Be grateful for those standardized tests
One of the most common criticisms I hear about standardized tests, especially high-stakes admissions tests or IQ tests, is that they "reduce people to a number". I say to these critics, be glad you live in a society where we at least give you a test before assigning you a number, instead of practicing the extremely insulting and worthless method used by Dr. Adel Sadeq, chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association. Yeah, I sure trust a man who advocates suicide bombing and the destruction of Israel to use psychometric terms legitimately.
I shouldn't even bother to point out that (a) legitimate psychiatrists don't use the term "stupid" for the lower part of the IQ bell curve, and (b) 110 is in fact almost a standard deviation above the mean and would be labeled "bright normal", because that would assume I'm taking the unhinged Dr. Sadeq's comments at face value. I don't care if he's deliberately exaggerating in order to make his reprehensible political point; psychometric evaluation is my field and I don't want to see some murderous anti-Semite tossing the terms around. (Thanks to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and to Damian Penny over at Daimnation! for the link)
Good site of the day
Check out the Education Intelligence Agency, which casts a critical eye on the education and testing news today. They provide good coverage on the NEA and breakdowns of standardized test scores and educational statistics. This is where to go if you want to follow the passage of NEA and other teachers union-related bills.
Kudos to ParentSoup for providing facts and discussion on standardized testing that are models of clarity and balance (or, as they put it, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly). This article does a great job of explaining the Good, and I'm not at all surprised that FairTest gets to inform us of The Bad. The "What Every Parent Should Know" article has a list of questions that I wish to God every parent would ask, in order to get their information straight from the source, rather than from the overly-hyperbolic comments that comes through the press from the anti-testing organizations.
Privatizing Philly's schools
The LA Times has a good article today on the tremendous experiment currently going on in my hometown of Philadelphia. The article doesn't exaggerate the problems that Philly has - the combination of awful schools, a lack of good affordable housing, and the ridiculous wage tax on those who work and/or live in Philly has created a situation in which college graduates tend to flee the city either for their first job or when their first kid comes along. Not a good formula for creating a vibrant and self-sustaining city. I happen to love living here, and I'll be keeping a close eye on how this market-driven approach works (you know I'll be keeping a super-close eye on those test scores). This approach can't be worse than what's currently in place, when so many of Philly's students don't show even basic levels of competence on reading and math tests.
A few quick hits:
Yet more evidence that homeschooling can work - This is the first time I've seen interviews of adults who were home-schooled and who plan to do the same for their kids. I've posted on here before about the relatively high test scores of homeschooled children; this article addresses the accompanying argument, "Yes, the test scores may be high, but homeschooled kids can't be properly socialized, right?" Wrong.
A Cascade Policy pub on teaching job skills in school (requires Adobe Acrobat) - When I first heard about this article, I thought, "Good, this school district realizes that not all kids should attend college, and those kids should be prepared for the working world." The Salem, OR school district has gone too far, however, and is requiring the test accompanying the training, the Certificate of Advanced Mastery (CAM), for graduation from high school. Why? The college-bound kids may not need it. The non-college-bound kids may need nothing but. Another unfortunate example of a test being used in a way that wasn't intended for it.
Boneheaded research - A new book on women and career choices says that women are unhappier today because they are putting careers before children. I've seen this debate rage on in several quarters, but this author goes too far. Women should be taught cooking, not science? All women are unhappy at age 30 if they choose a career rather than kids? Sorry, but this scientific woman in particular would have been miserable if all she had to look forward to at 30 was a couple of ankle-biters and some masterful souffles. To argue that women should be allowed to choose kids and home over career is sensible; to argue that science education should be compulsory for men but not women is ridiculous and insulting.
By the way, I found all these links at the excellent Freemarket website. Great stuff, and a sweepstake every month.
Shameless bragging
Hey, I got a royalty check today. No, it's not a huge amount, but it's nice to feel like a professional writer, even I was just a co-author on a few chapters of a book that very few people are ever going to read. I'm not slamming the book - the chapters I worked on consumed two years of my graduate school career and I'm very proud of how it turned out. Still, I don't expect a dense textbook entitled "Test Scoring" to hit the best-seller list, nor do I expect to gain fame and fortune for writing a chapter such as, "Factor Analysis for Items or Testlets Scored in More Than Two Categories". I'm just happy to be able to go out for a fancy dinner this week, and then buy some nice things for Mother's Day. I haven't made as much money as Instapundit yet, but it's a start.
Following California's example?
Maryland is changing their tests as well. The MSPAP is on its way out, and Maryland now has to develop a new test that is in line with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. The new test must be in place by next May, which is an extraordinarily short lead time to get such a program in place.
Also on the Baltimore Sun's excellent website is one of the few explanations that I have seen in the media on the feasibility of computerized testing. This is my area of expertise, so to speak. I'm somewhat familiar with the "e-rater" technology that is meant to automate essay scoring, because I've seen the research presented at several professional conferences, and I'd love to see more media coverage of it.
A few other comments:
The author says that the computerization of the test allows for personalizing the test to each student and that "personalized tests, of course, make it all but impossible to cheat." In saying this, the author seriously underestimates the determination of test-takers and the limitations of personalized tests. The tests may be personalized or adaptive, but the item pool is not infinite, so there will be item overlap among test-takers. There are methods by which to stagger items in item pools and limit the re-use of items, but no test out there has a large enough item pool so that no two test-takers have no item overlap whatsoever. Human nature (and high-stakes testing) being what it is, I have no doubt test-takers will try to pool and share information (the current non-judgmental psychometric term for "cheating") on any such test, and the more the item overlap, the more the test-takers will be able to use "shared information" to their advantage.
Another quote: "ETS says its research shows a 90 percent correlation between human and computer essay scoring", which is not bad at all, and I wish the author had pointed that out, and perhaps provided a little eduational information about inter-rater reliability (it's a short article, though).
Finally, while it's perfectly fine for the author to note that "solving problems of security and confidentiality also will take time", the obligatory and unimaginative scare quote about how this is all a "brave new world" could have been left out.
"Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?"
That's one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, Blade Runner (the Director's Cut, of course). I watched it last night, once I had completed the move into my new rowhome (the moving is what kept me from updating this blog for four days). Not only is it a great, deep, dark sci-fi flick, but it's one of the few that I can steal lines from about psychometrics (such as the aforementioned quote, or any other general lines about the Voight-Kampff tests). I have to stretch the point, true, but the popular entertainment sources for referring to (or making fun of) psychological tests are few and far between.
