Number 2 Pencil

My Un-Labor Day WeekendLight bloggage

My Un-Labor Day Weekend

Light bloggage this weekend, folks, because I'm out of the house and enjoying my long weekend. The boyfriend's band has a gig in NYC so we're headed up that way tomorrow. I'll keep an eye on the testing news, just in case President Bush gives the order to invade ETS or something like that, but I probably won't be posting again until Monday or Tuesday.

Ya'll enjoy your weekend now, you hear?

History bad, Individual Development goodThis

History bad, Individual Development good

This story landed in my inbox tonight, courtesy of Williamson Ever's listserv: The National Council for Social Studies is advocating "social studies" that leave out history, and instead focus on "contemporary conditions of real life," "specialized ways of viewing reality," the promotion of the "common good" of all people, "Individual Development and Identity," "Culture" and "Global Connections." All while standardized history test scores tank and the majority of seniors surveyed at 55 of the nation's most elite colleges and universities fail a NAEP-based history exam. The connection between vanishing history and increasing social studies seems apparent to some:

The relationship between historical illiteracy and social studies seems fundamental. Schools don't teach history--students don't learn it. But this connection eludes educational pundits who call for more social studies and blame schools (inadequate course requirements) and teachers (insufficient credentials) for the amnesia of Americans under the age of 30.

Research recently published by the Texas Public Policy Foundation offers a sobering warning about Social Studies. The next generation of social studies textbooks proposed for use in Texas and the nation are miserly about history. Textbooks not only begrudge history, history is tainted with errors and partial facts that sacrifice objective interpretation for brevity.

What's more important than money?Fascinating

What's more important than money?

Fascinating article today in the Washington Post about the schools run by the Department of Defense. There are 69 of 'em spread out across the US, Guam, and Puerto Rico. They aren't military schools, per se, but schools geared towards kids whose parents are in the military.

School morale is high. Discipline problems are low. Standardized test scores are very high. Is it because military discipline is imposed? Because government bureaucrats throw lots of moola at the schools? Because all the kids who go there have lots of money and live in big houses? Because the schools are all lavishly equipped and can afford to offer many specialized elective courses?

Not even close. The schools are good because:

...Every student has at least one parent with a high school degree or more and a job...But most parents and school officials say the biggest reason is the involvement expected, even demanded, of parents. "Parental involvement is the number one key to our success with kids," said H. Charles Winters, the high school principal. "It's a partnership."

The military facilitates the partnership. Commanders grant parents permission to leave during the day to attend school functions. "It's about the most ideal situation you could walk into," says Janice Weiss, principal of the 270-pupil Ashurst Elementary.

There's no way to evade parent-teacher conferences. Teachers are authorized to call the supervisor to request time off for the recalcitrant parent. "At the low point, we have 99 percent attendance," Weiss says. "I strive for 100 percent. And we get it most of the time."

These schools succeed because, despite low budgets, sometimes-crummy buildings, and lack of money for fancy furnishings and electives, the parents are highly involved with the schools and with their children's education.

But I suppose the fact that Marines drive the school buses doesn't hurt, either.

A good lesson to teach

A good lesson to teach on September 11th

Conservative powerhouse National Review has two great editorials about the NEA's much-ridiculed suggestions for September 11th history plans this year. The first editorial points out, quite rightly, that even if you conclude that the NEA's suggestions are not as unpatriotic as some bloggers have claimed, you'll still notice that the lessons are ridiculously touchy-feely, centered on pop psychology, and sorely lacking in any useful historical or cultural information. This is an indication of our culture's recent tendencies to worry about feelings before facts:

It is modern liberal culture's shallowness...History is consulted only to the extent that it teaches us that people in previous eras have had feelings of grief and anger after disasters, too, and that these feelings have been expressed in more and less healthy ways. The history of the Middle East is not mentioned anywhere. Islam is a source of "diversity," and the only thing students need know about Muslims is that they are not all alike.

The NRO site also mentions an alternative lesson plan, from the Thomas Fordham Foundation:

And rather than the conventional post-9/11 approaches, the Fordham guide seeks to avoid what others embrace: "blaming America," "simple disregard for patriotism and democratic institutions," etc. Instead, Fordham embraces freedom, democracy, and patriotism: "dealing in a realistic way with the presence of evil, danger, and anti-Americanism in the world" and "hail[ing] the heroism of those who have defended our land against foreign aggressors — including those who perished on 9/11/01." There's no pop psych or self-esteem soothing in "What Our Children Need to Know." But you will find useful academic content.

Useful academic content, rather than condescendingly soothing pap therapy. Imagine that.

When I read that The

When I read that The Confidence Man had found a link about a female student whose parents are threatening to sue her teacher because she wasn't given a hall pass, I thought the same thing he did: Good God. These lawsuits are getting out of hand. First, students sue when they flunk a course, and now this.

But after I read the story, I thought that a lawsuit seems to be the only recourse the parents have to punish a teacher who ignored the student's repeated requests for an emergency bathroom visit, taunted the child in class and suggested that the child wear diapers, and then allowed the child to have a bowel movement. In her chair. In class. The kid is 14, and if I had a 14-year-old child who had to go that badly, I'd hope they'd jump up and run to the bathroom, hall pass or no hall pass, but this kid's parents probably taught her always to obey the teacher (the article said she had no previous conduct problems). The teacher has offered no apology, the school has offered no apology. The teacher has also not been disciplined.

The student was forced to go to the bathroom in her chair. Can you say, "health hazard"? Can you say, "incompetent teacher"? Can you say, "oblivious teacher"? Can you say, "teacher who either can't or won't take the initiative to issue a previously-non-disruptive student a hall pass"? Can you say, "insensitive school administrators"?

And can you say, "Maybe a lawsuit is the best option here"?

Journalists who need Stats 101

Journalists who need Stats 101

So, I'm working on Lecture 2 for my undergraduate statistics class, and right in the middle of the discussion on correlational vs. experimental methods, I decided to break for lunch and surf the web. Of course, I have to read James Lileks every day, because he's incomparably witty and well-informed and is by turns scathing, touching, incisive, and benevolent. Most of his topics have nothing to do with education or testing (although he did talk about the infamous NEA September 11th lesson plan a while back; scroll down to Tuesday's entry), so I rarely get the opportunity to link to him.

Imagine my surprise, then, when today I see Lileks give a good thumping to a boneheaded Brit reporter for making an error that anyone with even a milliletre of statistical knowledge should know to avoid - mainly, that correlation does not imply causation. The boneheaded reporter is George Monbiot, who attempts to make the curious argument that poverty is preferable to wealth, because riches seem to make so many people unhappy:

Boneheaded reporter:
But while poverty does not cause happiness, there appears to be some evidence that wealth causes misery. Since 1950, 25-year-olds in Britain have become 10 times more likely to be affected by depression. And it is surely fair to say that most of us suffer from subclinical neuroses, anxiety or a profound discomfort with ourselves.

