Leave no child where?

Listen -- if we can't get something as basic as education right, why in hell do we think we're superior and can rule the world? Huh? A friend of mine, during a stint as a teaching assistant at a major university, was in despair about the essay questions she had to grade for a GRADUATE biology course. The papers were largely indecipherable and not one of them showed any ability to articulate anything relating to the subject at hand. She was going to flunk 'em all when she was told, no grades under C+.

This is typical school board logic: If the test indicates that children are not learning up to the standard, lower the standard.

Arghhhhh! This garbage pisses me off.

Ditto, Scrat.

Standardized tests are doomed from the start. Is that so hard to understand, that tests are DESIGNED so that only 10% of people do above 90 percentile, that only half score above 50% and, half HAS TO score below 50%. If everybody scored at the 90%, surely the test would be too easy and it would have to be redesigned!!! Why does the press and even many policy analysts so rarely realize this? It is not the tests that is the problem, but the way they are used. Besides, many kids do poorly with test, they don't fit everyone's nature. A smart educated kid can flunk any standardized test easily, they do not reflect the true level of knowledge to begin with. Moreover they are so impersonal and unmotivating, no wonder kids take no interest in school. But there is more to that. The overly general and unspecialized character of high schools, with very few ties to the work market is another put-off. Why would kids bother taking interest in school if it has no practical use for them? The tracking systems will not solve the situation, for they are designed to benefit the best students that want to go on to college and grad school. But the large body of students who might want to work after high school is left out without guidance and assistance. Some European countries or Japan may be inspiring for reshaping of the US education system, but the proclaimed principle of 'equality' - the goal of having everybody graduate from high school, getting the same education, putting as many kids through college as possible, will prevent any radical changes. Not to the kids benefit, I think.

How would you like to teach graduate school in NYcity?

Dag - The test is intended to measure whether or not a given child has retained the minimum required information for that grade level. Period. If the test is designed properly, there is no such thing as it being too hard or too easy. It either test for the appropriate level of knowledge, or it does not. If we assume that it does, then those who fail it lack that knowledge and need further instruction to gain it. Period.

They have an exam in Massachusetts, called the MCAS. Kids have to pass it to receive their high school diplomas. Some of the questions make no sense at all and others are plain too hard for a kid just 17 years of age.

Exactly right, scrat. If the test is designed right, then 50% of kids will score under the 50% of the possible score. And you have to expect that some percentage will flunk it, otherwise the test is wrong. However, how many times do you read that the test is bad, it's too hard, or whatnot, because 40% of kids are below 40% of the total score? That blows my mind for it is against basic knowledge. And yes, New Haven has a good example, what a riot it is right now that hundreds of kids are not able to graduate because they flunked the MCAS. MCAS is a standardized test and you have to expect a normal distribution, duh. If you want everybody to graduate, either have oral exams, or no exams, or a final paper or some other test that does not pretend to be standardized.
Besides, we examined the MCAS scores at Boston University, only to find out that the results strongly correlate (0.85) with race (especially Hispanic) and income level. Now is that fair?

Meaning of course that Hispanic students and poor students are most likely to do poorly on the test...

Dag - Wrong. You are assuming the test is designed to yield a standard deviation, rather than designed to test for basic competancy.

I would say that this is exactly the WRONG critera for developing these types of tests. The % of people scoring above or below 50% is totally irrelevant to the tests objectives.

Thank God someone else sees this, fishin'.

should be fishin, but in reality is not. that's how the tests are designed. first things they look at are the SCORES, not the information in the subject matter. ONly after that they adjust the test so that it approximates normal distribution. It is not my assumption, unfortunately.

I suspected that there was a correlation between score and ethnicity and socio-economic status. I remember there was a question about the microwave oven. I own one and still couldn't answer the question. What do kids do , who likewise don't own a microwave in their homes.


I think the purest test has to be some sort of math test.

This comment strikes me as significant. I worked for many years for the State Universities Civil Service System of a midwestern state. I originally got employment with that bunch as a bilingual secretary, for which i qualified by testing. I got credit as a veteran, but the extra points only meant that my final qualifying number was 105 out of a possible 100. Obviously, working in a language department meant that whether writing and speaking in English or French, you had to stay on your toes. We were lodged in the Foreign Language Building ("You've got your own building ? ! ? ! ?"--in the words of one professor calling from Cornell), with the Dept. of Comparative Literature, the Dept. of Spanish, Italian and Portugese, the Dept. of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Japanese Dept., and the Chinese Dept. Only the secretary of Comparative Literature and I were able to speak more than one language, among the civil service support staff of all of these departments, and she was Belgian, so her multi-lingualism should surprise no one. It simply wasn't a requirement for hiring civil service staff. One of our Professors, Francis Nachtmann, was a natural genius at teaching, and he had never published more than was necessary to keep his tenure--he spent almost all of his time teaching and loved it. He made a good deal of cash on the side correcting the English of other professors at the University who were embarrassed to submit manuscripts to the University Press with gross errors in their native language. I was saddened to see his obit in the NY Times. He used to urge all the graduate students to get a copy of English Grammar for Students of French. Damned good advice, too--it was simply appalling how many graduate students, AND professors, could not be trusted to proofread their own work for grammar, spelling and punctuation. (I do not refer to the Department of French, which maintained very high standards, thanks to the irritating Swiss bastard who headed the department.)