Another source that's always good for a few laughs at the expense of standardized tests is the comic strip Safe Havens. Bill Holbrook is one of my favorite cartoonists (he also creates On the Fastrack and Kevin & Kell), because he mixes the normal and the fantastic together in a very insightful and funny fashion. The kids in Safe Haven take the usual potshots at the standardized tests they endure on a regular basis, but in an intelligent (and good-natured) way. The most recent strip is here; the dark-haired guidance counselor is actually a border collie who's been turned into a human. Apparently she does a good job of herding the students into filling out those bubble sheets.
Yeah, that's me
In case some of you were wondering, that's a pretty good example of what I look like over on the left, there. Stor Entertainment has a template for all sorts of little "stor troopers", so go make one for yourself today. And yes, my actual hair really does have yellow stripes in it!
California switches tests
Why does it seem like every third post on here is about California? Anyway, California has swiched from the STAR test (using Harcourt) to the California Acheivement Test (under contract with ETS). I am not familiar with either test, although I do know that both are norm-referenced tests that will allow California students to be compared to students nationwide. At first I was surprised that California would switch, given the stakes, but it turns out that the STAR was due for substantial revision at any rate, and an equating process will be in place so that STAR and C.A.T. results can be compared.
The latest poll on testing
Education Week has the results of its second annual opinion poll online. I have excerpted the section on testing and reproduced it in its entirety below:
Testing Views
A large percentage of Americans—74 percent—support requiring students to pass a basic-skills test to be promoted to the next grade, the poll suggests. But the respondents provided different opinions about the role of standardized testing.
About 25 percent said linking promotion to the next grade to performance on a test would help schools identify and help those students who need extra attention. But an equal percentage said they were concerned that focusing too much on testing would force teachers to "teach to the test."
The poll also shows that only 8 percent of Americans are worried that more testing will lead to higher dropout rates.
Last year's PEN/Education Week poll showed that almost 30 percent of Americans responding believed that improving teacher quality was the surest way to improve student learning.
And this year's results haven't changed. The second most important step is equalizing funding between rich and poor schools, with 16 percent of the respondents choosing that remedy. Twelve percent said that having all children read by the 4th grade was the most important factor in raising achievement, but Mr. Griffith said he wouldn't be surprised if that option rose to the top in a few years as the public focuses more on results."
These results are about what I expected, and much more even-handed than the media and the anti-testing hysteria crowd would like us to believe. In response, the testing and education fields should emphasize to parents that we agree with their concern about testing basic skills, and demonstrate to them that "teaching to the test" is just teaching those skills, if the test is well-constructed.
Whose test should we use?
The Sacramento Bee published an article entitled, "Teachers try to upend school reforms" (you can go here and search by title to purchase the article for $1.95). The California Teachers Association has sponsored legislation (in the form of AB2347) that is being described as a "frontal assualt" on the policies of Governor Davis. High points from the article, with my commentary:
The bill would "mandate that 'high-stakes decisions' not be based on test scores alone."
Fine, if you tell me what else you plan to base them on that is valid, reliable, and not subject to variation based on political climate or the teacher's mood that day.
Sanctions "could not be imposed under AB 2347 unless the state significantly altered its accountability program to consider more than just test scores."
See previous comment.
Teachers "feel the state's current testing system is 'terribly flawed,' producing too many tests that eat into valuable classroom time and don't adequately measure student knowledge.
So why trash the system? Can the number of tests be reduced, or the class time on them used more efficently? And what evidence is there that the tests are not adequate?
Hold teachers accountable, but not for socioeconomic factors they can't control -- and not by test scores alone, Goldberg said.
Fine, just let me see those other measures that will go into accountability.
"Things are not going to get better by browbeating the principal or telling the teachers they're slugs or worms,"
Wow, was that language really part of the state standards? Didn't think so. I propose a measure that makes it clear that holding teachers accountable is not synonymous with calling them names (or, heavens, hurting their self-esteem).
[Under AB2347] The state's Standardized Testing and Reporting Program (STAR) [will be] replaced by a new achievement test that would be aligned to state standards and minimize classroom disruptions.
How on earth were those teachers preparing for the previous tests, if doing so "disrupted" class? I thought disruptions were things like food fights or foul language. Anyway, bring that new test on. If it actually exists already, that is. Otherwise, we're seeing a proposal to replace an established test with a non-existent one, with little to no mention of validation, reliability, content domain, etc.
[AB2347 would create] a new state board to administer the tests, thus removing responsibility from the state Department of Education and the state Board of Education. Five members would be appointed by the governor and one apiece by the Assembly speaker and Senate Rules Committee. The bill requires that a majority of board members be teachers.
Ah, so the test administrators would be a small group of hand-picked pals of the Gov, many of whom would be held accountable if their students don't do well on the tests. Yes, I foresee a test in the future where minimizing classroom "disruption", and quite possibly any uncomfortable race and sex differences, trump all questions of validity and reliability. Um, were there going to be any psychometricians on this board?
Students [are] not to be tested if they aren't proficient in English.
And we're going to be able to tell if they're not proficient...how? The teacher's comments? Self-reporting? Osmosis? Wouldn't a non-scored form of the test (under the current law) be the best way of knowing how many of these students you've got?
Elimination of the soon-to-be-imposed requirement that students pass a high school exit examination to receive a diploma.
Hey, a reasonable suggestion! Although I'd like to know more about the passing rates now, and I'd like to see the test stay in place just so the school has an idea of how well these teachers are preparing students for graduation.
Back again, and rather nervous about it
I just got back from the conference in Minneapolis (more on that later). Waiting for me upon my return was a nice email from Steve Sailer, who has a site of his own that takes on a variety of topics related to human biodiversity. On his page, I found a link to a story that I missed, about a professor in Maine who made "racist" statements about IQ.
Hmm. Now, it's possible that the newspaper reporter is not giving the full story, and certainly it sounds like Professor Broida may have incited his students with a blunt, accept-no-argument tone in his comments about IQ and race. On the other hand, the "hateful, racist" statements are described as follows:
[Professor Broida] lectured students about the debate over whether "nature" or "nurture" influences human behavior more. He told students that some psychologists argue that there is a difference in intelligence between whites and blacks and that it is due to blacks being exposed to harsh environmental influences, but that others cite a genetic cause...psychologists who espouse the genetic theory would say that blacks are "less intelligent" because of "their genes, their inheritance. They've been bred for years to be big and strong, not smart."... his own conclusion is that: "It's not nature or nurture. It's both."