Lilek's response:
Speak for yourself, twitchy. And while you’re flipping through the Morrissey CDs looking for le mope juste, stop to consider that your assertion is manifestly baseless. Just because 25-year olds are “10 times more likely to be affected by depression’ - whatever that means - doesn’t necessarily mean this arises from “wealth.” It could be any number of things, from a declining culture, bad food, rotten weather, poor schooling, social stratification, exposure to relentlessly downbeat newspaper columnists, bad fashion, boy bands, whatever. It could be argued that wealth allows people the luxury of redefining the vagaries of adolescence and young adulthood as actual clinical depression; when you’re hungry, or working in the coal mine, or pulling 18-hour shifts in a dimly-lit factory whose sole ventilation consists of a fist-hole punched through a window ten yards away, there’s not a lot of time to be depressed.

Unsatisfied with only one erroneous correlational statement, Monbiot makes another:

Boneheaded reporter:
The rich lock themselves in and lock everyone else out. So many fences rise to exclude us that after a while we are no longer shut out but shut in. And if we try to cross those barriers we pay dearly, for the increasing freedom of capital has been accompanied by unprecedented rates of imprisonment.

Lilek's response:
Translation: so many people lock their doors that citizens can’t move unimpeded through private dwellings without someone tweeting for the bobbies. Note again the false correlation: the “increasing freedom of capital” - whatever that means - has been accompanied by a higher number of people tossed in gaol.

Kudos to Lileks for illustrating a concept that my students will have learned by the second day of class. Perhaps Mr. Monbiot dropped his stats class before getting that far.

Update: A reader asked me why I felt it necessary to draw attention to Mr. Monbiot's nationality. There was no real reason to do so - I just thought "Boneheaded Brit" was both alliterative and descriptive. Also, a lot of nonsense comes out of the Guardian, and Mr. Monbiot's statements were consistent with the left-wing, European, "It's all American's fault" mindset. However, I wasn't making a statement about British journalists in general, and Mr. Monbiot's statement would be equally risible were he French, Italian, or American, so I believe my reader may be correct in stating that it was unnecessary for me to mention Mr. Monbiot's nationality.

School testing news Big controversy

School testing news

Big controversy over the use of Massachusetts' MCAS as a high school exit exam - this is the first year the test is going to be used in that way, but at least one school district has announced that it will issue diplomas regardless of MCAS scores.

Wisconsin's standardized test scores paint a mixed picture - fourth-graders did better, tenth-graders did worse. Some schools matched the overall state pattern, other schools diverged from it. School officials are concerned - fluctuation is okay, "inconsistent fluctuation" may be cause for worry.

Eighty-two percent of New Jersey seniors took the SAT this year, placing NJ second only to Connecticut in percentage of students taking the exam. The NJ students' patterns mimicked the national verbal pattern - meaning, a slight decrease in the verbal mean - and showed no change on math. Unfortunately, the NJ averages are below the national average, which may be related to the fact that so many of its seniors take the SAT. The SAT patterns are also inconsistent with NJ students' performance on the state standardized tests, which has seen a decrease in the math mean in recent years.

Bloomington, Indiana, is darn proud of its seniors, who scored above the state and national averages on the SATs. Bloomington High School North school principal Franklin says, "We looked at our curriculum, particularly second-year algebra, and realized that is a foundation for much of college mathematics, for pre-calculus and college-level math...We strengthened that curriculum and had students take it every day, rather than every other day, as had previously been the case. "

Finally, good, solid, Midwestern advice for parents at the beginning of this new school year - Habits that don't work should be broken. Teachers should instill an attitude in kids and bring out their natural curiosity. Students must be taught the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills to succeed. A great deal of responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of parents and children. Parents of preschool children should read to their children, and older children should be taught thay they are the ones responsible for their academic performance.

More commentary on color-blind scholarships

More commentary on color-blind scholarships

Yesterday I posted on a lawsuit that alleged racial bias in Florida scholarship awards. I also briefly explained bias, which does not mean what the filers of the lawsuit think that it means.

The formidable Steven Den Beste of the USS Clueless has a much more lengthy discussion of similar bias charges made against several scholarship programs by Harvard researchers. He starts out with a explanation of the supposed "flaws" discovered by Harvard in the various scholarship plans:

What Harvard's researchers discovered was that the administrators responsible for these [scholarship] programs were administering them honestly, and awarding the scholarships without regard to race or financial means, based on academic performance and test scores. That's what the Legislators said they wanted when the programs were set up, and that's apparently what the administrators have actually been doing. Harvard says this is broken, but it sounds to me as if it's working as designed.

He also addresses the Florida lawsuit:

In other words, they [the researchers] discovered that on average, Florida's blacks do worse in High School than Florida's whites. Yes, that's true. But this program [Bright Futures scholarships] isn't responsible for causing that, and changing this program won't alter that. They've mischaracterized this: "also rewarded whites disproportionately". The program was actually color blind. It was giving the money to the kids with the highest [SAT and ACT] scores. As it happens, because of the situation in Florida regarding how various kids do in school, it turned out that a disproportionately large number of the kids qualifying for these grants were white. But they weren't being rewarded for being white, they were being rewarded for doing well in school. They weren't being rewarded for being part of a group.

Steven not only discusses the Florida situation more elegantly than I did, but he also brings up a point that I missed. In my discussion, I focused on the fact that the "advocates", who are suing because not enough scholarships go to minority kids, were using incorrect definitions of bias.

What I did not comment on is that these advocates are trying to do away with truly color-blind scholarship programs - where kids are being judged not on the color of their skin, but on their academic accomplishments - because it's no longer important to them to assign scholarships due to merit. Kids should instead be rewarded simply for being part of a disadvantaged group. Motivating black kids to do well and take pride in their individual accomplishments is no longer seen as important as making sure that white kids don't get rewarded "disproportionately", regardless of the fact that a white kid with a high SAT score has done just as much work, and deserves just as much credit for his or her accomplishment, as a black or Hispanic kid with a high score.

As Steven puts it at the end of his long and excellent discussion of the topic,

...when you create an honors society, you don't means-test. You don't say that you qualify with a 3.9 GPA if your parents are rich and you're white, 3.6 if you're middle class and white, or 3.2 if you're black no matter how much money your parents make. The point of an honors society is to acknowledge what the student himself actually does, without regard to who his parents are or what his parents do. The value of acceptance in an honors society is that it is acknowledgement of achievement by that student....

So if your goal is to inspire kids to work, and to take responsibility for their own fate (which, despite any barriers that society may have thrown in their way, is still a good thing), then offering substantial cash rewards for achievements should also not be either racially-filtered or means tested...The most important message that this sends is that the kid who gets one of these rewards did because of what he himself did, and any attempt to means-test the program would destroy that message. "This program is to reward hard work, but only if you're poor." Somehow the message doesn't come through that way...

