a new superintendent) then by god, she’ll flog us classroom teachers with mandates until life has left her lap dog assistants’ bodies. And possibly ours.
I need to make a sticky note poster for myself: “X days until summer…X-1 days until summer..”
bleh.
I have to slow down reading too much of this stuff being a teacher in NYC. I am getting way too angry these days. I see way too many people with 20+ years, and are fantastic teachers, who are getting pushed out in so many different ways. Inept supervisors motivated in making a quick impact and moving on, and this complete reliance on individual teachers to create everything themselves, has made it very difficult to impossible to succeed if you are working in a difficult school environment.
1. other people’s children
2. the death and life of the great american school system