A top New York education official has squared off against NYC Mayor Bloomberg and his plan to retain third-graders based on test scores:
Board of Regents Vice Chancellor Adelaide Sanford said the state Education Department's guidelines advise against basing promotional decisions on a single test for elementary and middle-school students.
"Test scores should not be used in isolation because low test scores can often result from low motivation and other factors that are independent of a student's knowledge," Sanford said during a hearing sponsored by Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields.
If the test is that high-stakes, I'm not sure if motivation is an issue. However, one can certainly argue that the test is not a good enough measure of reading ability to judge whether a child should be promoted, and one can also argue against ever using a single test score to make such a decision. All test scores contain error, and while they may contain less error than subjective grades, that doesn't mean that supplemental information shouldn't be used in conjunction with scores.
Sanford argued the policy punishes students who lag academically because they have inexperienced or incompetent teachers.
Well, but if students are lagging behind academically, then it's reasonable to argue that they should be held back to retake the grade with a different teacher. After all, if no students of an incompetent teacher get retained, when will we discover the incompetency?
Such a policy doesn't take into account if children are struggling because of undetected health problems, including those that affect vision or hearing, she said.
Students with visual or hearing handicaps would, I assume, be struggling with all the grade-level material. There's no reason not to provide test accommodations for kids who already receive such help in the classroom, but if a kid hasn't learned the material (whether due to the handicap or not), I don't see where it follows that promotion to the next grade is required.
And she stressed that all the data she's seen shows that children who are held back are more likely to drop out. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein staunchly defended the tougher policy, arguing that troubled kids are worse off later in life if they're passed along.
Chicken-and-egg problem. Smart kids aren't likely to be held back. If kids who are retained one year in the lower grades then go on to drop out later on, where's the proof that it's the retention itself, rather than the lack of intelligence/motivation/discipline that led to the retention, that is the cause of that? I have no doubt that retention is correlated with dropping out, but that doesn't mean that retentions cause later dropouts. Correlation doesn't imply causation.
The chancellor stressed he's talked to numerous teachers who say their students are lost because they're years behind. And he said half the city's kids leave the schools without basic skills.
I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be a sixth-grader teacher who realizes that her class is at the fourth-grade level. I agree with Bloomberg that social retention can do much more harm than good, especially if it's done in great numbers. But I disagree with using one test to decide whether a child should progress or not. Perhaps the test scores and grades could be combined, where test scores are weighted so that grade inflation won't help a kid pass.
Posted by kswygert at February 25, 2004 12:27 PM