Later, i worked for another University in the system. There, i did quite a lot of work for PhD candidates on the staff who were writing dissertations and other papers. Our department head, to whom i was secretary, was also completing his PhD (it was an environmental center, and the qualifications for the Director did not require a PhD--hey, don't ask me, i'm not responsible for the standards!). Most of them routinely butchered the English language, and didn't care. One PhD candidate wrote a long description of his method for instructing Outdoor Program Aides, and referred to mentors and "mentees." I pointed out to him that the noun mentor derives from the name Mentor, the man who was left in charge of Telemachus when Odysseus went off to troy. Pointing out that there is no verb in English "to ment," the word "mentee" was in fact a non-word. I asked him if he had not simply made up the word to appear clever in the text. He admitted this, and said to leave the text as it was. What was worse, though, was that the PhD's who formed his committee, and who reviewed his work, had no problem with it. I know that the PhD candidate knew nothing of the classical work to which i had referred, and i strongly suspect the case was the same for the members of his committee, who ought to have been old enough to have had this in their education. There are many other examples of the poverty of education which i encountered in my years with the system, but i won't digress with them here.

My point in this is that when the standards slip so badly at the highest level, how can we expect much better at the elementary school level? When the President is so articulate, when popular entertainment has a cultural memory roughly equivalent to the life span of a fruit fly, why should we expect, and, indeed, how can we demand better from children?

Just thought i'd throw this in. For the record, i've never gone back to school to get my degree, although i had planned to do so while in the army. It has not affected my earning power, as i've taken a wide variety of jobs, and never had an ambition beyond having the few material possessions i've desired, and to live comfortably. With what i've seen in that portion of the higher education system, i don't regret the choice.

Setanta - We owe it to our children to challenge them, but more than that, we owe it to them to challenge ourselves. The real fly in the ointment is that sometime after government said it would educate every child, many parents decided that was one less thing about which they would have to worry. I don't believe it is possible for a teacher to fail my child ("fail" as in "fail to teach" not as in "give a failing grade") because I would never let that happen.

While we are in the early stages of experimenting with holding schools and teachers accountable, I would love to find ways to hold parents accountable as well, though I'm loath to give the government yet another inroad into our private lives.

I shudder to do so, but i believe i agree with you, Boss. I know who Mentor and Telemachus are, because i read it at home. I knew these people before i ever read a word of history or of Greek legend and myth in school. To me, the personages of history, and the characters of classical myth and literature are real people, the companions of childhood who have never deserted me. They are always there, standing at my shoulder, smiling.

My grandfather, who had an eighth grade education, taught me to read before i was four. Without the least hesitation, he handed me Wells' The Outline of History when i was seven, and kept up with my reading to assure i understood as best my maturity allowed. My grandmother, with a fourth grade education, was one of the best read women i've ever known. You dared not tell her you were bored--she'd find you some work to do, real work, or she'd tell you to go read a book. If the latter, the next time she saw you, she demanded to know what you'd read, and what it had meant to you. I don't think government should be in the business of assuring that parents do their education duty at home, either. It saddens me though. The word education in French refers not so a societal experience, it means what you learn at home. How sorrowful i feel when i consider that the word is almost meaningless in so many homes.

Sorry, back to MCAS, I just found this whole article, it explains better what I tried to say. The core of the idea is that MCAS should be a criterion test - to test the level of knowledge. BUT, in reality, as I tried to say, it closely resembles the norm-reference tests, that show normal distribution of scores. This is an excerpt from a very clear and useful article on the topic:

The MCAS, like other state tests, is widely assumed-even among its critics-to be a criterion- referenced test. Remarkably, an examination of its technical manuals reveals that this is not so. Questions for the MCAS are selected and rejected on the basis of their usefulness in discriminating among test-takers. For example, pilot test questions answered correctly by a large proportion of students in 1998 were mostly gone from the operational version of the MCAS in 1999.

the link: http://www.ccebos.org/Haney_%20MCAS_EdWk071002.html

2 quick anecdotes.

#1 I spent 4 years in the '90s as an Adjunct Professor of Paralegal Studies (Torts) for NYU. Used to give an open-book essay test. It was one essay and asked about tort concepts which would generally be found in Law School. No, I wasn't teaching Law School, but every semester I asked my students if they were planning on going to Law School, and every time it was all but maybe one student. And even for that student, the questions weren't unfair. After all, legal problems exist for paralegals just like they do for lawyers.

It was open-book, remember? Oy, the number of people I should have failed! I offered a question one year about a conversation held on a phone between two people speaking through a relay operator for the deaf, and they were speaking falsely about someone having a loathesome disease. Was there slander (you need a third party, or "publication" for slander)? Actually, it doesn't matter - a lie about a loathesome disease means it's slander per se, but you still need publication. No one got this part of the question. And, does the relay operator constitute a third party? Hard to say (this has apparently never been litigated), and no one got that (e. g. that you could argue this bit either way). The bottom line was that unless it was 100% spelled out in the notes, so as to be spat back, it didn't end up on the test papers. And, even if the information was in the notes, it generally didn't end up on test papers. Unbelievably discouraging.

#2 People sometimes do far better than the standard. I went to public High School in a class of 400 people. Over 300 of us went to at least a 2-year college. Over 1/4 of the class made the National Honor Society. We had teachers who challenged us. We had parents and a school board who cared. We had a community that thought that debate and chess were as important as football.

I firmly believe that these things made the difference in our lives. It wasn't standardized testing (although a lot of students voluntarily got Regents diplomas [the Regents is exclusively in NY and is somewhat like the MCAS but after 9th grade you can generally get out of taking Regents exams. But if you take enough Regents courses, you can get a Regents diploma and even a small scholarship to a New York state college of your choice]), but rather I think it was that there were things that were expected of us and we all worked to get there.

I graduated High School in 1979.