School boards are fighting back against high stakes testing

@engineer,

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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 am not sure I agree that the government is the employer (and I am certain the federal government is not the employer). When I have concerns about the my kid's school I go to the school principal. If there is a bigger issue I would go to the city government. I can't imagine a situation where going any higher would be a good idea. School is local communities and city government (if any).

But the real issue here is how effective is political meddling (and high stakes tests are political meddling)?

The reason companies, such as the one run by George, are effective is that the company runs itself with the expertise of its own employees. Companies have a mission and a set of values. They hire employees that help them meet fulfill their mission and define their own ways of measuring their success.

Schools should be run the same way. A successful company hires experts in their business and then trusts them to make decisions and measure success. Unfortunately it is not politically expedient to consider teachers to be experts in the field of education.

I agree that there should be a way to ensure teachers are doing a good job. High stakes testing is not he way to do this.

Quote:

I would no more ask a politican to develop a curriculum than I would ask one to do open heart surgery.

High stakes test constitute a curriculum. Whether elected state officials have the power to force a curriculum on local schools is not in question. The question is whether it is a good idea, or whether they should butt out and leave education to educators and local communities.

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@maxdancona,

The Bunkum awards are for bad research on education topics. If you go to the link it explains how the winners were picked. And, no, it's not just about charter schools.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

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.

So I'm guessing you should stop doing that. Instead you should take a huge chunk of money that you would otherwise spend on hiring and retaining quality employees, the equipment and tools they need to do their jobs properly, any extras that the company might provide to make the workplace more tolerable and enjoyable and throw that money to some "experts" who can devise and adminster tests that measure your success. Remember, you don't get to have any input at all into the test, whatever a bunch of people who have no experience in your field decide what's important is now what's important.

Since you can't afford good staff anymore you can bring in some unskilled "Engineer for America" recruits and cram everyone together into small offices. When your company is no longer to meet the standards set by the experts they'll simply close your doors.

Sound good?

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@engineer,

And the original intent of NCLB was to invest in schools in low income areas. It didn't work out that way at all.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

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.

I share the same reservations as you about Federal Government intrusion into matters that are the proper purview of local government. However, on issues ranging from racial equality to student performance of basic skills like reading and arithmetic, the Federal government has been meddling into local affairs for a very long time - in these and many other areas. I would prefer local solutions in every case. There are some issues which are serious enough to make me welcome an attempted solution from wherever it comes. This is one. The national educational establishment, including Federal and State bureaucrats, textbook publishers and the teachers unions have together developed a self-serving system in which insiders mnove from one node in the game to another, and which serves principally to protect their own interests over those of the parents and pupils to whom they should be responsible. Breaking their stranglehold over the system is, in my opinion a necessary precursor to the improvement of a public school system which is failing its nost needy students and parents.

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@georgeob1,

I see, so you think the way to break the stranglehold of Federal bureaucrats is a more powerful Federal program to control education. Good thinking . . .

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

There are some issues which are serious enough to make me welcome an attempted solution from wherever it comes. This is one.

No its not. As I keep pointing out, there is no real evidence to any alleged serious crisis in education. The crisis is invented by the politicians who want an excuse to grab control and say they are doing something.

Local communities do just fine (in any community that has enough funding).

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@georgeob1,

I just love it when people whose field of expertise is, say, business or engineering or politics start talking about the field of education as though it were just another form of one of these activities. It's really a case of everything you see looking like a nail because the only toool you have is a hammer.

That you test your employees fairly constantly and rigorously, George, to make sure they're up the job is probably a good idea for a variety of reasons. It halps assess their level of competence on the job, it prevents the need for more expensive re-training and it probably helps keep them on their toes and au courant with the latest devollpments in their field. I would suggest that school-age youth are not employees of the entity that is testing them. Propermotivation is far better achieved by dedicated and talented teachers who instill a love of learning in their charges.

In the final analysis, the onlly thing most of these tests reveal is a student's ability to pass a test. Do youreally think this is an important measure of anything? The worst part of this scenario is that, as long as the student is made to understand that passing this test -- or any test is probably more important than anything else, it is bound to stifle any creative research or actiivity into fields that the kid already knows he probably won't be tested on.

Comparing conditions in the workplace with conditions in schools is a self-serving cop-out.

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@boomerang,

But the SAT did work the way it was supposed to and college administrators didn't like the results. It showed that minorities were not as well prepared as the majority, that the poor were less well prepared than the rich, that people could send their children to exclusive private schools and get a better education than at the run of the mill public school, that boys score better in math and girls score better in language. That is why there is such a move away from using the SAT in admissions, not because the SAT doesn't work as a predictor of college success but because it skewers some of our sacred cows and using the results would tend to reinforce tendencies already in society.

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@Lustig Andrei,

Lustig Andrei wrote:

I just love it when people whose field of expertise is, say, business or engineering or politics start talking about the field of education as though it were just another form of one of these activities. It's really a case of everything you see looking like a nail because the only toool you have is a hammer.

