The parents speak out about the impending plan in NY to hold back third-graders who flunk the state reading test:
Dedicated Harlem dad Matt McCoy thinks kids should be held back if they don't make the grade.
He picks up his third-grade daughter, Tatyanna, from school every day and helps her with her homework to make sure she does well.
He doesn't want her to move up through her school grades simply because of social promotion, but because she has truly mastered the material.
"I would want her held back if she didn't pass the standard requirements," said McCoy. "That's why we supplement her learning after school."
Meanwhile, teacher Carmen Barber tosses out every cliche in the book:
[She] believes that if you keep kids back until they make their grade they may never move up - because many factors cause them to fail in the first place.
Technically, one factor will cause them to fail - how well they can demonstrate their academic abilities on a test. That's all Ms. Barber needs to focus on.
"If they are not ready to move along they are never going to be," said the veteran teacher. "But eventually you have to move them. What are you going to do, have a 16-year-old in the third grade?"
Quite frankly, I'm all for abolishing social promotions if it results in 16-year-old third-graders, because that's about as stunning an indictment of the ineffectiveness of public schooling as I can imagine. It would be pretty hard for teachers to insist that the test, or the promotion rule, is the problem, if they can't teach kids to read at a third-grade level within 11 years of schooling. "Eventually you have to move them" - yes, by teaching them to master the material. Is Ms. Barber suggesting that a 16-year-old who reads at a third-grade level is somehow better off because he or she is sitting in an 11th-grade classroom?
Barber, who teaches in PS 175 in Harlem, says her pupils' tough home environment is often the cause of their academic difficulties.
"A lot of the parents work nights," she said. "The problem is that what we teach in school needs to be practiced at home and if they can't do that they will never be ready to move on."
I sympathize. It must suck to see kids fall behind because their home lives are so impoverished. But is moving them up the ladder really helpful?
Barber also blames a lack of school funding, which means there are not enough resources to deal with challenged kids.
"They can't be put in special ed because it costs a lot for the smaller classes and more teachers are required. Instead, those kids are thrown into the main system. It is all these combinations of things that keeps the kids down," she said.
At least one recent study has found no relationship between school funding and student performance:
No one has found a more statistically reliable benchmark for student performance across state lines than nationally standardized tests – the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the ACT Assessment Test (ACT), and the mathematics and reading tests administered by the congressionally-chartered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The results of these tests prove this year, as before, that bigger school budgets do not correlate with higher student performance...
Washington, Iowa, and Wisconsin achieved among the highest standardized test scores in the nation, yet Iowa and Wisconsin ranked near the bottom on percentage of funds received from the federal government, Washington and Iowa ranked in the lower half of states with respect to per pupil expenditures, and Iowa was ranked in the lower half of states with respect to average teacher salaries.
Granted, this is at the state level. But I rarely see anyone who claims that "funding is the problem" present any numbers to show that funding really is the problem.
Ms. Barber concludes with a generic anti-testing sop:
She also believes standardized exams aren't a good indicator of success because "some kids are just better at test taking. "The patterns are different for each individual kid."
What patterns? How they fill in the test bubbles? And for the record, I fully believe that some kids are better at "test taking" than others, but I'm also certain that these test taking skills correlate highly with academic skills. Despite what anti-testing educators would have you believe, bright kids aren't flunking standardized tests in big numbers; neither are unaccomplished kids acing the tests solely through test taking "strategies."
Posted by kswygert at March 8, 2004 04:06 PM