This is pretty much the current wisdom and standard explanation of the controversies surrounding differences in IQ scores. It frightens me if we are indeed moving toward an age when such accurate (and not incidentally, constitutionally-protected) speech is offered as proof of racism.
Professor Broida was not teaching a class on psychometrics, so he may not have given the usual disclaimer that the average difference is on IQ scores, not IQ. This seems like splitting hairs, but all tests measure traits imperfectly, and the blunt comment that blacks and whites differ "in IQ" has a psychological effect on an audience - the statement will seem to be that IQ is a perfectly-measured, perfectly-reliable, and somewhat more permanent state of being, rather than an imperfectly-measured quality of a person. What's more, his class is an introductory psychology class, with no statistics knowledge required, and I know perfectly well that such students tend to interpret "A and B differ on average" as "everyone in group A is different from everyone in group B", because they have little knowledge of overlapping distributions, standard deviations, and so forth.
I know that if I were teaching this subject, I would use the phrase, "There is a score gap on IQ tests such that the distributions of blacks and whites, while overlapping, have different means, and [I think] different standard deviations. The black mean tends to be one standard deviation lower than the white mean. The search for the cause of this score gap is something that has been mired in controversy for the last forty years. The current wisdom is that (1) such tests must continue to be reviewed for culture bias, (2) nature has an effect on IQ scores, in the sense of heritability of intelligence, physical health, and pre-natal care, and (3) nurture has an effect on IQ, in the narrow sense of the quality of education that children get at home, and the broader sense of the socio-economic status and early education of children." I would not mention the "nature" argument without also giving equal time for "nurture" examples. I would then refer them to the excellent book, The Black-White Test Score Gap, which is chock-full of information yet intelligible to layreaders.
I hope that Professor Boida is not penalized for his comments, which are protected, and he should not be muzzled because one student finds them offensive. On the other hand, I would never mention slavery during a lecture on IQ, because I don't think it is relevant and I know that some students will feel uncomfortable, or ashamed, or generally emotionally upset over the topic.
What's my name again?
Oh, and thanks for the permalinks from Ye Olde Blogge (who lists me as Kimberly Swygert), The Musings weblog of Enter Stage Right (who lists me as Number 2 Pencil), and Godless Capitalist (who lists me as Kim the Psychometrician). Hey, I don't care what they call me, as long as they get the ULR right. :)
So long, farewell...
...for one more week, anyway. I'm off to lovely Minneapolis (snow expected on Sunday!) for the 2002 meeting of the ACM's Computer-Human Interaction conference. I'll be checking email but not posting while I'm gone. Hopefully I won't miss a full-blown testing controversy while I'm in Minneapolis having fun doing...doing what, I'm not sure exactly. Unlike Minnesota, I'm not big on malls, American art, or Swedish culture, so it's a good thing I've got a lot of reading to catch up on.
And they say our children's test scores are the problem?
Gadfly Tony Woodlief has been inciting the masses with his postings on government schools. He follows up by giving time to letters from readers and providing links that prove his point, including this truly abysmal set of teacher scores. When only 202 out of 758 teaching applicants in a suburban New York district pass a reading comprehension test meant for high-school students, don't tell me the problem lies in the exam.
Hey, when Tim Blair starts yakking about the need for a standardized test for journalists, he's stepping on MY turf! I have to say, though, I never would have thought to call this "emergency recalibration". But I like it.
Just scratching my head and wondering
Just as an aside, I thought I'd mention I will be an adjunct professor at the College of New Jersey this fall. Yup, I'll be teaching a night class in Behavioral Statistics, and I can't wait. It's going to be a lot of fun, for me if not for the poor souls who are stuck in class two nights a week with this required course. I decided to use the 2nd edition of the Aron & Aron Statistics for Psychology text, which came highly recommended from one of the previous instructors.
Now, these kinds of texts always have one of two types of cover illustrations: photos of people (for the psychology part), or photos of graphs/charts/numbers/architecture (for the statistical part). This book does not, and while I find the cover photo very easy on the eyes, and rather cute, I was wondering: Why on earth did they chose this photo for the cover? I checked the 3rd edition of the book, and another book by the same authors, and all the covers have the same theme. I'm dying to know what the connection is between statistics and these creatures.
Standardized tests and diversity in graduate school
Brand-new story from the Sacramento Bee today. The UC system isn't limiting itself to dissing the SATs, and is now going after the graduate school admission exams. No particular exams are listed here, but I assume the big four under attack are the GRE, MCAT, GMAT, and LSAT, for graduate school, med school, business school, and law school, respectively.
Lt. Governor Bustamante wants to pass a resolution forbidding graduate schools to use standardized tests as the sole means of admissions, which makes me wonder - has the Lt. Gov. ever spoken to an admissions officer, or a testing organization official? Has he ever examined a score report? Does he truly not know that schools do not ever use these tests as the sole means of determining admission?
Here's how it works: The testing organizations release the scores with various measures of uncertainty (such as confidence bands), and various warnings about how large a score difference must be to be meaningful. No school has ever been encouraged by the testing company to use a test score as an infallible cutoff or as a sole criterion. It's up to the schools to decide how much weight to give a score, but the last I heard, no graduate program out there does not include at least GPA in the weighting formula, in order to give students who perform well in class but test badly a fighting chance. Most schools include a great deal of other information, including personal history and extra-curricular experience. Some schools do use test scores as a means to group applicants into piles such as Admit, Review, and Deny Admission, but these are primarily schools that receive thousands of applicants for only tens or hundreds of spots.
If the undergraduate population in California is truly becoming more diverse, without sacrificing quality of performance, the graduate population will also become more diverse, in time. For the "powers-that-be" to suggest that graduate programs will look at only one facet of a student's performance is not only uninformed, it's downright insulting to the programs and admissions officers who do their best to evaluate the "whole student" in as fair and valid a means as possible.
Since when are "profit" and "quality" mutually exclusive?
Salon has a link to the recent privatization of 42 of Philadelphia's lowest-perfoming public schools. This is a grand experiment that I will be watching eagerly. I have high hopes for a positive outcome, mainly because what was already in place clearly wasn't working. One protesting student is quoted as saying:
"It's worth it [to risk going to jail]. We are talking about our education here. They shouldn't be giving these schools to private companies that care mostly about their own profits."