These are not the only scholarship programs in existence. There are a lot of other sources of financial aid out there and most of it is directed to helping those on the lower rungs. I think that's fine and I think they should remain that way. What I'm objecting to is the idea that these particular programs must also be made race-aware and means-tested...

What, exactly, is wrong with having at least a few programs which actually do ignore the group a kid belongs to and which reward a kid solely for what he himself does?

What, indeed. Steven has hit the nail on the head - we seem to be moving toward a time when group mean differences are unacceptable, standardized tests are assumed to be biased if every group does not score equally on them, and any color-blind rewards for accomplishment are somehow "discriminatory".

Thanks to Joanne Jacobs, who blogged this before I did.

Welcome! I got all kinda

Welcome!

I got all kinda bloggers out there sending readers my way. Welcome, all you folks from NRO's The Corner, More Than Zero Sum, Colby Cosh, Joanne Jacobs, and Education Weak. Enjoy, and stick around.

More griping about the SATA

More griping about the SAT

A group of civil rights and education advocates have filed a federal complaint against Florida's Bright Futures scholarship program, saying that the program discriminates against minorities. Their evidence for this? The program relies on "rigid" minimum SAT and ACT scores as part of the criteria for receiving the scholarship. Whites win more scholarships than do blacks and Hispanics, hence the scholarship process must be "biased" against minorities.

Problem is, that's not what bias means, and that isn't proof that the tests, and thus the scholarship program, are biased. Bias can be defined in several ways. A test can be biased at the item level, meaning that members of groups who are performing at the same level perform differently on certain items. If high-scoring whites and high-scoring blacks had different probabilities of answering an item correctly, that could be evidence that the item was biased. The factor analytic structure of the test could be different for different groups (meaning, roughly, that the items seem to be related to one another in different ways), and this could be evidence of overall test bias. Internal differences can point to bias - if the rank ordering of item difficulties differs for different groups, that could be due to bias.

Finally, if there's a difference in the regression lines - if college GPA, for example, is significantly less predictable from SAT scores for blacks than for whites - that's also evidence of test bias. There is no research to suggest that any of these bias indicators exists for the SAT and ACT. It is true that the regression lines of prediction of college GPA from SAT differ in their intercepts for different groups, but this just means that black GPA's tend to be overpredicted (and Asian GPA's underpredicted) by the SAT, not that the SAT is any less related to GPA for those groups.

The presence of a simple group mean difference is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence of bias - bias can exist without group mean differences, and mean differences can exist without test bias. The explanation that test bias is behind group mean differences is pure speculation, with no basis in fact.

The group differences are not proof of bias, but a call to arms. Black and Hispanic children in Florida are not receiving the educational assistance that they need in order to achieve the minimum scores that the scholarship fund requires. What's also scandalous is that the filers of this suit would rather fight to have standards lowered for these kids (the use of the term "rigid" is the tip-off) than fight for educational reform that would improve SAT scores for black and Hispanic youngsters.

My home state boosts its

My home state boosts its scores

South Carolina has finally "moved out of the SAT cellar", according to this article in The State newspaper (yeah, I know, imaginative name for a paper, isn't it?). As the article says:

South Carolina's average SAT scores are no longer last in the nation and have improved at the highest rate in the country for the second time in three years.

The state's average score on the nation's most widely accepted college entrance exam increased seven points over last year, to 981, four sources familiar with the report said Monday.

That score puts the state in 49th place, sources said, moving S.C. students ahead of Georgia's....The state's scores have improved 30 points over the past four years.

After years of being last in the nation on the SATs, South Carolina has taken steps to improve:...Better preparation: Several S.C. schools offer special SAT preparation courses. After-school primers on math and reading concepts likely to appear on the test also are common at most S.C. high schools...Competition: High school teams compete in test-taking skills in the state education department's annual SAT tournament.

Hmm...competition? Isn't that what educrats try so hard to shield students from? And the success of preparation will be viewed by some testing critics as evidence that the test is eminently coachable, I bet. Being able to prepare for a test, and being able to greatly improve scores just by learning coaching strategies, are two different things, and I don't believe that standardized tests are as coachable as the test prep companies claim (they're out to sell courses, after all).

Anyway, for an entire state to raise its mean score by seven points is a huge jump. One reason that the score was historically low, and this is only a theory of mine, is that South Carolina encourages all its youngsters to take the test. I remember in my high school everyone was encouraged to take the exam, and if you have a lot of non-college-material students taking the test, the average is indeed going to be low.

And speaking of encouraging everyone to take the SAT, California reports a huge increase in the percentage of high school students taking the test - from 37% last year to 52% this year. Successful outreach and recruitment, and a baby boom in the number of college-age youth, are cited as the reasons for the increase. The state is reporting more AP exam requests as well.

My buddy Jonathan has a

My buddy Jonathan has a blog!

I just discovered that someone I work with, someone who's in the next department over from me, has his own blog, Essays of a Troll. He just discovered my blog, sent me an email, linked to me, and he's off with his own discussions (which are quite good).

Can I just say, though, that's it's an odd feeling to discover that someone who you see every day is reading your blog and has a blog of his own? It's like we each have two personalities, and his online self just made contact with my online self. Odd, but neat.

Comments for Dummies (that would

Comments for Dummies (that would be me)

I now have comments enabled on my posts. I went to Haloscan for the code - they could not have been more helpful, and the code could not have been easier to install. Trust me - I'm so clueless about this stuff that I couldn't find my ASP with both hands and an CGI, and I was able to install it in less than 60 seconds. And they work, too.

Florida's high schools not doing

Florida's high schools not doing the job?

Good article today in the Ocala (FL) Star-Banner about the shameful unpreparedness of minority students for college:

The state’s College Readiness report shows that seven out of 10 black students in Marion County need work in English and math when getting to college. Likewise, 50 percent of Hispanic students are not up to par after graduating high school...Though white and Asian students are, by no means, always ready when arriving at college, the two groups do have college-readiness rates that match or exceed the state average — which amounts to about six out of every 10 students being ready when they arrive at college.

This means that, on average, four high-school graduates are not ready when they arrive at college. The poverty explanation for poor performance is mentioned here, and it is true that parental income is correlated with standardized test scores and high school GPA (although parental education levels, for one, correlate more highly with SAT scores than parental income). However, as the article notes, minority students at middle-class schools also lag behind white students.

So what are the other reasons? Minority students are less likely to take challenging or advanced courses in high school. Black students may be subject to a negative peer pressure that equates doing well with "acting white" (could the Ku Klux Klan have come up with a more insidious, evil, and divisive theory?). Teachers may expect less of minority students.

What is not true is the myth that standardized tests are biased against minority students. That's the facile explanation that the demagogues advance, but there's no data to support it. What's more, it's my feeling that such statements only serve to further intimidate minority students.

What remains to be seen - if the new SAT highlights the lack of preparedness for college, will that result in better schools, or more negative press for standardized tests?

