School boards are fighting back against high stakes testing

Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not sure how you got here



based on what you wrote. The kids you interviewed in the 90s were better educated than the kids you interviewed in 2008 (who most likely spent their high school years under NCLB dictates).

As to the Civil War writers I think there are probably a lot of things to take into consideration. I've read elsewhere about the high literacy rates before public schools started. I suspect that, like China now, they made no attempt to test every kid. I also suspect there was a bit of "I'll pay you a dollar to write this letter for me" thing going on. It's impossible to say. Maybe Setanta will show up and school me on the topic.

This "bad teacher" thing really bothers me. I don't think it's hard to fire a bad teacher, at least no harder than it is to fire any other bad government employee.

It's how they determine the "bad" that is the real problem. Should the "worst 8th grade math teacher in New York" be fired? All the data reports show she's the worst.

I think she should get to keep her job.

Read her story: http://eyeoned.org/content/the-worst-eighth-grade-math-teacher-in-new-york-city_326/

Do you think she should be fired?

If not, how do you suppose we ferret out these bad teachers?

The educational elite don't set the curriculum. Politicians and school board members are rarely educators. They typically have 0 background in education. Where did you get the idea that the educational elite are designing curricula?

I have yet to see any real evidence that education of 2012 is any worse than education of 1980 or 1950 or 1890. The number of kids with access to education has greatly increased in the past 150 years.

With more kids being included you will find more kids at a lower level of achievement, but there are also more kids receiving better education in American public schools than ever.

There are political reasons on both sides to decry the alleged horrible problems in our education system. And that is why our education system is always decried as "in ruin".

But objectively (outside of the problem of class disparities) our public education system remains excellent.

The only reliable information i know of regarding literacy at the time of the American civil war is that, although derided by Southern officers when their correspondence was captured for grammatical and spelling errors, the literacy rate among Federal troops was much higher than among Confederate troops.

One reason for the literacy rate being so much hgher in the North was that before the War there was no such thing as "public education" in any of the Southern states. Schools were private and certainly not tuition-free. Well-to-do parents engaged tutors for their children if they didn't wish to send them off to school. As a result, only the moneyed classes educated their children. Most Northern states had some form of public eduation, whether mandatory or voluntary, but paid for with taxes.

For those who could not afford a formal school, there was another method used in the south, which was also used in the north in less densely populated areas, especially those on what was then the frontier. This was that a young man who had received some formal education would conduct a winter school for children whose farm labor was not needed at that time of year. The young man would receive a small monetary recompense from a small group of families who would also provide room and board. If the boy went home each evening, he'd likely get a larger cash reward. He then was entitled to also submit a voucher to the county. The earliest signed document by Thomas Jackson (later known as "Stonewall" Jackson) was on a voucher from Green County, Virigina (now West Virginia) for conducting just such a winter school. He was about 16 or 17 at the time.

The literacy rates as between north and south are based on enlistment or conscription documents. The ratio of men signing their documents (as opposed to making a mark which was then witnessed) in Federal service as opposed to Confederate service was more than 3 to 2, but less than 2 to 1. This was the subject of an article in a Tennessee historical society journal which i read circa 1980.

I fail to see what is wrong with letting the educational elite form curricula.

I read the part where Finn claims a "generation" of Americans are "semi-illiterate". I know lots of Americans, I am wondering which generation he is talking about.

Speaking of access for the upper class....

Has anyone else been reading about this new August SAT? Everyone has to take it in June, except for the kids from the Society for the Gifted and Talented who can afford the $4,500 three week program.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/college-board-urged-to-cancel-special-august-sat/2012/06/04/gJQAG7wiDV_blog.html

I got that test prep for free. My school district selected high scoring students, and then offered them free test prep for the PSAT and SAT, in order to increase the number of National Merit Scholars.

How did you feel about that?

Has your opinion changed over time?

I think it was a gimmick, but my family was so clueless about education that it ended up being really good for me. I wouldn't have known that the PSAT was/is a pre-requisite for becoming a National Merit Scholar, so I would have missed out on a lot of opportunities.

My current thinking is that the SAT is just a way of getting around using family income in admissions. The SAT is supposed to correlate with success in higher education, but it also correlates with family income.

As the saying goes, "them what has, gets."

The Bunkum Awards:



Read all about it: http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2011

Boomerang, I watched the first few minutes of that video until I couldn't take any more. Other than the fact they don't appear to like charter schools, is there a point?

I have never in my life encountered a company, athletic team, or organization of any kind which functioned well over time that wasn't subject to objectictively determined feedback about its achievements or the lack of them.