As opposed to a public school system that cares mostly about...what? In the schools that are being privatized, over half the students have been scoring in the bottom quarter on state reading and math tests. Whatever the public school system cared about, it couldn't have been quality.
As if standardized testing wasn't controversial enough....
This article questions whether Scripture supports standardized testing, and presents the "Preliminary Christian Perspective". When I read the title, I braced myself for an extremely fundamentalist or eccentric argument....but to my surprise, this is one of the most in-depth and balanced articles that I've ever seen posted. Actually, it's not all that surprising, given that it was written for the American Scientific Affiliation (whose webpage doesn't seem to want to load), described as "a fellowship of men and women of science and disciplines that can relate to science who share a common fidelity to the Word of God and a commitment to integrity in the practice of science". How very interesting.
The article makes many delightful points:
It presents a couple of ancient examples of psychological testing, including the one from Judges 12 where the pronunciation of the word "Shibboleth" detemined the veracity of a tribal identity claim (I've seen this example listed in several landmark papers on psychometrics).
It provides a clear definition of the meaning of and rationale for "standardization", "reliability", and "validity".
It points out that even if tests were abolished, decisions as to admissions and allocations would still need to be made, and so removing the tests does not remove the potential for useless or harmful decisions.
They point out that standardized tests may result in better social justice because nowadays tests are designed in order to make as objective and unbiased a judgement of someone's performance as possible.
Tests have their uses, and misuses. There is danger as well as safety in numbers. Often the problem is not with the test itself but in the interpretation or use of it. All are common-sense points, often ignored in the media, that I have tried to make previously on this blog.
Although aimed at the educated layperson, the authors cite actual psychometricians to make their points. Cronbach! Novick! Names I lost much sleep over in graduate school! How awesome. What's more, they cite published articles that debunk the testing criticisms that I wasn't aware of and now need to get copies of.
I don't feel qualified to cite Scripture in order to comment on the Christian perspective presented of whether we should judge others, but I will say that this article takes a very common-sense approach to the question. And, hey, any essay that says,
"It therefore behooves us to be informed as to their [standardized tests] nature and influence, and to thoughtfully evaluate the significant role they play in our lives."
and
"In their zeal to point out the weaknesses of standardized tests, many critics have allowed strong emotion to take precedence over clear thinking."
has not only won me over from the start, but also demonstrates a level of rational thinking far above the majority of the published testing criticism out there.
And they don't have to eat cafeteria food, either
Here's the study that shows homeschooled kids do better on standardized tests. The kids who are being homeschooled now may just have better educated and more determined parents (because obtaining the homeschooling materials and satisfying the state requirements are still big hurdles to leap). What will the results look like when homeschooling becomes more prevalent, I wonder?
Race and sex data released with test scores
Here in my hometown, race, sex, and SES data were released with math and reading scores for the first time to the public. A quick summary:
"A look at the state's data on Elkins Park School shows that while 73 percent of all fifth graders scored as proficient or advanced in reading, there were notable differences when studied by race. Eighty-nine percent of white students did well on the reading test, while 53 percent of blacks, 55 percent of Asians, and 58 percent of students identified as economically disadvantaged performed at the top levels."
Yes, there's a gap here (although the Asian gap is a surprising one). More Asian and black children appear to need help than do white kids, but that's no reason to assume that race is an immutable or inherent predictor of test performance. This is related to my comments, below, about scheduling meetings on the test results by race. If a meeting is to be held, the parents of those 11% of white kids, 47% of black kids, and 45% of Asian kids should all be at the same meeting to discuss just what these results mean and what they can do to help their children improve.
"Separate but equal" in (where else) California
A middle school in California held four meetings last week for parents to discuss the results of recent Stanford 9 and STAR standardized tests - with the four meetings separated by race. What does this suggest for the future of rational discussion about standardized tests when school officials believe that parents of different races can't even discuss the results together? The ostensible goal is to keep the parents of low-scoring Hispanic and black students from feeling uncomfortable, but what about the high-scoring Hispanic or black kids, or the low-scoring white or Asian kids? Were the parents of biracial children allowed to go to more than one meeting? If you have to have separate meetings, why not do it by percentile scores, so that the parents of low-scoring kids would actually be all in the same meeting? Or is there an assumption here on the part of the school that race is the only factor that matters?
Scroll down past the Chaucer quote....
Never knew I'd get the chance to say that. Anyway, here's an article from the Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition on the New York state exams. This site generally has a lot of good and opinionated commentary on standardized testing in the K-12 grades and beyond.
Oh, and you can click here to find the Public Agenda's "Reality Check 2001" report online, because FAST doesn't provide links to it (c'mon, guys!). The report states that kids don't seem traumatized by the statewide assessments, which might actually be useful (who'd have thought?) in diagnosing problems. On the other hand, it was disheartening to read that, when asked their most likely reaction if they heard that many students in their district did poorly on a standardized test, teachers were most likely to respond that they'd assume something was wrong with the test. I understand that it may not have been in their best interests to assume that the tests were measuring a genuine lack of preparation on the part of the kid or the school, but still.
Hey, a newer blog than mine!
Matthew Henken has got a new blog up and running. He was kind enough to comment on one of my recent postings. Go and read him now. He's created a great blend of the humorous (you gotta love his description of Andrew Sullivan) and the sublime (his comments on my posting).
And for the record, "Ms. Pencil" is fine. My students will have to address me as "Dr. Pencil", though.
Ignoring the scores
Here's a stunning example of the witch's brew of testing controversies, curriculum changes, social issues, and political battles that comprises the current educational reform system. Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for the link. I'm not going to comment much, other than to say: (1) read the entire article, and (2) I'm rooting for Ross.
Evaluating the evaluators
I'm not familiar with the American Evaluation Association, so I can't provide any guidance as to the validity or objective nature of their high-stakes, K-12 standardized testing position statement. According to their site, they are "devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation", and I suppose my kind of testing falls in the realm of "other", so I'll make a few comments on various aspects of the statement here.
AEA statement: Although used for more than two decades, state mandated high stakes testing has not improved the quality of schools; nor diminished disparities in academic achievement along gender, race or class lines..."
My reply:I'm not sure the testing in and of itself was ever supposed to improve school quality or diminish disparities. The tests were and are meant to indicate the success or failure of the reforms put into place, and if the quality of schools has not improved, I fail to see how removing the tests can help.