Chicago has a new educational

Chicago has a new educational plan that's heavy on data (and on "educationese", according to the article in the Chicago Sun-Times). Feedback will be provided to teachers and parents via the web:

Teachers need only click on a specific skill assessed on each test to see which kids need fundamental help with it, which ones merely need some practice and which ones are ready for advanced work. It also suggests ways to teach each skill to each ability group and provides a short battery of questions to determine mastery...By spring, parents will get a detailed report on their children and ways to help them improve at home...The goal is not to encourage test preparation, but to regularly identify where kids are and how to help them move forward, said Grow Network CEO David Coleman.

And what article on education would be complete without an inane quote from a teachers' union representative?

Chicago Teachers Union President Deborah Lynch is somewhat wary..."If it's going to be used to help teachers help students, we welcome it," Lynch said. "Are they going to use it to judge teachers? That would be a question we would ask."

Because, you know, teachers shouldn't be subject to judgment of how well they perform their jobs - that's only for the rest of us employed folk.

The NEA September 11 lesson

The NEA September 11 lesson plan update, underqualified teachers, and a lobster suit

Joanne Jacobs has wise commentary about a whole raft of educational topics, including the NEA's controversial lesson suggestions for September 11th, the startling lack of qualifications of out-of-field teachers, and the unbearable lightness of being a lobster.

Also, George Will has a take on the NEA lesson plan that includes the delightful phrase, "sinners in the hands of an angry professor of psychology".

I thought hockey fans were

I thought hockey fans were supposed to fight dirty

Working back through the IP's my counter provides, I discovered a lively yet very decorous discussion on the new SAT taking place on the Fanhome.com Hockey thread. You can read them here (scroll up to the top for the first entry) without registering, but if you want to post, you have to register. I posted a few comments and was heartily welcomed - the moderator even put a heart icon by my name (in response to an earlier post of mine). My impression of hockey fans is changed forever.

Tips for getting past "the

Tips for getting past "the real angst machine" - the SATs

SmartMoney.com has a page for parents with tips, both financial and practical, for getting kids through the test-taking hurdles of high school. The tips are pretty darn good:

Between the PSAT, SAT, SAT IIs, APs and state-mandated high school exit exams, kids see more tests than actuaries do. Avoid a pile-on in your child's junior year by having him take some of the SAT IIs in the ninth or tenth grade instead. Aside from easing schedules, it only makes sense to take these subject tests right after kids have studied the material...

Of course, the real angst machine is the SAT. At the beginning of your child's junior year, start doing exercises with him that bring "tenacious" and "prodigious" into his lexicon... Make sure to break these lessons into bite-size pieces. Dedicating 20 minutes after school each day is far wiser than locking your kid in her room for three hours each weekend....

Assuming you had your child take the PSATs as a sophomore, it's a good idea for him to retake them in his junior year to get an up-to-date baseline. His score will probably go up just because he's a year older. If the predicted SAT score (verbal and math combined) is more than 200 points from the average SAT of those admitted to his target schools, first make sure that you're being realistic. Don't shoot for Stanford with a score of 1000....

Consider having your child take the ACT instead. More of a straightforward assessment of what he has learned, the ACT can reward the worker-bee student who doesn't test well[This is the first time I've heard that claim made]...

If your child's score is within 100-150 points of the target, scaling that hurdle isn't unrealistic. A self-motivated and jitter-free student can improve simply by taking the practice tests in the book 10 Real SATs.

Click here for the link to the main page, with tips for vouchers and parents who want to homeschool.

And you don't have to

And you don't have to deal with that annoying Dell kid

Visit the Friedman Foundation website, take a school-choice quiz (really part survey, part quiz), and win a free Gateway computer. The entry form requires that you sign up for email updates from the foundation.

And I'll even give you a hint for the question about whether voucher kids score higher on tests - they do:

They are higher. Research studies by Harvard, Princeton and Indiana University indicate a positive effect on students' achievement scores.
Harvard University found that after 3 years in the Milwaukee voucher program, children who received vouchers scored between 5-12 % points higher on math and reading tests than their public school counterparts.
Princeton researchers found that Milwaukee voucher students scored 1.5 - 2.3% higher in math on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.
In Cleveland, according to a study by Indiana University, children receiving vouchers have higher test scores in language and science than their public school counterparts.

Reader and fellow blogger Lisa

Reader and fellow blogger Lisa Snell was kind enough to inform me that my Hotmail account was bouncing emails back to her. It may have been doing this to everyone else as well. I created a new email address today - you can reach it from the links on the left hand side of the page, or by clicking here.

Steve of Enter Stage Right's

Steve of Enter Stage Right's weblog Musings posted today about his love for death metal and its ability to inspire his writing. I can do him one better - not only am I familiar with the Slayer album that he cites, God Hates Us All, I get to hash out my literary blogging ideas with a real live death-metal musician, namely, my boyfriend Dave. His band Cirrhosis just put out their first CD, and they have a gig in NYC next weekend. And my boyfriend reads my blog every day and gives me feedback on it. How about that, Steve? =)

And on that note, I think it's time to go home for the weekend.

I've had a soft spot

I've had a soft spot in my heart for Mark Steyn and his incisive ideas for a long, long time, even though the articles he writes are not about education or testing. But today he finally turned his vicious pen on the NEA's suggested September 11th "history lesson". The results are the logical bloodbath that I've come to know and love.

Profiting from school computersSwanky tech

Profiting from school computers

Swanky tech magazine Red Herring investigates the money that is spent on computers in classroom and asks, "Who benefits the most - the kids or the tech companies?" Red Herring thinks the claim of technology to improve education may be "the 21st-century's version of snake oil":

... it's hard to distinguish the influence of technology from that of enthusiastic teachers and supportive administrators. A West Virginia study found that fifth-grade students who had access to computers for six years gained an average of 14 points on an 800-point basic-skills test. Researchers concluded that about 11 percent of those 14 points, a mere 1.5 points, were attributable to technology tools, which cost $7 million per year...

In the last comprehensive study of its kind, a 1998 research project by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), a private testing organization that produces the Scholastic Aptitude Test and others, found that school computer use was associated with increasing math scores for eighth graders by one-third of a grade level. However, researchers cautioned, "the appearance of higher test scores in students who use technology more frequently may be due to the technology, or it may be due to the fact that such students come from more affluent families, and so are better academically prepared in the first place."

This paragraph was of particular interest to me:

The new federal law [the Leave No Child Behind Act] also places an emphasis on testing and uses test scores to determine the allocation of federal funds. Naturally, technology companies are angling to make sure their products support the new federal emphasis. Nearly every new offering--from traditional education publishers like Scholastic to startups like educational-software maker Lightspan--comes packaged with claims of raising test scores. In the short term, such a sales pitch may persuade superintendents to buy, but in the longer term, the basic question of whether technology is an effective teaching tool is still not answered, and further, it's unknown if standardized tests themselves adequately measure learning. "Test scores are pretty brutal proxies for success in the workforce," says Roy Pea, a professor of education at Stanford University. "What kids need to know and be able to do is changing as the world changes."

