Like many others in the blogosphere, I've been following the forged documents story. Astounding. Absolutely astounding. The power of the blogosphere has been decisively demonstrated (and by bloggers that I love - like Powerline and LGF - no less). Now, all I want is for the idiotic forger to try again, perhaps with a document "proving" that Bush is dumb because he got low scores on the computerized GRE back in 1974. Then I get to jump in and be the next SuperHero Blogger Putting The Big Media In Its Place.
Hey, I can dream, can't I?
Anyway, here's a roundup of testing news from this week:
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A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Harvard found that charter school students in Massachusetts were performing better on reading and math state standardized tests. More information can be found here. The same caveats apply for interpretation of the results - it's far too soon to conclude that charter schools raise scores. It's also interesting to see the charter school opponents trot out the same old objections. Such as "Opponents of charter schools argue that the schools siphon off public dollars and top students from regular public schools. " As though the parents who pay those public dollars and raise those top kids don't deserve to have a say in how that money is spent, and where their kids are educated.
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A computer mixup sends California students to class without their STAR scores. ETS made a boo-boo with the zip codes, and now district officials are frantically trying to route scores to where they need to be.
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The NY Daily News supports Mayor Bloomberg's decision to end social promotion for fifth-graders. Current fifth-graders have until April - and $20 million allocated dollars - to learn enough to score higher than Level 1 on the state's standardized exams.
Money quote: "Bloomberg and Klein were vilified by many last year when they adopted a similar program for third-graders. Then the kids got into the swing of it, parents pitched in and test scores rose. Forty-one percent of the children who attended summer school made the grade, compared with just 19% the year before. The fifth-graders now will have the same chance, and there's every indication that with a full year's help, they'll do even better. "
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All the hurricanes of late may be helping little Floridians learn their alphabet (and how to tape windows), but the weather patterns are wreaking havoc on test schedules. Some administrators are asking for FCAT scores not to count towards funding this year, not least because some teachers are homeless and some classrooms still don't have roofs.
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Fellow blogger Stephan Sharkansky (Sharkblog) gets press as an opponent of Seattle's Families and Education Levy. No, he's not anti-family, nor anti-education; he's just anti-spending-money-with-no-accountability:
For Sharkansky, one of the most outspoken levy critics, the primary concern is the lack of regular, thorough program evaluations that demonstrate how the levy money was used and how it improved student achievement. Sharkansky said he has pored over pages of public records, including the levy's 2003 progress report, and thinks there is little data to show whether levy money was spent effectively.
"All the previous programs had 'measurable outcomes,' but they were so loose as to be largely meaningless," he said. He cited one example from the 2003 levy progress report: the Community Action Camp, a three-week summer program for high-schoolers that trains students to be "social activists" and places them in a weeklong internship with local community organizations.
Looking at the evaluation, he notes that the program's main achievements were that "67 percent felt that the project gave them a useful role in the community" and that "100 percent of the students involved showed increased leadership skills."
"What does that mean?" he said. "That doesn't say much."
Shark also got his own op-ed in the Seattle PI, here. Best comment: "Even as city leaders acknowledge they've done a poor job of managing the past 14 years of levy proceeds, they expect Seattle families to give them 69 percent more money in exchange for only vague promises that they'll somehow do a better job this time."
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The Texas A&M Battalion sticks its neck out for sexually-segregated classrooms:
The bottom line is the same: Separate the girls from the boys.
...Dr. Leonard Sax, a Maryland physician and psychologist, found in a study that girls tend to learn in a quiet and slower paced environment and liked to be called by their first names whereas boys like things energetic, fast paced and prefer to be called by their last names.
This is a nationwide trend re-appearing with the number of single-sex public schools increasing from four to 140 over the last eight years, according to Sax. And the trend keeps growing. CNN reported at least 10 single-sex schools were to open this fall in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and South Carolina.
This trend has such a positive impact on public schools that the U.S. Department of Education is looking to change parts of Title IX, the law that bars sex discrimination.
It seems to me that the same arguments used against homeschooling - that such students do not get exposed to the same material as in "real" schools, and also become "undersocialized" - get used in arguments against single-sex classes. As though education that in any form separates students from the "mainstream" will leave them deaf, dumb, and socially maladjusted.
Posted by kswygert at September 10, 2004 01:09 PM