Joanne Jacobs has some great stuff up today (I take weekends off from the blog; you can tell that she doesn't). She has a new column on high-tech testing up on Tech Central Station, and grateful for the article I am, because it defines adaptive testing (something that the layperson may not know about) and it has lots of good info on the overall rise of computerized testing.
Maryland mania: Joanne also has two Maryland education-related links, one encouraging, one ridiculous.
The encouraging story is about a new school superintendent in Maryland's Anne Arundel County who's determined to narrow the test-score gap that separates whites and Asians from African Americans and Hispanics. Superintendent Eric Smith has taken some risky chances in an ultimately-successful attempt to narrow the achievement gap, known as the "the holy grail" of school superintendents:
Last spring's scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test provide a glimpse of the academic chasm among college-bound students. White high schoolers across the country scored an average 1060 out of a possible 1600 on the widely used entrance exam, while Asian students did even better, posting an average of 1070. But black students lagged behind with an average of 857, and Hispanic students scored an average of 910. Locally, those gaps were even bigger. In Virginia, black students scored 210 points behind white students--848 to 1058. In Maryland, the divide was 244 points, with black students scoring 848, whites scoring 1092. In the District, where the majority of students are black, black students trailed whites by 424 points--819 to 1243.
Superintendent Smith is among a group of superintendents who were recently recognized for implementing the right approach to target minority students. Their methods depend on early intervention that frees the students from the soft bigotry of low expections - and relies on constant testing to boot:
All set concrete performance goals for their districts, and in most cases "those goals were outlandishly audacious," says Michael Casserly, the council's executive director. And everyone--from the superintendent to school board members to school principals--was held accountable for achieving the goals.
They replaced a mishmash of reading and math instruction with a rigorous common curriculum throughout the whole system. And they tested their students--sometimes as often as every eight to 10 days--to ensure they were mastering the material. In Charlotte, for example, all students were given six-question quizzes at the end of every math chapter, and the students who hadn't "gotten it" were given extra help. "We didn't wait until the end of the semester to find out that the students were falling behind," Smith says.
In 1990, Smith moved to Danville, Va., to become superintendent of the 8,500-student system. For the first time, he had the power to go after the achievement gap in a big way. Right away he began centralizing the elementary reading curriculum and pushing teachers to boost minority reading scores and find ways to keep high school students from dropping out...Two years later, he took over as head honcho of Newport News's school system, where he started talking, immediately, about improving the performance of African American students and raising the standards of every school...The community was skeptical. At one meeting... people told Smith: "You will not do that here. They'll ride you out of town." But he persisted.
"You will not do that here"? You will not raise standards in an attempt to convey to African American students that the tests are not culturally biased, that they can do as well as the white and Asian students? Good thing Superintendent Davis didn't listen to such nonsense. He stepped on a lot of toes and outraged a lot of teachers, but the minority students in his schools have the improved test scores and class performances that back up his methods.
Joanne's other Maryland story is a link to an outrageous rule given to a fellow blogger's child in a Maryland school - "Do not refer to yourself [in a family tree] as an American unless you are an American Indian". Insane.