If I read this correctly, the author of the article managed to slip in a dig at standardized testing along with criticizing the claims of technology-pushers. I'm not sure if the author feels that tests are inadequate to measure any learning, which is patently untrue, or if she believes that the type of learning promoted through technology can't be measured through standardized tests. There's no reason to think that it can't.

When you combine that comment in with Dr. Pea's subsequent bogus criticism of tests (standardized tests were never meant to be proxies of workplace performance, therefore their "brutality" as a proxy is irrelevant), what you see is the argument that standardized tests should focus on what kids need to know in the workplace, and that the technological knowledge allegedly required in the workplace isn't measured by current tests. By that logic, technology-pushers can claim that even if their products don't improve test scores, they are improving a kid's chance for success in the workforce.

Fine, but there are three problems with criticizing current standardized tests and pushing technology on youngsters:
(1) The current educational system is meant to educate as well as prepare for the workforce, and the current standardized tests measure how well the educational part is working. No matter what the author claims, the current tests do in fact measure learning, and no matter what the technology-pushers claim, plain old reading, writing, and arithmetic will always need to be taught. Whether that is taught via teacher or computer is up to the school, but standardized tests will measure the efficiency of the teaching equally well in either case.
(2) If we decide that schooling should now prepare students technologically for the workforce, we won't know if the products featured in this article will achieve their desired end unless we have a way of measuring (i.e., testing) that, so standardized tests for technology knowledge would logically follow.
(3) According to the article, current educational programs in place may have their budgets cut to support the technology that is being installed. There's only a finite amount of money available to help schools comply with the LNCB Act. Therefore, I'd like to see more research assessing the use of technology in the classroom, with results demonstrated via the current standardized tests, before more money is spent on these kinds of improvements.

As Red Herring puts it:

Schools need more substantial proof that their investment in technology has made learning better--not just cheaper or faster. They should take computer and software sellers' claims with a sizable grain (boulder?) of salt. Tech companies aren't likely to change their tune; they're raking in money from the education market. Schools should also consider whether the modest gains achieved with expensive technology are worth the sacrifice in funding to other programs.

Amen.

The Pacific Research Institute, which

The Pacific Research Institute, which I have not been reading enough of, is the latest to claim that UC's new admissions policy discriminates against Asians, and their argument is one of the more convincing that I've seen.

Under the new [comprehensive review] criteria, last year UCLA admitted fewer Asians and whites, but 19 percent more blacks and nine percent more Hispanics. Total system-wide black and Hispanic admissions are up significantly, exactly what UC wanted. The Wall Street Journal quotes former UCLA admissions director Rae Lee Siporin who says that the new system was crafted to make the student body reflective of the state’s population. Further, Siporin baldly says that simply using poverty as the key criterion wouldn’t work because it would “pull in” too many low-income Asians...

Hmmm...You know that NEA proposal for a September 11th "history lesson" that has the education blogosphere so fired up? The one that suggests we teach our kids tolerance and make sure they don't practice discrimination? This new UC admissions system is a real-life lesson plan in discrimination, but I doubt we'll see the NEA suggest class discussions such as, "What does it mean to say that a university is pulling in 'too many' low-income Asians, and why is it considered a bad thing if they do?" or "How, exactly, does this type of discrimination differ from the type of discrimination the new admissions process is meant to alleviate?"

Thomas Sowell's not done with

Thomas Sowell's not done with you yet!

Today, Part III of the "teaching to the test" myth appeared in my mailbox and on Townhall.com. (Part I and Part II are blogged below.) Mr. Sowell has already Fisked and fact-checked those educrats who perpetuate such idiocies as "discovery learning", and now he's back for more:

They [failing educational fads] went back to the teachings of John Dewey, whose "progressive" ideas shaped developments in American schools -- and especially American schools of education, where future teachers were trained. Moreover, Dewey's ideas were tried out on a large scale in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, before they had achieved similar influence in the United States...During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1928, Dewey reported "the marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practice under the fostering care of the Bolshevik government." He noted that the Soviets had broken down the barriers between school and society, which he had urged others to do, and said, "I can only pay my tribute to the liberating effect of active participation in social life upon the attitude of the students."...Here we see the early genesis of the current idea in today's American schools that the children there should be promoting causes, writing public figures and otherwise "participating" in the arena of social and political issues.

In other words, educrats don't like "teaching to the test" because that doesn't leave them enough time to promote social and political issues in school. Our educational system may have gone so far off track from its original purpose that we now have "educators" who claim that teaching solid information in school, and then testing children on that information, is somehow limiting and damaging to the child. And, unfortunately, we have too many demagogues and politicians who are willing to believe them.

If it's a good, valid, reliable test, "teaching to the test" is nothing more than teaching the material in a clear and understandable fashion, clear enough so that students can then sit down and demonstrate on a test that they have memorized, learned, and now comprehend the material. That used to be what was was involved in "getting an education" in this country. We seem to have wandered a long way off from it.

Addendum: Thanks to Generous Reader Tim F. for providing the following printer-friendly links to all three of Mr. Sowell's articles:Part I, Part II, and Part III.

And the SAT debate begins

And the SAT debate begins

Boy, that didn't take long. Yesterday, I posted on John Harper's review of the new SAT in the Weekly Standard; this morning I find an email directing me to Stanley Kurtz's rebuttal to Harper in the National Review. Mr. Kurtz expands on the prediction that I made yesterday, which is that revising the SAT will lead to even more test criticism:

When the SAT was aptitude based, it was relatively insulated from tinkering or dilution. Bogus attempts to prove racial bias in the test were made, but any questions that conceivably carried racial bias were long ago eliminated, with very little change to the test itself. But an achievement test will be subject to death by a thousand cuts. Just wait until the accusations of racial bias on grading of the written section begin, with accompanying arguments about Black English, Ebonics, etc. And this only scratches the surface of potential problems involved in the relatively subjective grading of a written test.

I agree with Mr. Kurtz 100%. The criticism that both he and I predict will come from educators who do not like that written English is being assessed at all, and the new method of assessment is indeed subjective and thus open to debate just as much as, if not more so than, the multiple-choice items.

Mr. Kurtz's observation highlights one of the classic Catch-22 situations for psychometricians and test developers. If we create a test that is composed solely of multiple-choice items, the test is often very reliable, but educators scream that it is too "sterile", not enough "like real life", and too "restrictive of creative thinking". On the other hand, when we create a test that is more subjective, "real-life", and performance-based, the educators fight over the subjective methods of grading, and predictability will go down with such a test simply because the reliability of the test is bound to decrease as well. We're damned if we do, damned if we don't.

However, I believe Mr. Kurtz is too pessimistic about the problems in administering and scoring essays, because I'm aware that ETS has concentrated a great deal of effort and money into improving and automating essay scoring. Whether or not they've succeeded in creating a program that swiftly and adequately grades essays remains to be seen, but I am impressed by the effort they've put forth.