That you test your employees fairly constantly and rigorously, George, to make sure they're up the job is probably a good idea for a variety of reasons. It halps assess their level of competence on the job, it prevents the need for more expensive re-training and it probably helps keep them on their toes and au courant with the latest devollpments in their field. I would suggest that school-age youth are not employees of the entity that is testing them. Propermotivation is far better achieved by dedicated and talented teachers who instill a love of learning in their charges.

In the final analysis, the onlly thing most of these tests reveal is a student's ability to pass a test. Do youreally think this is an important measure of anything? The worst part of this scenario is that, as long as the student is made to understand that passing this test -- or any test is probably more important than anything else, it is bound to stifle any creative research or actiivity into fields that the kid already knows he probably won't be tested on.

Comparing conditions in the workplace with conditions in schools is a self-serving cop-out.

Well I've had a lot of experience in Education though mostly as a student - grade & high school, University and four years of post graduate education - plus Navy Flight Training, Test Pilot School and Nuclear Power school. I've also done three years as an adjunct Professor at the University of Virginaia teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematics. All of those institutions gave fairly rigorous examinations which, though imperfect, were generally accurate assessments of my knowledge (and sometimes composure), and they did a lot to make me study and really learn the material at hand.

Your statement that "the onlly thing most of these tests reveal is a student's ability to pass a test" is specious and deliberately misleading. Learning "how to pass a test" in Arithmetic doesn't do jack **** to enhance one's ability to pass a test in (say) partial differential equations. The obvious fact is that a test in the subject at hand is an imperfect, but generally very effective, measure of a student's knowledge of the subject (how much depending on the the sample implicit in the test) and a very powerful incentive for the student to put forth the effort and study required for real learning. Learning is an active verb and it requires effort and study on the part of the student. Tests stimulate that.

I never thought that the tests I took from grade school through the PhD testing were anything more than attempts to assess my general knowledge and understanding of the subjects at hand by testing particular elements taken from it. They were generally effective and the scores I got were in almost all cases accurate measures of ny real knowledge and proficiency.

In my experience of life nothing works well over time without periodic examination and feedback. Not football, not basketball, not the practice of engineering, not teaching reading and arithmetic in elementary school, not teaching tensor analysis in graduate school and not even in governance where we have found that democracies generally do better than autocracies.

The notion that third grade teachers have a primary role of enhancing a child's creativity and not getting them to learn multiplication & long dividion is frankly absurd. Children are quite creative on their own, as I learned from the experience of raising four of them.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

All of those institutions gave fairly rigorous examinations

There is a big difference between examinations given by institutions that were written by the professors who actually taught at the institution, and statewide examinations written at the request of politicians.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Quote:
All of those institutions gave fairly rigorous examinations

There is a big difference between examinations given by institutions that were written by the professors who actually taught at the institution, and statewide examinations written at the request of politicians.

I'll accept that. However, my strong impression of the discussion here is that most of the posters arguing the point oppose the idea of standardized tests in general. I find that rather odd because several states including New York operated such standard testing very successfully for many years. Our current teachers unions oppose testing or ANY objective measures of their success (or lack thereof implaccably. They also oppose ANY proficiency-based standards for their promotion or pay. Can't imagine why if they are really so obsessively concerned about the "real learning" of their students, as their claques here claim.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

The notion that third grade teachers have a primary role of enhancing a child's creativity and not getting them to learn multiplication & long dividion is frankly absurd.

It is only absurd in the respect that you don't understand it.

There is a big difference between math (i.e. what professional engineers and mathematicians do) and arithmetic. Math requires critical thinking skills and involves thinking up creative ways to solve problems and discuss and defend the results. This is what you pay your employees to do. Arithmetic involves rote multiplication and dividion.

The skills learned in math (creative problem solving and logical thinking) are skilled used in other disciplines from history to philosophy.

I strongly disagree with the idea that arithmetic is more important than math.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

I strongly disagree with the idea that arithmetic is more important than math.

The ability to multiply 3.141592 by 2 is a necessary shill for trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, harmonic analysis and all that follows - just as learning the letters of the alphabet and the sounds associated with them is a necessary precursor for reading and even writing poetry or somgs.

No one compared their relative importasnce: only the necessity of doing one before the other.

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@georgeob1,

I taught physics in a public high school. I found that almost all of the kids were very good at solving for x in quadratic equations. They had been taught to solve for x and factor and all of the other rote turn the crank arithmetic crap we stuff into kids heads.

The problem was for all of this arithmetic which they could crank out nearly flawlessly, they couldn´t solve problems.

I had ¨A¨ students that looked at ¨Math¨ as a mad-libs. They had a bunch of templates they learned with blanks in them. To solve a problem they mentally went through all of the templates they had memorized to find one that sort of fit the words in the problem. Sometimes the results were hilarious.