AEA statement:"...nor moved the country forward in moral, social, or economic terms"
My reply:This is an even more extreme example of "criticising" the tests by noting that they did not accomplish something they were never meant to accomplish. I would get reamed, and rightfully so, if I tried to claim that a child who did poorly on a statewide assessment was deficient in a moral sense, so how can the AEA consider it a valid criticism to say that the tests have not produced an improvement in the moral or social awareness of schoolchildren?
Selected specific criticisms of high-stakes testing programs:
AEA statement: “[They] are implemented and used to make high stakes decisions before sufficient validation evidence is obtained and before defensible technical documentation is issued for public scrutiny"
My reply: They must be implemented to be validated, in the sense of collecting data, but no decisions should be made until validation is complete, so this is a valid criticism, if true.
AEA statement: “[They] are flawed, both in technical adequacy and in accuracy of scoring and reporting"
My reply: ...as are all grades, performance assessments, etc. No test is perfect, and all good tests come with some measure of reliability or inaccuracy, in the form of standard errors of measurement, reliability coefficients, and the like. The question is not “Is the test perfect?” but “Does the test do a better job of predicting/measuring the construct of interest than some other measure we're currently using?”
AEA statement: "[They] promulgate undue centralized control of what is taught and how and [They] channel educational offerings to satisfy monolithic, narrow, test-defined state standards rather than address the differential needs of students in local schools”
My reply: ...which, if you believe that states should set the standards for the bare minimum of what gets taught, is just fine. Do you want individually-funded districts to decide what each child learns, or do you want the state government to decide what it means for a child to be left behind?
AEA statement: "[They] narrow the curriculum to tested subjects, usually reading, writing, and mathematics and marginalize non-tested subjects, which often include the fine arts, physical education, social studies and science”
My reply: What if these “differential needs” mentioned above are that some schools can’t manage to teach their kids to read and write? Some schools may need to marginalize those non-tested subjects at certain times.
AEA statement: "[They] stimulate teachers and principals to manipulate test scoring and standards, change students’ answers, send slow learners away on testing day, or otherwise invalidate test scores”
My reply: This comment is very eerie. The gist is, “Because teachers and principals will cheat on tests, we shouldn’t give them”. I have to wonder – if there is indeed a lot of this type of fraud going on, is it because the tests are inherently stressful and difficult, or is it because there are plenty of critics out there claiming the tests are so harmful (or unimportant) that it's okay to fool with the data or walk out of the tests. Hey, I thought these tests were supposed to have “moved the country forward in moral…terms”, and now we hear the tests are flawed because people are willing to cheat with the results. How is this evidence that the testing program itself is at fault?
AEA statement: "[They] consume a disproportionate amount of student and teacher time that takes away from other valued school goals and activities, e.g., spending as much 30% of the school year preparing specifically for tests"
My reply: Which, if that preparation includes teaching basic skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics, leaves 70% of the day for fine arts, Phys Ed, and all that other fun stuff. Given the tone of the rest of this statement, I'm betting the 30% figure is high and outside, yet even that number doesn't seem to justify the criticism of "narrowing" the curriculum dramatically.
AEA statement: “[They] assume that all children, including English language learners and special education students, learn in the same ways at the same rate and that they can all demonstrate their achievements on standardized tests"
My reply: I wouldn't say that testing programs assume this so much as measure to what extent this is true, and that's useful knowledge to have.
AEA statement: “Tests focus attention on particular students, such as those scoring just below the cut-off score and ignoring those who score well above and below the cut off score”
My reply: This comment I don’t quite get. By “focus attention”, do they mean the tests do a better job of measuring those in the middle? These types of tests usually are more accurate in the middle range. Scholastic achievement often has a normal distribution, with many kids in that middle range, so the test items tend to cluster around that achievement level. Or, do they mean that schools pay attention to or give feedback only to those in the middle? I don’t see how, since a child’s performance at the 95th percentile or the 5th percentile is what is going to garner a lot of attention from the teacher, or the school, if the tests are part of accountability.
AEA statement: “[They] encourage, in direct and indirect ways, students who may not pass the test to stay home on testing days or to drop out of school altogether”
My reply: See my statement above about cheating. I doubt the tests or testing programs so much encourage this behavior so much as those who place too much or too little emphasis on the results.
AEA statement: “[They] measure, for the most part, parental income and race, and therefore perpetuate racism, classism and anti-working class sentiment"
My reply: This comment is highly controversial, yet vague (What exactly does "for the most part" mean?). Even if it was 100% true (which it isn't), evidence of a relationship between test scores and SES does not mean that the relationship is immutable. Some studies do show a high relationship of SES to test results, but every so often a school with a large percentage of minority or disadvantaged students will come along, make reforms, and demolish this belief with the resulting high test scores. While this sort of observation has worth, the attitude implied by it can fall too easily into the realm of "shooting the messenger", i.e., getting rid of tests that show that kids in disadvantaged school districts might be falling behind. And I find it hard to reconcile that supposed "anti-working class sentiment" with the newspaper reports of students in wealthy school districts walking out of some tests.
AEA statement: “[They] contribute to an atmosphere of distrust, fear, divisive competition, and hysteria that is antithetical to teaching and learning"
My reply: Well, most of the hysteria I've seen is on the part of people like CARE who think these tests are analogous to the assignment of yellow stars (Yup, I'm still upset about that). Competition is not in and of itself divisive, and perhaps the distrust is because of those principals and teachers who cook the results.
On a more serious note, I'm glad to see this kind of imformed commentary being placed out for public viewing (although I found out about it through a mailing list of testing professionals, so I'm not sure how many actual laypeople will hear of it). I couldn't find the bibliography listed for this statement, and that's something I'd like to review when I have more time.
Caustic commentary from the Opinion Journal
The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, and it's Best of the Web feature, is always a great read. Today, they provide more detailed commentary on the ridiculous "bacchanal of bathos" featured at a Seattle public school (scroll most of the way down the Opinion Journal page to read) that I linked to yesterday. Also in the Opinion Journal today is an article about the new antisemitism on campus.
So what's the relationship between this news and standardized testing? It's that two of the main criticisms of standardized tests are:
(1) class time that should be spent developing genuinely important skills is instead spent on the dry and dull "test prep" education, and
(2) the tests supposedly don't measure "higher-order thinking".
Solution to (1): Schools that make time for "psycho cry fests" certainly will, by definition, have less time for actual educational pursuits. Perhaps we could leave the emotional training to the parents, thus giving the teachers more class time to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. Radical concept, I know.