I also agree with Mr. Kurtz that:

Harper himself notes that "aptitude test" is now a dirty word on the academic Left. This hostility to differences in ability is the real reason for the change in the SAT.

This is something I've noted before - the academic Left is rapidly warming to an ideology that considers even the mere reporting of group differences in ability to be racist and sexist.

So, in one corner, Mr. Harper thinks the new SAT was a canny move on ETS's part that may improve the quality of schooling by placing emphasis on the preparedness of students. Mr. Kurtz thinks that ETS has caved to political pressure and students will pay the price, while leftist ideologues will be encouraged to further attack testing. What do you think?

Update: Mr. Kurtz also posted a link to this post in the NRO's weblog, The Corner. Thanks! And if you're here from NRO, you're a friend of mine.

Grading the new SATJohn Harper

Grading the new SAT

John Harper of the Weekly Standard reviews the new SAT and is surprised - and impressed - by what he finds. I'm surprised - and impressed - by what I read.

Little things:
* Harper uses the word "psychometrician", which I'm very happy to see in print, because I'm tired of spelling and defining it for people I meet.
* Harper found a college admissions officer who was willing to be quoted by name in saying what all psychometricians and admissions officers know, which is that standardized test scores tell you much more about a potential applicant than class rank.
* Harper took the time to wade through UC President Richard Atkinson's original SAT criticisms, disregarding the rush to criticize the existence of the test (by liberals) and the rush to disparage any test critic (by conservatives), and pulled out the true gist of the criticisms. Harper also thinks that ETS addressed those criticisms in the smartest and fairest way possible.
* Harper flatly acknowleges that words like "IQ" and "aptitude" have become anathema to the PC crowd. Rare is the news article willing to admit this.

Big things:
* Harper points out that the current SAT is not racially biased, because the existence of a group mean difference does not prove bias, and the test does not negatively impact non-Asian racial minorities because it actually overpredicts, rather than underpredicts, their college performance. Psychometricians already know this, but the mainstream media steadfastly refuses to state it. If anything, Asians are negatively impacted by the current SAT, which underpredicts their college performance.
* If group mean differences don't change under the new SAT, which is more obviously not a racially-biased IQ test but a test of college preparedness, it will be even more damning evidence of the public school's inabilities to educate. My prediction is that this will lead to even more test criticisms, which is the easy way out, rather than an overhaul of the public education system.

Harper says, in conclusion:

Competition under the new SAT will be fairer, at least in that everyone will know that the college entrance exam is an achievement test and that the best preparation truly is studying hard in a demanding high school and reading and writing as much as possible. Still, as long as there is unequal access to excellent college preparatory schools, equal opportunity as Conant conceived it will not be realized. Coaching will continue under the new SAT, since parents naturally want to give their children every possible advantage. But by calling attention to the deficiencies of so many public schools, the new test should at least fuel pressure for the reforms (including school choice and vouchers) necessary to rectify or ameliorate them.

His optimism is heartening, but I stand by my prediction above. The new SAT will increasingly reveal the shoddy schools, and the NEA and teacher's unions will rush to defend these schools by demonizing the "bias" of the new, achievement-based SAT. As long as tests reveal inadequate schooling, inadequate educators will criticize the tests.

Thomas Sowell isn't content with

Thomas Sowell isn't content with only one take-down of the "teaching to the test" myth - Round 2 appeared in my mailbox this morning from an education reform mailing list, and also in the Jewish World Review. Here are selected portions:

One of the objections by the educational establishment to state-mandated tests for students is that this forces the teachers to teach directly the material that is going to be tested, instead of letting the students "discover" what they need to know through their own trial and error...In other words, the students should not simply be taught the ready-made rules of mathematics or science but discover them for themselves. The fact that this approach has failed, time and again, to produce students who can hold their own in international tests with students from other countries only turns the American education establishment against tests.

Thank you, Mr. Sowell. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've said it myself many times - removing tests just because you don't like the results is no more than shooting the messenger. Tests by themselves do not improve a curriculum, but neither does removing tests already in place. In fact, I would say that it isn't possible for education reform to work unless tests are in place, and if we don't like the results we see, we should change something and test again.

The anti-testing crowd is in fact an anti-accountability, anti-reform crowd, because removing the tests allows those in the educational system to run rampant with dysfunctional teaching techniques. The theory that education can be improved by removing tests is no different from the theory that you can lose weight and get the body you want by tossing your scales and measuring tape out the window. The problem remains, but the method of assessing whether any given solution is working is now gone.

More from Mr. Sowell:

Discovery learning is just one of the many fads in education circles today. Only someone with no real knowledge or understanding of the history of ideas could take such a fad seriously. Nobody believes that the way to train pilots is to let them "discover" the principles of flight that the Wright brothers arrived at -- after years of effort, trial and error. Would anyone even try to teach people how to drive an automobile by taking them out on a highway and letting them "discover" how it is done?

I would try to add further support for Mr. Sowell's argument by taking it to the logical extreme - how would you like to send your kids to a school where they "learn" to play violin without ever being taught how to hold the bow, and "learn" to drive a car without ever being taught how the clutch works? - but I know that somewhere out there is an "educator" who thinks, hey, what a good, non-oppressive, creative idea. And I don't want to give them any more "good" ideas.

And finally,

It is impossible to understand what is happening in our schools without understanding the kind of people who run them. But, once you see the poor academic quality of those people, you can easily understand why textbooks have been dumbed down and why there is such bitter opposition by educators to letting exceptionally bright children be taught in separate classes with more advanced material. Do not expect intellectual losers to look favorably on intellectual winners.

Ouch.

NYU Professor Diane Ravitch has

NYU Professor Diane Ravitch has written a brilliant article entitled "Education After the Culture Wars" (Adobe Acrobat required), in which she describes the recents downward trends in history and literature education. Selected quotes:

As a member of the NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board], I reviewed one- and two-page passages that had been prepared by the testing consortium for President Clinton’s “voluntary national test” of reading in the fourth grade... After I had read about a dozen such
passages...I realized that the readings themselves had a cumulative subtext: the hero was never a white boy. Instead, the leading character–the one who was most competent, successful, and sympathetic – was invariably either a girl (of any race) or a nonwhite boy. Almost without exception, white boys were portrayed as weak and dependent...

When I asked why so few reading passages were drawn from classic children’s literature, the publisher explained that it was a well-accepted principle in educational publishing that everything written before 1970 was rife with racism and sexism...

Not only tests but textbooks are to be purged of certain ways of referring to people with disabilities or social disadvantages. The writers are directed not to speak of “the blind,” but only of “a person who is blind.”... Or consider this sample sentence: “Even though she was a poor, Hispanic woman, Maria was able to start a successful company.” Such a sentence is outlawed by the guidelines as elitist and patronizing, and it would have to be revised: “Through hard work and determination, Maria Sanchez started a successful company.”...