These students really frustrated me. They completely missed the point of mathematics (even though they could breeze through math tests by rote).

This is a math teacher joke... ¨King Henry the eighth had five kids, how many kids did King Henry the fifth have?¨. The funny thing is that ¨math¨ students will set this up as a proportion and come up with an artimetically ¨correct¨ but mathematically ridiculous solution for it simply because they have memorized a template that fits problems that look like this and they apply it without any critical thinking.

Of course the math done by engineers and mathematicians relies much more on critical thinking and creativity then on arithmetic.

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@maxdancona,

What exactly is your point here????

Are you suggesting that proficiency in elementary algebra is a hindrance to learning physics??? That is decidedly odd because from Newtonian dynamics to elctromagnetic field theory to particle physics, relativity, and cosmology, the language of physics is mathematics.

Did the "physics" you taught in public high school involve any mathematics? If not, it wasn't physics.

One can attain rthe appearance of proficiency in any field by rote memorization, but soon enough when real understanding is required it ceases to work. This is as true in mathematics as it is in any other serious discipline, including the sandbox physics you were teaching.

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@georgeob1,

George, you completely missed the point. Let me try again.

Physics is based on mathematics. There is a big difference between mathematics and arithmetic. You seem to be confusing the two.

Mathematics is a rich language used to express ideas and solve problems. Mathematics is the ability to think critically and creatively and to express new ideas. Someone who is good at mathematics will be able to come up with a new solution to a problem of a type they have never seen before. And, someone who is good at mathematics can hear or read someone else's new idea and be able to respond intelligently to support or question it.

Mathematics is not about memorizing tables or plugging numbers into pre-fabricated turn-the-crank processes.

When I taught (or studied) physics we focused on Mathematics (as opposed to arithmetic). There is a problem to be solved. What is important is the ability to formulate ideas and express them.

I majored in Physics in college. The further I got the less arithmetic there was (really after the first year in college we stopped calculating anything). My graduate courses presented us with hypothetical situations (i.e. a charged particle in a electromagnetic field) and had us come up with functions to describe their behavior. Again the focus was expressing ideas rather than turning the crank to get a number.

And, as an engineer I use lots of Mathematics and very little arithmetic. Recently I developed a new algorithm and was asked to defend it. I had never seen an algorithm like this before and had to express to my co-workers and managers how good it was. I told them it was O(NLogN) and we discussed this compared to other approaches. This was something I had to understand on the basis of my ideas without having memorized. And we never calculated a single number.

When we teach kids English, right away we present them books to read, and stories to write. The purpose of English is to express new ideas and be exposed to new ideas. Sure, we have spelling tests later... but in truth the practice of reading is far more important that spelling and yes kids can read long before they can spell.

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@maxdancona,

I don't follow your somewhat tortured argument at all. Arithmetic and algebra are both part of what we call mathematics. You appear to be making meaningless distinctions. You started all this with the rather odd observation that young students proficient in the solution of quadratic equations were, as a direct result, unable to grasp simple problems in physics or abstract thought. Never mind the absurdity of the logic, in that nearly all physicists learned these same things before they started physics. I suppose that you are really saying that the rote recititation of something memorized is not a good preperation for physical (or any other kind of analytic thinking. That is rather obviously true and hardly needs comment from either of us.

The nonsecial part of your argument is that somehow the act of learning arithmetic is somehow disaling. That is so contrary to observable fact to be unworthy of additional comment.

Perhaps you are trying to say something else, but what you have written so far is far from clear.

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@georgeob1,

I am sorry you can't follow the argument. I was trying to make it as simple as I can. Let me clarify the few points that you have wrong.

Obviously learning arithmetic is not a barrier to mastering mathematics any more than spelling is a barrier to writing. The most important part of writing is the ability to express ideas. There are excellent writers who can express ideas clearly and outline new thoughts creatively who are terrible spellers. But a great speller who can't express themselves is not nearly as valuable as a great writer who can't spell well.

And the most important part of Mathematics is the ability to express ideas. I know people who have earned advanced degrees in mathematics and science who never spent the time to memorize their multiplication tables. It just isn't necessary.

What I am saying is that the ability to express, discuss and explore ideas is the key part of mathematics. That should be the focus. Arithmetic doesn't have to be a barrier, but if the focus becomes memorization and regurgitation it can block out the important part of mathematics.

Mathematics isn't about memorizing tables, or plowing through pages of the same problem by rote. Engineers don't do this. Mathematicians don't do this. Making students do this is a waste of time.

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@maxdancona,

I think that you don't know or understand either mathematics or engineering - or, for that matter literature or poetry, very well.

Yours are sophomoric ideas that have been thoroughly discredited by educators who applied them over the past four decades. There are stages in the mental and emotional development of people and limits to what can be grasped or absorbed as we grow. we aquire skill and understanding by stages and must always have a foundation for the next step. One must walk before he can run.

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School boards are fighting back against high stakes testing

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