From Charleston (WV), here's a personal essay in the Sunday Gazette-Mail, written by a professor of education who questions the usefulness of standardized tests, accountability, and education in general:
Few who have written on the subject [of standardized testing and school accountability] question the assumption that high-stakes testing equals true reform.
Really? I see people questioning it all the time. If anything, the media often seems inclined towards the assumption that standardized tests are flawed, biased, unfair, or unnecessary. If few writers had anything negative to say about testing, I never would have begun this blog.
House Speaker Bob Kiss, in fact, wrote that “Democratic lawmakers and educators agree wholeheartedly” with the conceptual foundation of the No Child Left Behind act. Perhaps he associates with educators with whom I am unacquainted. Many of my colleagues and graduate students, teachers and administrators themselves question the wisdom of substituting “standards-based accountability” for genuine educational improvement.
How many of her colleagues and graduate students have been able to show why standards-based accountability cannot go hand-in-hand with genuine educational improvement? Is there any reason to assume that it cannot? And notice that parents are not mentioned here among those who might be questioning the wisdom of accountability. I don't think it's a coincidence that they were left out of this discussion by the author.
First, as the Gazette’s Oct. 12 editorial recognizes, it is nonacademic factors that best explain the variance among test scores when schools or districts are compared.
Education Week reports that a study of math results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that a combination of four factors accounted for 89 percent of the differences in state scores — number of parents living in a child’s home, parents’ educational background, type of community where students live, and poverty rates.
Analyses of state tests have found comparable results. Those findings are no surprise to educators, who are familiar with more than 30 years of research confirming the data.
The author presents this as an argument against standards, but couldn't it also be read as an argument against education itself? If 89 percent of the variance between schools is explainable by the background factors, why educate children at all? Doesn't the reliance on this statistic suggest that a child's educational attainment is all-but-predetermined at birth? It seems odd that a professor of education would use this statistic.
I've been all over the Education Week and NAEP websites, and I can't find any reference to a study showing that those demographic variables explain such a huge amount of variance. Regardless, these alleged results only apply to the math portion of the NAEP norm-referenced exam. What about the reading portion, or all the other areas of the exam?
What's more, some would argue that it is bad schooling that has kept children in bondage to those "non-academic" factors not under their control. As E.D. Hirsch puts it, the children from poor backgrounds are more dependent on the quality of their schooling than the children from more privileged backgrounds. To say that children cannot be helped simply because their parents did not go to college is to abdicate any responsibility to help those children who need it the most.
Second, norm-referenced tests were never meant to evaluate the quality of either teaching or learning.
The Stanford Achievement Test, which West Virginia used through the past year, is designed so that only about half the test-takers will respond correctly to most items.
The primary objective of these tests, as researcher and author Alfie Kohn points out, is “to rank, not to rate; to spread out the scores, not to gauge the quality of a given student or school.” To use them in that fashion is not only unfair, but dangerous, particularly in light of the sanctions which can be leveled when a student or school fails to perform “up to standard.”
Here, I have to say that while I believe NAEP is a useful mechanism for comparing schools, one can certainly argue that schools should be measured with the use of criterion-referenced tests instead of norm-referenced tests (for more discussion of these types of tests, click here). However, until everyone in the nation can agree on what those criteria are, there's no way to compare schools across the nation to one another without using the norm-referenced exams that are taken by students in every state.
It's a bit of a dilemma, but it is by no means proof that tests such as NAEP cannot be used to compare performance across schools. It just means that to come up with a system of accountability that is standards-based requires that we develop those standards, and that hasn't yet been accomplished.
Speaker Kiss and others were quite specific on this matter in a Jan. 6 column, noting that the Legislature’s understanding of “accountability” involves “a system of sanctions and rewards.” Sanctions and rewards, however, are not opposite concepts. They are, in fact, quite similar.
One leads students and schools to ask what will happen if they don’t perform; the other, what they’ll get if they do. Like the proverbial carrot and stick, both elicit only temporary compliance, and neither encourages what’s surely a more appropriate question: Is there any real learning going on here?
Is there any reason to assume that there is not? Rewards and sanctions are used to teach children a great deal in their early years, and such methods do not cheapen the learning. Life itself involves sanctions and rewards, but simply because a reward is offered for good academic performance does not imply that the performance is artificial, and just for the sake of the reward.
It isn’t standards that are in short supply here. It’s common sense.
Many advocates of high-stakes testing have not merely ignored but contemptuously dismissed the relevance of the points raised above. Explanations about the impact of socioeconomic status or the failure of standardized tests to measure genuine student learning are written off as “excuses.” This is both disingenuous and thoughtless, and, like any other attempt to diminish the relevance of circumstances, ultimately serves the interests of those fortunate enough not to face them.
I disagree. The assumption being made by the author here is that people who think that poor children can scale great academic heights, despite having the SES deck stacked against them, are not only unrealistic, but elitist to boot. Why assume that all those in favor of standards-based accountability are "fortunate enough" not to face the circumstances? Some of those most in favor of accountability are called "parents," and they do indeed face the circumstances, mainly when confronted with schools who believe that a low level of performance is all that can be expected of children from a certain demographic.
It can be argued that high-stakes tests have precisely the opposite effect their advocates claim. The movement driven by what Kiss described as “an aggressive measurement and accountability system” essentially lowers meaningful expectations. Schools are encouraged to use a one-dimensional tool to measure student achievement.
That's because such one-dimensional tools are often the most reliable and most useful for accountability. That doesn't limit schools to teaching in a one-dimensional sense, however.
Growing disparities among our children are not so much neutralized by public schools as they are reflected in them. Until we insist on more equitable funding for schools, on decent salaries, and on more support for social services designed to help those in need; until we can ensure decent housing and access to adequate health care; and until we establish job opportunities for those who have none, performance standards for large numbers of children will be inaccessible and immaterial. And our schools, as Geoffrey Rips notes, “as the last large mediating institutions in our society, will continue to mediate inequity.”
Ah, so that's is what all this bleating is about. The author is just angry that these demographic differences exist in the first place. So, to recap, this professor - of education, mind you - is declaring public schools to be absolutely useless at educating any students who comes from a poor background, such schools being completely at the mercy of the raw material with which they are working (i.e., the students). It will be only when everyone is born equal, and there's an unlimited amount of money to give to those who don't have any, and we can guarantee jobs for everyone, that we can reasonably expect schools to leave no children behind.
In other words, when cradle-to-grave socialism is successfully instituted in the US, or when pigs fly. Whichever comes first.
Posted by kswygert at November 3, 2003 03:40 PM