A strong tone of cultural resentment pervades the Macmillan-McGraw Hill bias guidelines; they suggest that white European American males have received too much credit in the past and that the textbook writers must compensate by highlighting the accomplishments of women and members of minority groups in every subject field, including science and mathematics....

According to these guidelines, the aim of a textbook is not simply to help students master a specific field of knowledge; the goal is rather to create nothing less than “a Multicultural Person.”...

The worst aspect of all of these guidelines is that strict application of them entails the exclusion of classic literature from reading textbooks...It would not be too big a stretch to assert that the McGuffey readers of the nineteenth century contained not only better literature than our own bowdlerized texts, but also more honest writing about the realities of contemporary society – poverty, crime, unemployment, class differences, and social injustice. By ensuring that students never read anything that might possibly offend them, current textbook guidelines reinforce a sugarcoated and narcissistic view of culture, as if books and poems and historical narratives were ephemeral commodities–meant mainly to make us all feel better about ourselves.

Lisa Snell of Reason Public

Lisa Snell of Reason Public Policy Institute compares one school that practices accountability with another school that worries more about self-esteem enhancement. The standardized testing results are what you would expect. This is yet more evidence that schools that are forced to be accountable for their students' performances are much more likely to succeed than schools who rush out to print up t-shirts advertising their failings.

School testing newsBudget constraints mean

School testing news

Budget constraints mean some tests will be discontinued for Oregon's third-, fifth-, and eighth-graders. The suspended tests are the most expensive, because they're open-ended tests that can't be machine-scored, but they're also the "meatiest" tests - mathematical problem-solving, essay-writing, and so on.

Los Angeles staffers and supervisors get a slap on the wrist for their delay in submitting answer sheets for state-mandated LAUSD tests. This resulted in a delay in the release of test scores in other districts as well. The problem may lie not with those particular staffers but with the system that mandates extensive testing yet does not provide for testing coordinators for the school districts.

A telling quote in the Jacksonville Journal: "I'm against testing all the way.", by Duval County School Board District 4 candidate Vivian Hicks, who said standardized testing, including FCAT, should be abolished. Want to bet Vivian doesn't have a plan for accountability or assessment once the tests are abolished? I couldn't find any other information on the web about her political platforms - anyone out there have more information?

Rand Simberg envisions a future

Rand Simberg envisions a future of highly-qualified, non-disadavantaged students and their lawsuits against the University of California. Most precious quote: "Todd Hepplewitt, an honors student at Caca Fuego High, in Del Norte Vista, is claiming that, in today's society, he's handicapped by his lack of hardship in life. He contends that the difficulty of making it in a victimized society, and getting no government or institutional support, is underestimated and can't be appreciated by those who have been burdened all their lives by life." Genius.

And while we're on the topic of disadvantaged students, The Cranky Professor envisions the slippery slope as accommodations for mentally ill students become accommodations for the merely out-of-sorts. Scroll down for his commentary on the "education story" of a depressed student at Dartmouth that didn't include any comments from professors or information about the academics involved.

The Prof also pointed out something that I had missed in my discussion on disability accommodations a while back, which is that students demand disability-blind admissions (as evidenced by the multiple lawsuits against testing companies who dare to flag accommodated test scores), and then, once admitted, demand disability accommodations in the classroom. So college admissions are supposed to be disability blind, but college grades are not.

End result? ETS has decided not to flag results from tests given under extra time, although these test scores are probably unhelpful in predicting college performance, and the Prof reports that:

One of the people interviewed [in a recent NPR broadcast] was a fellow at Harvard who is dealing this month with a stream of incoming students and their parents who are now submitting letters from psychiatrists and coming to interview local therapists.

Thomas Sowell takes on the

Thomas Sowell takes on the myth that "teaching to the test" is a bad thing in today's Jewish World Review. He neatly skewers those teachers who complain that "teaching to the test" stifles creativity and impedes real teaching, by pointing out that:

If there has actually been such "genuinely great teaching," then why has there been no speck of evidence of it during all these years of low test scores and employer complaints about semi-literate young people applying for jobs? Why do American students learn so much less math between the fourth and the eighth grade than do students in other countries? Could it be because so much more time has been wasted in American schools during those four years?...Evidence is the one thing that our so-called educators want no part of. They want to be able to simply declare that there is genuinely great teaching, "creative" learning, or "critical thinking," without having to prove anything to anybody.

Read the whole thing. It's great. Thomas Sowell is my hero.

There's a dy-no-mite series in

There's a dy-no-mite series in the Washington Post on the trial and tribulations of algebra education for middle-school students. Some communities are doing a bang-up job, despite pessimistic demographics, while other school districts have no students taking algebra in middle school. Why does this matter?

Completing algebra by eighth grade is important "because it is doable. And I think attached to that is that kids in middle schools need a goal so they can't just drift through middle school doing the same things they have been doing," said Robert Moses, a civil rights leader who has made the subject his focus for two decades...Algebra is a significant educational barrier, educators say. Advocates of better mathematics instruction complain that parents and elementary school teachers frighten children by speaking of algebra as if it were an ugly troll guarding the bridge to math and science courses. It requires students to handle abstractions, including unknown quantities and word problems, but several teachers say success in algebra brings confidence that can extend to other difficult courses...The problem, educators say, is that school administrators cannot agree on how soon students should tackle algebra, usually a ninth- or 10th-grade course, and how their progress should be assessed.

Virginia is planning on changing their system so that algebra compentency must be demonstrated before a high-school diploma is granted (boy, that's going to give nightmares to some future English Ph.D.s). Philadelphia plans to expose all eighth-grade students to algebra, in the hopes that the ones who don't pass will have a better shot at it in ninth grade.

So, any problems? Well, part two of the series reports that, for example, Maryland's state algebra exam doesn't have a whole lot of algebra in it, nor was it designed to. And, "several experts note that most states either have no test to check what students have learned or have produced a test such as Maryland's, with just algebraic concepts". What's more, what passes for algebra instruction in some DC schools (which don't have a standardized algebra exam) doesn't translate to better performance on national tests like NAEP.

I can add here, anecdotally, that any school with a plan to expose all its youngsters to algebra classes is on the right track, and I feel like nothing builds confidence like succeeding in something as inherently abstract as the higher maths (algebra, calculus, and so on). I was kept out of algebra in the eighth grade due to my low placement on an exam, and I struggled with it in ninth grade, not really getting the hang of it until tenth grade. I also think that a good, solid, non-watered-down, end-of-course test is crucial to assessing the quality of the algebra instruction and the skills learned by the students. Algebra is a topic that lends itself extremely well to standardized tests, and any students who doesn't master it is going to be disadvantaged in any future math classes.

