Standardized Tests
Tell Lawmakers to Say NO to Tax Dollars for an 8th Grade "pre-pre-SAT"
Published May 27, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
From the Department of "Enough, Already!" The College Board, "non-profit" purveyor of the SAT, PSAT, AP, and other money-makers from the bubble-sheets-equal-intelligence economic bubble, is poised to inflict yet another standardized test on our students - this time in middle school.
Where will it all end? College prep bubble-tests for newborns?
This is no idle kvetching session. School districts - that means you, taxpayers - will end up paying for this new test, if the College Board isn't stopped, which means they won't have money to spend on more constructive ways to help our students learn.
Read more below, or just cut to the chase and sign this petition to Obama, EdSec. Duncan, Congress, and state governors to say NO to a middle school SAT clone.
The Big Money on Slate has more:
Before the financial crisis hit, eighth-graders across the country were scheduled to take a new test this fall, their first to get into college. The exam is called ReadiStep, and it's a new standardized test that simultaneously says it's "low-stakes" while also being a "vital step" toward getting ready to get a bachelor's degree. It's all multiple-choice, and it's split into three parts: reading, writing, and math. The test will offer teachers "insight into students' academic progress and early feedback that enables them to help students create a road map for success." Plus, administering the exam "helps create a college-going culture"—don't we have one already?—and the results are "predictive" of PSAT scores. PSAT scores, of course, are predictive of SAT scores, which are predictive of where one gets into college. ReadiStep is poised to become a new rite of passage for American youths.
But the test is not provided by the federal government. Nor is it a brainchild of state and local school boards or mandated by No Child Left Behind. It's provided by the College Board, the same organization that administers the PSAT and the SAT. It was originally supposed to launch this fall, but was postponed due to economic circumstances. . . . For students, ReadiStep is the gateway to a life of bubble-sheets and No. 2 pencils.
For the College Board, it's another way to make tons of money.
ReadiStep will cost 10 bucks a pop, which will likely be paid by school districts. That money goes straight to the College Board, just like all of the revenue generated by its other standardized tests. Read more....
The article sheds much light on the true nature of the selfless-sounding entities known as "non-profits." The president of the "non-profit" College Board pocketed a saintly salary of
$673,757 in 2006, an 88 percent increase from his initial starting salary," and "the College Board has 10 senior vice presidents and 28 vice presidents; senior staff members make an average of $239,374 in compensation. These numbers are presumed to have gone higher since 2006."
Who needs profit when two years at a non-profit can make you a millionaire? Thanks, charitable donors and taxpayer-financed government grants!
Again, please sign the petition here. This is getting ridiculous. Let's spare our 12-year-olds the anxiety of thinking bubbles determine their fate, and instead teach them that they have much more control over their lives than those bubbles do.
No Excuses, Teachers: Raise Homeless Students' Test Scores, or Else
Published May 26, 2009 @ 07:42AM PT
Last week I suggested that EdSec Arne Duncan's plan to hold teachers accountable for - and to evaluate, retain, pay, and promote them based upon - their classes' standardized test scores would be invalid, unless they factored in the "one bad apple" effect of disruptive students, which recent research suggests causes lower test scores for their entire class.
Here's another factor that demands to be added: student homelessness --
The National Alliance to End Homelessness has predicted that at the current rate, the recession will result in 1.5 million additional homeless people within two years. According to the advocacy group First Focus, nearly two million children will be impacted by subprime foreclosures, including some half a million Latino children and more than 280,000 Black children. In a national survey of school systems, several hundred districts reported a surge in homeless children last fall compared to the previous school year.
I'm serious. Bleating "No excuses" to teachers for poor classroom performance when their desks are filled with homeless students is unfair to teachers and students - and the schools that face closure for low test scores. No homeless student is going to have the emotional stability needed to excel in class. Simply being bullied in high school transformed me from an A to a C student. Imagine the effects of homelessness on Mary Quaker's grades:
For many families, staying intact may mean staying on the streets. The dilemma may be deepened by a looming fear of separation by child welfare authorities, who may place children in foster care.
