The Nation, the legendary publication of the left-wing's "snits and quarrels," as P.J. O'Rourke once put it, is acting postively ultra-snitty about standardized testing and the NCLB act. I don't have time to answer every "criticism" (most of which are acts of name-calling and outrageous hyberbole), but I do have to point out a few choice lines, so that you can see what passes for "valid criticism" of education reform from the far left:
It's true that in the past, schools could hide poor performance of, say, special-ed students by averaging it in with that of excellent students. Pulling out the subgroups creates what is called transparency. And that's fine, as far as it goes. But under NCLB, transparency is transmuted into school-bashing. In the words of the North Carolina State Board of Education, "A school's making AYP is an all or nothing prospect. A school will either have 'Yes' or 'No' in this field." One of Palo Alto's top high schools received a scarlet letter because some students skipped the test to study for AP exams.
In other words, transparency is okay, except when it's not. Pulling out subgroups is okay, until schools get slammed on the results. Quite a bit of equivocation here.
And remember, this is all based on how some squirrely kids perform on a standardized test that neither the public nor the educators have a right to examine. In some states a teacher is subject to reprimand or dismissal if she even glances at it. Or tries to comfort a child sobbing over the test.
"Squirrely"? Is that a real word? Is it supposed to be a blanket slam of all US students? What states have standardized exams that no educators ever see; which state withholds all exam results from the public? Can the author here give us a reason that teachers should be allowed to "glance at" live test forms before they are administered? Does he really think we believe teachers have been fired for trying to comfort students who are upset?
States must come up with a plan for achieving 100 percent proficiency by 2013-14, so they set up a grid: Oregon is typical, promising 40 percent proficiency in English/Language Arts in 2002-03, jumping to 60 percent by 2007-08, 80 percent by 2011-12 and 100 percent by 2013-14. Note that they're putting off the utterly fantastic gains until the last years. Maybe they're counting on NCLB's self-destructing by then.
Actually, as Jay Mathews already pointed out, the revision of those targets do not imply the "self-destruction" of the NCLB. What's more, when targets were previously set lower, schools didn't respond. That "100%" is supposed to spur schools on, but NCLB will most likely be modified once schools realize that just aiming to educate 60% or 70% or 80% of their charges is no longer acceptable.
A July press release from the Business Roundtable quotes Joseph Tucci, chairman of the Roundtable's Education and the Workforce Task Force: "You can't manage what you don't measure. No executive can run a business without accurate, granular data that explains what's working and what's not. Our school systems should be no different." Keep those 8-year-old widgets rolling along the conveyor belt! But man does not live by granular data alone. Neither should children, though everywhere music, art and recess are being cut--to make room for more test prep.
Ah, yes, the classic argument that students are dehumanized simply by being measured, and that testing must necessarily replace all other forms of discernment. Never mind that students who can't read at a basic level might not grasp the finer points of art history. Never mind that humans have been measured, evaluated, judged, poked, and prodded for at least the last couple of thousand years, and somehow we still have souls. The valid argument that some of these tests might not be accurate, or reliable, or informative, is here discarded in favor of the idiotic argument that human beings cannot be tested without their humanity being destroyed.
What does that make psychometricians like me, I wonder? God, or the Devil?
Posted by kswygert at November 14, 2003 03:10 PM