I'm sure this isn't on the radar of anyone who's not an adult educator, but a new GED is being unveiled in 2014. The reason? Essentially that a new company has purchased the right to provide it (I think it's Pearson). And also perhaps that education deformers a-fear that more students will opt for it as public/charter schools get more punitive and harder to access, and b-that if too many low income students do get the qualifications that will let them get to college, that will highlight a fact that's thus far been successfully swept under the rug, which is that living wage jobs in this country just are not growing that much. The job projected to have the most growth over the next decade is Home Health Aide, for which you do not require a college degree and which pays abysmally. It makes it easier to blame "lazy" working class students or their teachers for mass unemployment if fewer people pass that sneaky GED and become qualified to do something other than becoming a Home Health Aide.

All this aside, I'm really fairly concerned about the new tests.First off, once the new tests are rolled out, all previous scores will expire. The GED is comprised of 5 tests currently-what this basically means is that if you've taken 3 of the 5 tests when the 2014 version rolls around, sucks to be you-you have to then go back and study for the new version of all the tests, and retake even the ones you've already taken. It also means that unless you know you're going to finish before the current test expires, there will be no point in taking the GED in 2013. (If you've taken all 5 tests and gotten your GED before 2014, your GED is still valid, however). Can I just mention that if this test was taken mainly by middle class students, this would never be tolerated? Really. Imagine an analogous change on the GRE or the SAT. No one would stand for it. And they shouldn't be standing for it now either, but since the GED's constituents are not organized and are composed of working/lower class students and their teachers.....you can see how it is.

Otherwise, based on the limited information thus far released, there are going to be some improvements; for example, the tests will be computer based instead of paper based, and will be comprised of different activities, not all multiple choice. This will be a huge boon to our many ADHD students, for whom all 5 tests are currently a test on how long they can focus on one booklet.  Some of the activities will also involve manipulating objects onscreen, instead of bubbling in circles, which will also be great for ADHD and LD students. It seems that the Social Studies and Science tests will require more content knowledge, but on the upside the testmakers might deign to tell the rest of us exactly what content knowledge students need, which will help. (Currently, both those tests are designed on the theory that all the info is in the passages, you just have to be able to READ science and social studies materials. Of course, being able to read them requires background knowledge of undefined and unpredictable topics in those fields, which we as educators have to basically guess at. It would be nice to have an actual concrete set of topics to follow).

On the downside, the Reading and Writing tests have been combined (not necessarily a bad thing) into something called the Literacy Test (the name just underlines for me how culturally insensitive and essentially indifferent to the experience of test takers these companies are. I mean, have these people never read anything about Jim Crow?) This test will now require that students read a given text and write an analysis of it. Not that I'm against literary analysis. I'm actually for it-my first thought was that this will be a more fun test to teach to-I already have thoughts about how to work with students on analysis. But my second thought-and it's a real concern-is that these essays are not going to be graded by college professors or people who are trained to look at literature in an original way. They're going to be graded by temp graders who have BAs and are given a list of what the "right" answers to the essay questions are. The current tests work OK because the essay is basically not graded on content at all--it's all grammar--so there is no "set of right answers" that people have to come up with through original thought on the fly. (what an oxymoron!) My students often have very interesting takes on the literature we read, but they are not middle class white takes, and they reflect the students' experience, which is not similar to mine and not similar to the test makers', either. I'm not sure how I can train (it really would be training, not teaching) them to come up with culturally acceptable "analyses" off the tops of their heads at the test.It's one thing to have to pick the culturally acceptable answer out of 4, but to have to write it is a whole different ballgame. We GED teachers are gonna have to be very on the ball about this-particularly about setting up some sort of system of suing if valid but different answers are not accepted. I don't think there's any chance the testing companies will diversify their answers/graders unless they're pushed really hard and in court. Any GED teachers out there interested in trying to organize in advance?