For Yolanda James's 16-year-old daughter, Mary Quaker, the threat of separation dwarfed material hardship. She struggled through living in a car, even sleeping in her school gym when her mother could not afford a motel, but she clung to what mattered. "I just wondered," she recalled, "is she going to put us somewhere so we can be able to eat and take a shower and all that? I'd always tell everybody, 'Just don't split us up. We'll all get through it together.'"
So Secretary Duncan, please commission some economic think tank to factor homelessness into your value-added data metrics.
Are College Application Essays Obsolete?
Published May 22, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
From my own experience here in Korea, where the elite families pay thousands of dollars for tutors to "help" their kids write their application essays for top-tier US colleges, my answer would be a resounding "Ya think?"
The director of admissions at Cambridge does. He says...
that his institution does not give any weight to personal essays in applications. “With the profusion of companies and Web sites offering to help draft applicants’ personal statements for a fee, no admissions tutor believes them to be the sole work of the applicant anymore,” Geoff Parks was quoted as saying in both The Times and The Guardian. “We certainly don’t assign any marks to personal statements,” Mr. Parks added in The Times.
He adds teacher references to the obsolete pile, too:
"now that students can ask to see their references, teachers have stopped saying anything interesting or controversial,” The Times reported, and those recommendations are therefore also given little weight.
While we're at it, let's add the SAT itself to the pile. It's no secret that money buys higher SAT scores, and parents who can pay are willing to. Walk down any street in Seoul, and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAT cram school.
photo by oceandesetoiles
Diane Ravitch's Modest Proposal for Klein, Duncan, Sharpton
Published May 20, 2009 @ 12:44AM PT
Something that stands out about Ed Sec Arne Duncan and his inner circle - Klein, Sharpton, and, lord help us, Newt Gingrich at the *cough* "progressive" Education Equality Project; Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mayor Bloomberg, and the whole Billionaire Boys' Club gang; Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and the "give us a rookie idealist and a five week crash course, and we'll give you a competent, expert teacher" gang at Teach for America - and their whole "reform" discourse is how much talk and proposed action we hear about teachers, and how little about teaching.
An obvious cause is that Duncan and most of his gang have more background in management (or, lord help us, politics) than in education. And the frightening thing is, when we listen to them, there's little evidence they're aware of the difference between an MBA and a Ph.D. in education. It's like the hospital comptroller thinking he should have the right to dictate surgical techniques in the O.R.
Even if Duncan, Klein, Rhee, Kopp, Gates, Broad, et. al. really do have deep knowledge of education research and classroom (and broader) realities, they need to win credibility in the education sector by demonstrating that knowledge.
Diane Ravitch hits on a way for them to do this with the following modest proposal:
I think our society is in dangerous territory on this subject of accountability. The so-called "reformers," the guys (yes, guys) who call themselves the Education Equality Project, would have the world believe that accountability is the key to improving American education. They think it can be done fast, not incrementally. They think the key to improvement is punishing the bad students, the bad teachers, and the bad schools. Their latest formula, as enunciated by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is to close down 5,000 schools and re-open them. I wonder where he plans to find 5,000 new principals and thousands of new teachers, or does he just intend to reshuffle the deck?
This approach rests squarely on the high-stakes use of testing. One only wishes that the proponents of this mean-spirited approach might themselves be subjected to a high-stakes test about their understanding of children and education! I predict that every one of them would fail and be severely punished. (read all)
21st Century Skills Coming to NAEP in 2012: A Preview
Published May 14, 2009 @ 11:21AM PT
Like it or not, 21st Century Skills and "tech literacy" will be on the National Assessment of Educational Programs (NAEP) tests starting in 2012. The folks at eSchool News have put together the following resources to give you an idea of what it means, how it will look, and how to prepare. So have a glimpse of the future of high-stakes testing, 21st Century American Style, on them:
And some free advice for teachers scared of having to "know" all of this technology: relax. Your best teachers, if only you'll use them, will be quite a large number of your students.
image by Pete Ashton
Another Flaw to Grade-Based Teacher Evaluations: Disruptive Student Ratios
Published May 13, 2009 @ 01:51AM PT
[A]lthough they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common actions and behavior of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed....
--Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels - A Voyage to Laputa
Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge blog picks up on a study covered in Education Next that finds that a single disruptive student can bring down an entire class' achievement. While that's probably obvious to any teacher, it's still good to have a study providing "data" for those to whom what is not measured cannot count as true.
Robert's article is worth a read, but there's an angle I want to add here: namely, that the study seems to seriously undermine the validity of any attempt to evaluate (and pay, retain, and promote) teachers based on their class performance on standardized tests.
Obviously, if Teacher A has one or more disruptive students in a class, and Teacher B doesn't, this study 
suggests that the effects of the disruptors in Teacher A's class will degrade their grades come test time - and lead to Teacher A being labeled a "bad teacher." Teacher B, meanwhile, by the luck of the draw, will suffer no such handicapping come test time.
If we want to get Swiftian and add yet more measurement-mania to the value-added teacher assessment procedures being developed up there in Laputa, I suppose we could suggest that individual students' disciplinary records - principal's office visits per class, number of suspensions per year, etc - be factored into each teacher's test-based rating. To be fair to students, too, since their performance will be tracked from year to year, each of their records should include the number of disruptive students they had in each class each year.
I'm only half kidding.
I wrote recently about the French film, The Class, which follows a class containing a disruptive student for months, and then shows the same class after that student had been expelled. The night and day difference in time-on-task and learning atmosphere is enough to make any democrat uncomfortable: we believe in equal education for all, yet a single troubled troublemaker can create unequal learning opportunities for his or her classmates, while the neighboring classrooms have no such handicap.
I had such a situation last year. A couple of students who, when they chose to come to class, sometimes came on time, sometimes with their course materials and homework, sometimes not. I finally decided to bar them from the class and send them to the principal's office for the duration, until they decided they could get their act together. I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, but it at least let me and the rest of the class learn in peace.
I read last year, also - maybe on Charlie Roy's blog, maybe Barry Bachenheimer's - about a school that increased its counselor staffing to deal with disciplinary problems. I don't know if that's a solution, either - especially with today's budget cuts.
But I do know, getting back to the problem this study points to concerning teacher assessment based on student achievement, that Ed Sec Arne Duncan has embarked on a "listening tour" to hear our thoughts about his plans. I hope he listens to this one.
Image of Laputa from Swift's Gulliver's Travels
How Top Countries Test: Lessons for Arne Duncan from Linda Darling-Hammond
Published May 07, 2009 @ 10:52AM PT
In one of my recent criticisms of the much-hyped McKinsey report, I promised to follow up with the following presentation by Linda Darling-Hammond, of the Stanford School Re-design Network, that compares and contrasts the assessment approaches of the world's top-ranked education countries to those of the United States. The presentation is from a conference sponsored by the Forum for Education and Democracy, which describes Dr. Darling-Hammond's presentation with this blurb:
“What we have thought of as fairly rare in [the USA] is quite common in most of the high-achieving countries internationally,” Linda Darling-Hammond began. Beginning with a list of 21st century skills, Darling-Hammond contrasted US tests - which require recall of a simple fact or ask students for a one-sentence explanation - with exams abroad that include designing science experiments, refining computer programs and explaining the reasoning behind solutions for complex problems. “[In many nations,] there’s a teaching and learning system, that operates to provide rich curriculum and strong outcomes,” Darling-Hammond said. “They are what assure that the higher-order skills are actually taught and practiced.”
It's 20 minutes long, but well worth the watch (the discussion of science assessments around 15:00 is especially noteworthy).
For those of you who don't know, Darling-Hammond led Obama's education transition team, and was the top choice for Secretary of Education among many progressive education reformists. Instead of getting this education professor to lead our reforms, though, Obama chose instead Chicago's Arne Duncan, who never taught in a classroom and has no background or advanced degrees in education. It's hard not to regret that choice - and not to wonder why we hear almost nothing about Darling-Hammond's ideas from Duncan - while watching the presentation.
Anyway, enjoy:
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