Solution to (2): The critics may have a point here. College students have presumedly done well on state-wide assessments, high school exit exams, and the SATs/ACTs. So, they've managed to master the skills measured on those tests, yet they clearly don't understand that the "oppressed" people they defend are committed to the annihilation of as many people as possible, so long as Israel is destroyed in the process; that anti-Semitism practiced with a self-righteous and over-educated attitude is no less vile, racist, and shameful; and that, if they were Palestinian, their "courageous" leaders would not award them scholarships and install them on safe, pretty campuses, but instead strap explosives around their bodies and send checks to their families once the smoke had cleared. I say we do need some new test items to identify these sorts of intellectual deficits, and fast.
And I say we should hire Steven Den Beste to write them.
Just a test message to see if my new archive works...Yes! Finally!
Getting with the program....
Finally, I have a counter on this site! Woo hoo!
Straight from the source
For those of you who are interested (even if you disagree with everything listed), here's the ETS version of "Debunking Myths about Standardized Testing". I'd love to know what you think. I don't have comment capabilities on this site yet, but you can email me using the link on the left-hand side of the page.
Is cash the fix?
After posting the commentary below on the Chicago school-reform suggestion of handing out cash to improved schools but not to the teachers involved, I discovered a very good article that argues in favor of tying teacher performance to pay. Thanks to Susanna Cornett for the link.
The Right Kind of Pain for Students....
One of my favorite anti-idiotarians, Andrea Harris, reacts to yet another painful new idea in 21st-century schooling.
So let me get this straight. We're always hearing that standardized tests hurt children (and probably make them cry), and that this trauma should override the inconvenient fact that the tests have solid educational benefits. In fact, there are those who would probably find it acceptable for students to walk out of the Seattle tests in protest of just how stressful these standardized tests are.
Given all this concern for the tender psyches of young ones, how can this new practice of dredging up painful memories, with its extremely questionable psychological effects (how does being forced to talk about pain in public equal being "free of harassment"?) and complete lack of educational benefits, be considered acceptable?
I guess you have to be as progressive as Seattle to understand it.
Michael Jordan & The Great Homeschool Debate
You know, I'd have linked to this article anyway, because it emphasizes yet again that homeschooling can be a more effective alternative (as shown by spelling bees and test scores) than the public school system. And then I saw this quote:
Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators... said that having a few home-schooled bee champs does not necessarily show the superiority of home-schooling. Saying one child's triumph is evidence of the success of home-schooling, he said, is like saying all North Carolina colleges are good because basketball champion Michael Jordan attended one.
I just have to jump all over that simile. Michael Jordan didn't attend my alma mater, UNC, because of the school's academic reputation (I believe he majored in geology), he attended because the basketball program is damn good and so are the programs of three other NC schools - Duke, Wake Forest, and N.C. State. I believe Jordan's success is related to the fact that a relatively large number of North Carolina basketball programs are powerhouses. And I bet you that while these spelling bee results are not in and of themselves proof of how well home-schooling works, these results in conjunctions with all the other evidence suggests that home-schooled kids are likely to be as confident with five-syllable words as Jordan is with that basketball.
Different land, same complaints.
This article is a few days old but I find it intriguing. This passage is describing the reaction to standardized testing in Britain, but it could just as easily be an article about the testing controversy here in the U.S.:
Delegates at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers voted overwhelmingly to seek the support of parents and other teaching unions to oppose standardized ability tests. The tests are administered at the ages of 7, 11 and 14 and are used by the government to assess schools' performance and draw up national rankings. Left-wingers in the union oppose the tests, saying they are unfair and harm a child's education.
Once again, we have the old chestnuts trotted out, with no accompanying evidence, that such tests are "unfair" to students and that they "harm" education. According to whom? How can creating national rankings result in students being treated unfairly? If this is similar to tests in the U.S. such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, pronounced "nape"), the students won't receive individual scores, so how can they be considered to be treated unfairly? And why are they harmful? Standardized tests are just another measure of what children learn in school. They are not radically different in kind from any other type of assessment such as homework, pop quizzes, and the like. From the tone of the discussion from these "left-wingers", you'd think such tests were a physical weapon with which to beat children, and not a series of multiple-choice items written on a piece of paper.
Addendum
Here's the original article on the Chicago plan, which does give the tests used.
One way for schools to get more money...
...and I'm not sure if a way that I agree with. One proposed solution to improve Chicago's public schools is to give out cash for schools with higher standardized test scores. (By the way, which tests are we talking about? The article doesn't say.) On the one hand, it's nice that the money is contigent upon only the school's improvement as compared to own previous test scores and not those of other schools or disticts. It's also nice that the money doesn't go for teacher bonuses, not because I think good teachers shouldn't be paid more, but you can be a great teacher in a school that has big difficulties in raising scores and I don't think teachers should lose out on bonuses because of that.
However, there's just something about the direct cash-for-scores relationship that makes me leery. The money in this case is a reward for doing well, and there's nothing wrong with that, but an argument could be made that it is the schools that are having the most difficulty improving scores that need the money most, not the schools that are already showing the most improvement. Of course, if you give the dough to the worst-performing schools, there won't be as much an incentive to improve rapidly. It's a sticky issue, and I'm eager to see how this experiment works out.
USA Today is celebrating...
...with this article on the latest results in the UC system. I can understand the desire to applaud a system that does not use quotas nor "bonus points" for minority status (what a divisive idea). I myself am happy to read about the outreach system that helps disadvantaged students prepare for the SAT, even though the UC schools are weighting the test results less. However, I still raise a skeptical eyebrow when I read:
Finally, the UC system revised its admission system that once screened students mostly by test scores and grades. A new system gives more weight to students showing leadership traits or overcoming obstacles.
I immediately wonder: How much weight is now given to leadership, and who decided how that is defined? Why should someone be disadvantaged in college admissions because they didn't have extraordinary obstacles to overcome? As the outreach program to improve test scores continues, will the schools then begin to give the test scores more weight? And while it's jolly that minority enrollment is up, it's the minority graduation rate that will be much more telling as an indicator of how this new system works. If the UC schools can show that leadership traits are predictive of performance and are directly related to graduation rates, more power to 'em, but I haven't seen any such proof offered. So I guess we wait four years and see....
I missed this while I was in New Orleans...
Joanne Jacobs has already provided knowledgeable commentary on this article on alternatives to high school exit exams that appeared Teacher magazine earlier this month, but I just want to sneak in a couple of comments. I had high hopes when I first began to read this article, because the author, Ronald Wolk, makes the sensible point that,
Despite warnings from testing experts and educators that important decisions should not be based on a single measure, 17 states now require high school students to pass an exit exam to graduate, and at least seven more plan to do so.
