A retired Colorado teacher is spending his time trying to "defeat" the state standardized test (warning: annoying subscription process required):
If Don Perl gets his wish, the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests won't exist anymore. Perl, an opponent of CSAP, wants to kill the standardized test through the ballot box.
The Colorado Secretary of State's office approved the wording of a proposed initiative, crafted by the former Greeley middle school teacher, that would take the standardized tests out of all Colorado classrooms. Now all he needs is more than 68,000 valid signatures to put the initiative on the November ballot. Perl has to collect the signatures by Aug. 2.
Perl, who has been fighting CSAP for more than three years, said he opposes the tests because they are expensive to administer and government uses the tests as a threat to take away funding instead of using them as diagnostic tools.
"The threat is that if those schools don't do well, they will be taken over by the government and turned into a charter school," Perl said. "Who knows what chaos that will bring."
So Perl's only opposition to the tests is that if the scores indicate schools aren't doing well, the public system might be forced to give parents a choice? Why is "chaos" the only option that Perl can see?
The state uses the CSAP scores as part of the School Accountability Reports. If a school receives an unsatisfactory score three consecutive years on the reports, the state can turn that school into a charter.
Interesting. I wasn't aware that this was part of the NCLB; this must be Colorado's decision. Given that the tests are required as part of the federal act, though, I think it's unlikely the tests will be removed even if voters come out against the CSAP. Information on the CSAP can be found here. Colorado had pre-2001 laws on the books requiring the testing of kids from kindergartern to 10th-grade, but there's no indication that, before NCLB, schools doing poorly would be taken over.
And here's at least one person who will sign Perl's petition, if she hasn't done so already - Angela Engel, guest commentator for the Denver Post:
...Under the guise of accountability, policymakers have made test scores the complete indicator of what children will learn in Colorado. Instead of questioning that reasoning or examining the research around standardized tests, the public has blindly followed...
Um, it's not so much that the public doesn't "question" the research supporting standardized tests (which is substantial) as the public doesn't often see very solid information about the pros and cons of using these types of tests for this purpose. Even when journalists and commentators have operated with a solidly anti-test bias, rarely have they provided the solid research that would allow their readers to question the testing policy decisions.
Test scores have become the Holy Grail in education. By the time Colorado students graduate from high school, they will have spent, on average, a full 52 weeks being tested. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing reports that students will take 36 to 60 standardized tests during their K-12 careers.
"National Center for Fair and Open Testing" - yep, there's an unbiased opinion. As for 52 weeks being tested, I'm skeptical. Here's a breakdown, assuming the following - schools meet for 275 days per year for 7 hours per day:
1st through 12th grade = 12 (275) = 3300 days total, at 7 hours each = 23100 hours total for education
52 weeks = 260 days (five per week) = 1820 hours (assuming 7 hours count as a day)
1820/23100= 7.8% of total hours spent in school, or a little less than 1/12th.
For a 180-day school year, which is probably more realistic, this works out to be around 12%.
Assuming equal distribution of testing time per year (at 1925 hours per year for the 275-day model, and 1260 hours per year for the 180-day model), we arrive at a figure of between 21 and 22 days of standardized testing time per year (regardless of model). But according to this information, the four CSAPs are administered in each grade once a year, and testing sessions last only three hours each. That's 12 hours, or less than two days - where are the other 19 days of testing? Even with the ACT/SAT and NAEP in there, I don't see how this could be.
(Update: Kudos to Devoted Reader Zach, who noticed that the article doesn't say students spend 52 weeks taking standardized tests, but just tests. By following it immediately with the alarmist statement from FairTest, someone who's not reading closely - like me - doesn't notice that the qualifier "standardized" isn't there for the "52 weeks" number.
If the 52 weeks include every type of test, 7.8% of the total hours is hardly an issue. I should have done further math and noted that, if students take 60 standardized tests over 12 years - using the most outside estimate - they spend, at 4 hours per test, 240 hours, or only 1% of their time on these tests that educators like Perl and Engel hate so much. If we stipulate a 180-day school year, we see that less than 2% of the time is spent on standardized tests.