If the tests of student proficiency in core areas like reading and arithmetic are dominating the school's activity and traumitizing the children as alleged in the opening post, then it is the teachers themselves in the schools in question who are doing this. Very likely the trauma and frenzy is itself a consequence of their earlier failure to achieve their stated mission in these core areas. If it is indeed the case that they must drop everything else to get acceptable scores on these tests then the conclusion that they have not been meeting their core responsibilities is quite inescapable.

Since the consequence of failing average scores on the tests falls on the school district, the scools and the teachers - and not on the individual children, it is clear that these school boards, schools and teachers are, by their own allegations, demonstrating the dominance of their self-interest over that of their students.

How good would professional sports be if no score was kept during the game?

The object of the school is to teach essential skills to our children. Unfortunately our public schools are dominated by a self-serving Educational bureaucracy and operated by equally self-serving teachers unions which resist any form of accountability or measurement of achievement at every turn. Worse they lard up their curricula with trendy nonsense designed to indoctrinate children in current politically correct doctrine at the expense of their primary mission. This makes everything easier for the teachers and makes it harder for anyone to measure what they achieve. At every stage in the process the public educational establishment and teachers unions have acted in their self-interest without regard to their real responsibilities.

In almost every case, when a charter or private school is made accessible to parents they flock to it in great numbers, filling the available capacity. That should tell us something. I believe the public school system is incapable of reform on its own. We need serious competition and the real prospect of its elimination through competition to fix it.

George, Do you really think that companies and athletic teams would run better if their employees were evaluated with a politically motivated, government developed, measure of their employees performance?

I don't know of any company, sports team or organization that would accept this. Nor do I think this would be helpful for any of them.

I work as an engineer in a private company. We decide for ourselves how to measure success. It works well this way and I would be very upset if politicians tried to interfere.

The idea that politicians are better than educators at running our education system is ridiculous.

Not to mention, that the exams contain multiple answers that are factually correct, but just aren't the answer that the test writers are looking for.

Interesting. I run a private engineering company and, can assure you that we measure the success of our engineers and scientists very carefully; do senior technical reviews of their work products; and carefully assess the quality of the resulting projrct and work product. Some of the engineers may think that they are autonomous, but they are the victims of illusion. We occasionally fire a few of them for poor performance too.

You are introducing the new assertion to this conversation that the tests "are politically motivated". What does that mean? The obvious political motivatiuon is to alter the behavior of those who manage and run failing public schools. I'll readily concede that that is political motivation, but don't believe it is inappropriate. Tests of proficiency in reading and elementary mathematics aren't hard to develop. Tests are never perfect, just as the scores in basketball games are never perfectly accurate measures of the relative play of the opposing teams. However, they are clearly good enough to provide the feedback and competition necessary for real excellence in the game.

You are not being told by government how to evaluate your employees, you are not required to instruct them in order to pass tests, nor to spend your own funds to pay for the effort. Your employees are not obliged to devote most of their time preparing to meet a government standard. The conservatives always howled about "unfunded initiatives," yet NCLB is the biggest unfunded initiative in government history. School districts have to find the money to prepare their students for the standardized testing, with precious little time or resources left over for anything else. Why do you think Boom calls it high stakes testing.

You're ever the polemical shill, O'George.

Yes, and as an organization you are perfectly able to do this yourself without outside meddling. I am sure that as an engineering company you rely on the expertise of your engineers even when it comes to setting standards and measuring success (at least the engineering company I work for does).

A school should be run the same way. The school should measure the success of teachers and students very carefully. They should rely on the expertise of educators to make this assessment.

You would never accept politicians meddling into your business or care about how the government measured the "proficiency" of your employees, would you?

That's a really interesting take because the original purpose of the SAT was to remove family income considerations from admissions - make things more of a meritocracy. The SAT does correlate with success in higher education. Family income correlates as well, but not because the SAT measures family income but because Higher Family Income -> Better Preparation for College -> Better SAT scores. High income is one way to achieve better preparation.

But the government is the employer in this situation.

I think the government should do testing because without it they have no idea where the holes in the system are. I think testing should not be "high stakes"; the tests should be one form of measurement, not the form of measurement. I have four children in the public school system and I am amazed at how much more and varied their opportunities are compared to mine. They have far more art and music exposure than I remember and a much broader range of acedemic courses. I see the exact opposite of the "all we focus on is math and english" argument but I do see the big focus on end of grade testing. I think the majority of teachers are of good intent and reasonably competent although some more than others. I think there should be mechanisms to identify poor teachers but I think testing their students is not an accurate way to do it. I personally favor repeated classroom observations. For those who say the "educational elite" are in charge of curriculums, I wish. Elected state officials are in charge. Hopefully they will pay heed to those elite who actaully take time to study the reams of available data. I would no more ask a politican to develop a curriculum than I would ask one to do open heart surgery. I'll take the "medical elite" for surgery anytime.