However, the alternative to one exit exam proposed here is making graduation dependent on a score composed of GPA, exit exam score, personal work, extracurricular activities, and volunteer work. Why? Because the real problem with current standardized exit exams is that,
they don't address the qualities that most parents want their children to have—such as the skills and attitudes needed to continue learning on their own and to be good citizens, productive workers, and fulfilled human beings. Parents want their kids to develop virtues and values that we can all agree on, like diligence, honesty, tolerance, fairness, and compassion.
The author means well, but this plan could lead to disaster in so many ways. I'll touch on two of them:
(1) While exit exams and GPA may not seem to be the full measure of a child's performance, they were never intended to be comprehensive so much as objective. In the author's plan, objective measures account for only 60 of the possible 80 points needed for graduation, 100 points for honors, or 115 points for high honors. Twenty-five points are at stake for "personal work (such as exhibition in the arts and sciences), class participation, and behavior", and these points are going to be hard to obtain for students who are shy, unassuming, have behavioral issues, or otherwise do better at listening in class than participating. Twenty-five points are for extra-curricular activities, and 15 points are for volunteer work in the community. What about students whose situations preclude this, such as students who must work rather than play outside of school, students who live in communities where volunteer work is limited, or students whose interests are not in line with the schools? What if my school doesn't want to recognize the extracurricular nature of my newly-founded shooting club? What if my desire to volunteer with the local Republican party is not acceptable to my teachers?
(2) A related point is: who's to say what measures a good citizen, and why should schools be trying to measure this? It's difficult enough to attach a number to the SAT math section and back up the claim that it's a valid, unbiased measure of mathematical aptitude. Now we have a scoring scheme blithely attached to extracurricular activities that are subjectively evaluated by teachers - is that scale going to be subjected to the same scrutiny as other forms of measurement? If a parent asks for "proof" that this scale measure a student's worth as a citizen, what is the school going to say in reply?
A little tangent....
I was amused to see a reference two days ago on Tim Blair's smart, smartass website to the uproar caused by the latest plan hatched by the Australian government to assist Aborigines. Tim, like any sensible person, doesn't see the harm in the straightforward five-point plan. But I'm not surprised at the outburst, at least against point #2, "Target primary school students' literacy and numeracy skills".
"Targeting" these skills requires some method of assessment, to see whether or not the literacy and numeracy skills of aborigine children are improving, and the most efficient and even-handed method of assessment is through standardized testing. That's a controversial idea over here, and while the US and OZ situations are not exactly the same, you see the same outraged reactions from some of the US parents quoted in the NYT article on testing (see previous post below). They present the idea that testing is harmful to minorities as though it were a foregone conclusion, and not a subject very much open to debate.
For your further reading:
Pro-standardized-testing for minority children articles and sites: No Excuses; Achieve.org;Richard Phelp's, "Why Testing Experts Hate Testing"
Anti-standardized-testing for minority children articles and sites: The Nation (6/5/00); The Canadian Teacher's Federation;Education Week (9/27/00)
One big chunk of raw meat to digest....
So, I'm back just in time to see the New York Times weigh in on the "Test Mess". This is one humongous article, chock full of information that has me jumping up and down either in frustration or celebration, so bear with me. I've got a lot to say here, but I'll try not to be too schizophrenic in my comments. For a much more concise summary that focuses on the class war angle of the article, go to Joanne Jacob's site (and scroll about half way down).
The article opens up with a scene from a classroom in New York City suburbs, where the teacher is preparing students for the eighth-grade English language arts exam:
This is not quite the way I remembered junior high, but in recent decades a highly progressive species of education, with interdisciplinary units and history fairs and do-it-yourself science projects, has become an upper-middle-class suburban birthright. And here O'Brien was drilling her kids to prepare for a test obviously designed for -- well, there was no very delicate way to put it.
So, right off the bat, we've got the sides established - progressive, laid-back education vs. stuffy old traditionalist tests...
New York's eighth-grade E.L.A. exam, which requires students to listen to a lengthy passage and answer questions and write an essay about its central themes and details, to answer questions about written passages and also write two other essays, is well regarded in the testing world; but nobody in the class...considered it an intellectually worthwhile exercise... Just about every eighth grader at Hommocks, and just about all of their teachers, are dismayed about the state-mandated tests...Over in Scarsdale, the wealthier suburb next door, the moms are fighting mad; last year, more than half of the eighth-grade parents took their children home when the tests were given.
So we shouldn't give tests that wealthy suburban kids consider to be too easy and not worth their time? They shouldn't have to go through the process of providing the state with valuable information about their achievement just because New York is trying to ensure that all of its children can read and write? And what a valuable lesson to teach your eighth-graders - "You're too smart and special for this test. It's not worth your time. Stay home and watch the Cartoon Network today." Funny, we're always being accused of making tests that only the wealthiest of tykes can do well on, and now they complain about how easy the tests are....
And in December, Congress overwhelmingly passed President Bush's education bill...at its core there is a requirement that all states devise standards for English and math and institute tests in Grades 3 through 8 to see that the standards are being met.
And the reason for this is that the goal of the bill is to have 100% reading proficiency in the U.S. within 12 years of the 2002-03 school year. The goal is not to test every child to the limits of his or her capability, and the lack of understanding about this is why we're already seeing this backlash from those who don't find the tests appropriate or challenging enough.
... Amy Wilkins, a policy analyst for the Education Trust, an organization that strongly backs testing as a tool for bringing equity to the schools, says that she finds it infuriating ''to hear the soccer moms say these tests are bad for black children.''
My jaw drops for the first time, in delight - an actual quote from someone who has something positive to say about standardized tests.
The academic value of this exercise depends, of course, on whether the test assesses skills important for a fourth-grader to master. There seems to be a very wide consensus that the E.L.A. test does just that.
And based on this, we can assume that "teaching to the test" might be a worthy endeavor, since that would involve teaching skills that are important, right? Right?
Kronin took me over to Mark Molina's eighth-grade English class...It was about six weeks before the E.L.A. test ... I leafed through the class textbook. It was titled ''Aim Higher English Language Arts, Level H.'' The book was divided into sections: Test; Pre-test; Exam Overview; Listening, Reading and Writing; and Post-test...Here was test preparation with a vengeance. The textbook was a training manual, and the curriculum was the test...Nobody defends this kind of regimented pedagogy
Oh, I guess not. So here's a teacher actually trying to teach the skills listed in the textbook with the full understanding that yes, the kids will soon take a test that this article has already noted is measuring important skills... but this approach is indefensible? Try as I might, I can't seem to wrap my head around the concept that teaching important skills and then measuring them jeopardizes education, so I'll move on.