One might argue that it's not the amount of time spent on the tests, but the effect that the tests have on curriculum, that is the issue here. But then, why throw in these unsupported statistics?)
I wonder what kind of readers our children will be when they graduate, having taken dozens of tests instead of having read dozens of novels. What kind of writers will our schools generate when students have spent all of their time answering short-answer questions instead of articulating their ideas? I want more from my child's education than "proficient" test scores. Our children require more than a factory approach to schooling.
I agree entirely. But if my child's teacher were to forgo novels and creative writing entirely in order to do nothing but test prep, I'd have more complaints about the teaching style and the curriculum than the tests. Nothing about CSAP requires that teachers stop assigning novels and essay assignments, and I find it hard to believe that students who master tough novels would have a hard time on the exam.
A Colorado school district recently determined that dinosaurs would no longer be part of the first-grade curriculum. What could possibly be wrong with 6-year-olds learning about Tyrannosaurus Rex, you ask? Isn't the excitement of dinosaurs the reason we didn't drop out in the first grade?
I think I was more excited about ghosts, but still, what does this have to do with the tests? And that's one school district out of...how many in the state?
Jefferson County schools and the majority of districts throughout Colorado are implementing a new curriculum modeled after the CSAP - which also is used to rate schools - and pushing out things like dinosaurs.
Did I miss the memo about dinosaurs being essential in order to teach reading skills to first-graders? And while concern about classrooms changing to test prep curriculum is warranted, again - why is the test being held responsible when schools have decided that they cannot teaching reading, writing, and math effectively without help from McGraw-Hill?
Supporters argue that the CSAP tests students on important skills. Fifty short-answer, computer- scored multiple-choice questions cannot accurately reflect a year's worth of learning...
Define "accurately", and then show me an an alternate assessment that is this short (if it's 50 items, where are those 21 days of testing coming from?), has high reliability, and can be given this easily to every student in the state at the same time. There isn't one. Other forms of standardized tests (non-multiple-choice items) would be more expensive, more time-consuming, and less reliable. And non-standardized tests, which include teacher grades, means that student results cannot be compared between schools and between districts. Standardized testing is the least worst method of assessing every kid for comparison purposes.
The first time I wanted to become a scientist was in the sandbox during an palentological dig for dinosaur fossils (which I later discovered were chicken bones). My kindergartner will not find this same joy next year when she enters the first grade. She will miss the lessons on herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. Her instruction will not include ecosystems or the food chain. She will not come running home with questions about volcanoes or giant meteors. Shoeboxes filled with dirt mounds, dead plants and plastic dinosaurs will be replaced with worksheets crammed into notebooks.
Worksheets about what? Did Colorado decide that lessons must be topic-free and that any discussion of science is illegal? The kids will be learning about something; otherwise, how will they learn to read?
I'm not trying to be mean; Ms. Engel is described as someone who has worked a great deal with Denver's inner-city students, and I'm sure she's as concerned as all get-out about their education. And if Colorado has indeed removed all interesting content from lesson plans, she has reason to be concerned. But I doubt that's what Colorado has done; even if they did, would removing the tests mean that the curriculum would automatically revert to something interesting and effective, for every kid, at every school?
Update: Someone in the know in Colorado sent more information on recent Colorado testing results (here and here). My reader also points out that only one school, Cole Middle School in Denver, faces conversion to a charter this year if scores don't improve, and if so, it'll be the first school to have done so. Hardly the "chaos" that Perl envisions.
Speaking of Perl, my reader also pointed out this article, which says that three years ago, Perl was suspended for refusing to give the tests:
A teacher in Greeley was suspended for six days for refusing to give the tests to his students. Donald Perl said the tests violate Colorado's constitution and put non-English-speaking students at a disadvantage because most of the tests are in English.
Posted by kswygert at March 15, 2004 10:25 AM