...proponents [of standardized testing] actually agree with critics that tests that you can prep for aren't worth giving.
My jaw drops for the second time, in utter disbelief. I've been in this field for 10 years, I know an awful lot of psychometricians and test specialists, I have some knowledge of the inner workings of testing companies, and I have never heard anyone agree with a statement like this. It is utter nonsense. "Prep" as it is used here is short for "prepare", education is about preparing students for the real world, and these tests are a shorthand way to measure how well they've been preparing. We can all differ on what to test and how to best teach the material on the test, but to suggest that a good test is one for which you cannot or should not prepare is laughable. This claim may stem from a confusion over the fact that some tests supposedly do not benefit from nor require preparation, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or various personality inventories, but that doesn't excuse the outrageousness of it.
If you remove this claim from its educational testing context, you can see even more clearly how ridiculous it is - because you can prepare for the driver's license exam, does that mean the driver's license test is not worth giving? Let's keep those tests that require people to parallel park and demonstrate understanding of one-way signs, shall we? My car insurance rates are high enough as it is.
Now she [Alice Siegel, a teacher referred to earlier in the article] said: ''It's the same thing as whole language and phonics. If you said that you wanted to teach phonics, they said that you hated children. With whole language, it was very nice. You sat there with a big book, and everybody sat there blah blah blah. But everybody needs to know how to attack a word they don't know how to pronounce.'' In the world of education, a great deal of moral power attaches to practices that are aesthetically appealing; but justice is very often better served by the merely effective.
This is not news to anyone with common sense. The "merely" only serves to distract the reader from the concept that the best and most just method of teaching children might be one that's effective. Imagine that. And the comment that "they" could say you hated children just because you wanted to teach them using one of the most effective reading instruction methods possible is as devastating a judgment of "they" as I've ever heard.
Even if the kids do better, though, it's fair to ask whether the price has been too high -- whether all this test prep has killed whatever residual fondness the kids had for school or learning...Davis held a ''Saturday Academy,'' a euphemism for an extra two hours of voluntary test prep. The teachers insist, implausibly, that the kids show up well before 9 and wait for the doors to open...About 130 students in all eventually came...I talked to a dozen or so kids during the break, and they all said that they came to Saturday academy voluntarily, and most of them said they liked it...One girl, who kept her red ski jacket on all through the class, said that she so enjoyed the exercise of reading texts and learning to pull meaning out of them that she had started to read more on her own...I may be wrong, but I would have sworn they were having a good time.
Again, why is it news that teaching kids to master important skills in an effective manner is not irreversibly harmful to them and in fact might benefit them? We all know that adults often relish challenges and enjoy enhanced self-esteem from demonstrating mastery of new skills, so why the assumption that similar pressure from inside the classroom is so damaging to kids?
... I sat earlier this year at a breakfast table piled high with leaflets and talked with Jonathan King, father of two, professor of molecular biology at M.I.T. and charter member of the Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education, or CARE...King said he believed that the tests were turning the schools into ''a police state'' in which educational drill substituted for education. And while the tests, he said, were a colossal waste of time for his children, they were, he insisted, a catastrophe for minorities, who would soon be dropping out in large numbers as the state began withholding diplomas from students who had not passed the exit tests.
I don't believe that tests are one step down the road to Fascism, nor do I believe that educational drills cannot be real education. I do believe that the policy of using exit exams in high school is unsound and may very well be unfair. And I will keep tearing my hair out as long as the catastropic sound bites such as "police state" continue to take precedence over a reasonable discussion over the validity of exit exams.
CARE is a most unlikely vehicle for a national campaign against testing: the group's chairwoman, Jean McGuire, described the M.C.A.S. in a recent newsletter as a device for ''sorting and labeling,'' like ''the yellow star'' and ''the N-word.''
Yeah, that's one way to bring everyone together for the good of the children - refer to the psychometricians, test specialists and educators as Nazis and bigots. Way to go, CARE.
...an increasing number of states have come to the conclusion that students should not be permitted to graduate from high school unless they can pass tests in the core subjects. These tests pose very little danger to successful school districts, but they constitute a fearsome reality check in average or below-average school systems...The whole episode is a painful proof of the absurdity of thinking that testing, all by itself, will raise the academic performance of children who have muddled along in school for years.
All psychometricians are well aware of this absurdity, and many disagree with tests used in a way that may be invalid and result in this sort of damage. Too bad there's not one quote from a psychometrician anywhere in the article. Much better that the public continues to view us as Nazis and bigots (yes, I'm going to be upset about that CARE quote for a while).
The problem of human understanding is that people do not readily grasp a reality radically different from their own. It is, for example, taken for granted among activist Scarsdale parents, as it is among the crusaders at CARE, that testing is even more harmful for disadvantaged children than it is for their own,
...despite the fact that some people with experience in educating disadvantaged children, such as the folks at No Excuses, consider testing crucial for educational and personal development (scroll down to page 11 of the .pdf file)....
...that ''drill and kill'' can only crush young minds,
...again with the hyperbole! "Police state"! "The yellow star"! "Crush"ing young minds! Come on, folks. I read a lot of warblogs and anti-idiotarian blogs in my (ha) free time. There are plenty of places in the world that are police states and where the crushing (or exploding) of young minds is not just a figure of speech. Suburban New York and Massachusetts are not those places.
Whew. I think I'm done. Although I lost my cool a few times while reading this article, overall I thought it was pretty fair and much more even-handed than I expected from the NYT. I automatically cringe whenever I see "testing" as the focus of any mass-media production. It's almost never kudos, just complaints, complaints, complaints, despite the fact that there are plenty of schools out there who swear by testing as a necessary part of an effective educational process.
Whee, I'm back!
New Orleans is exhausting. And fun. And a complete tourist trap, and expensive, and obnoxious. But fun. I finally visited the Audobon Aquarium of the Americas, the website for which highlights the obvious draws such as sharks, frogs, and jellyfish, but completely leaves out the one critter that everyone leaves the aquarium talking about, the leafy seadragon. The photos don't really do them justice - you have to see them fluttering through the water to really appreciate the oddness and beauty of these critters.