Luckily, some teachers are trying new methods to get rid of "math phobia", rather than just weeding out kids who don't, at first, seem to have the skills necessary for algebra:

Shirley Kossoy, who has taught math at Irving Middle School since 1985, said there are ways to get less confident and less energetic students through algebra without diluting the examinations. She's had students keep journals of what they liked and did not like about her lessons. Several students said they did better when she let them work in small groups and then checked with the clusters individually, rather than forcing them to do problems on the board in front of the class.

"I like it when you come around to each table and make sure we understand what you just went over . . . instead of standing in front of the class and saying, 'Any questions?' " a student wrote in her journal. The potential for embarrassment and memories of being ridiculed in elementary school after missing a question were at the root of many of her students' math phobias, Kossoy said.

I feel for Baltimore... ...Baltimore's

I feel for Baltimore...

...Baltimore's schoolchildren, to be more specific, who may soon be at risk of missing out on effective phonics-based language learning. In its place, they could be submitted to the dreadful, and widely-reviled, "whole-language" method. The article (registration required) mentions that the phonics-based program is both "highly successful" and "may be in trouble", which tells you all you need to know about the true motives of the whole-language crowd. Ideology before education, and when something ain't broke (under the phonics program, Baltimore's first-graders went from the 37th to the 59th national percentile on the Terra Nova, and their fifth-graders went from the 16th to the 40th percentile), be sure to fix it.

No usable scores in Georgia?The

No usable scores in Georgia?

The state gave up trying Friday to get usable scores from the Stanford 9 achievement test given to children across Georgia last spring, after months of trying to fix the problem...Officials with the company that produces the test said they could get accurate results if given more time, but the children who took the Stanford 9 have already started a new school year.

A Concerned Parent sent this article my way, in the hopes that I would understand what the problem is, but I can't tell from the Access Atlanta article on it what the exact problem is. Harcourt Educational Measurement is citing an "equating" problem, which is extremely serious. It's pure speculation on my part, but here's what could have gone wrong:

(1) When the problematic 2002 test was assembled, the test assembly procedure was insufficient and did not produce a test that measured the same skills, or measured the skills to same degree of difficulty, as the 2001 test.

(2) When the problematic test was assembled, no items were used that could link that test back to the 2001 test, so that the test results could be placed on the same scale. Anchor items are a popular method for equating tests for difficulty - the College Board uses this for the SATs. I'm not sure what a "common equating" procedure means, but I think it's possible that they mean equating across common (anchor) items. If so, I'm not sure what could have gone wrong. It's possible that the common items were not included, or that even with common items, the content of the 2002 test was vastly dissimilar to the 2001 test, and once the equating process was complete, the test demographics were so different as to yield no acceptable scores for their purpose.

The magnitude of the change mentioned in the article is 24 percentage points, which is humongous, but what's the meaning of the comment that "scores on the 2002 test rose or fell by up to 24 percentage points"? Either the 2002 test is much easier, or it's much more difficult. If in fact test-takers were all over the place, with some increasing scores by 24 percent and some decreasing their scores by that much, it sounds like the test was assembled incorrectly and doesn't measure the same thing at all as the 2001 test. Either way, it's a huge black eye for Harcourt.

Hssssss.....That's the sound of steam

Hssssss.....

That's the sound of steam escaping from my ears, the result of my reading the NEA's idea of a September 11th "history lesson":

The National Education Association is suggesting to teachers that they be careful on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the terrorist hijackings that killed more than 3,000 people...Suggested lesson plans compiled by the NEA recommend that teachers "address the issue of blame factually," noting: "Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise."...But another of the suggested NEA lesson plans — compiled together under the title "Remember September 11" and appearing on the teachers union health information network Web site — takes a decidedly blame-America approach, urging educators to "discuss historical instances of American intolerance," so that the American public avoids "repeating terrible mistakes."

Thoughts that come to mind:

(1) Does the NEA also suggest that, for example, when issues surrounding slavery and racism are taught, teachers should be careful not to "suggest any group is responsible"? Doubt it.

(2) Does the NEA's suggestions for "addressing the issue of blame factually" include the facts that each of the 19 hijackers was a Muslim male from the Middle East (mostly Saudi Arabia) and that each celebrated a horrific form of religion that espouses suicide and murder of innocents? Doubt it.

(3) Does the NEA suggest balancing the discussion of those "historical instances of American intolerance" with the myriad instances of current intolerance in the countries from which the hijackers came, including brutal intolerance against women, homosexuals, and people who dare to worship a God other than Allah? Doubt it.

So, on a day when adults are planning to wear red, white, and blue and support their country, the NEA is suggesting teaching moral equivalence to the children. Can anyone explain to me why I should have any respect whatsoever for the NEA?

Update: Little Green Footballs has more information, and even more dignified fury, on the topic (Scroll down to the post, "Teaching Tolerance for Terror" for Aug. 19th). Joanne Jacobs also puts the NEA in its place (scroll down to the post "Blameless Terror" for Aug. 19th).

Remember my comments yesterday that

Remember my comments yesterday that consquences alone (as in, the high stakes of testing) aren't sufficient to raise grades or exit exam pass rates? I take it back. If schools improve, Jeb Bush is going to dye his hair purple. Let's hope it works, because if it does, we can require politicians everywhere to do it.

If you don't regularly check

If you don't regularly check in with Slate's Editorial Cartoons, you should, because they always have a range of great cartoons on current events. Click here to get their grab-bag of back-to-school cartoons (my favorite is shown below).

Qualified teachers need not apply

Qualified teachers need not apply

A 30-year teaching veteran vents in USA Today about seeing highly-qualified teaching candidates turned away because they lacked "education" courses, while less qualified candidates who managed to gain certification were hired (text not available online for free; search archives for "snub teachers" to purchase). Patrick Welch says:

To create the illusion of having "qualified teachers," states and individual school systems have tried to get the public to believe that "qualified" and "certified" are synonymous. Any parent who has seen some of the pathetic "certified" teachers...knows that state certification does not even rise to a minimum competency level.

In some states, the verbal pass rate on The Praxis Series test used to license teachers is set below the 25th percentile. In Kentucky, for instance, the verbal pass rate on the Praxis is set at the 20th percentile, even though a teacher's verbal ability is crucial to a child's learning.

Several years ago, I graded the essay section of the National Teachers Exam administered by the Educational Testing Service. For the most part, the writing was wretched, far below the quality of the papers of high school seniors I had read while grading the Advanced Placement English exam. Yet the standards were so minimal that even candidates who appeared to be semiliterate had to get passing scores....

...take the case of T.C. Williams social studies teacher Caitlin Stravino, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Harvard School of Education. Despite the fact that she was certified to teach in Massachusetts through her Harvard program, the gatekeeping gurus in Richmond [Virginia] didn't think she knew enough to teach. They told her she needed to take 33 more hours of course work to gain certification. Stravino called the state education department more than a dozen times during the course of her first year at T.C. Williams - and got nowhere. She finally called James Gilmore, then the governor, telling him that if Virginia insisted on the 33 additional hours, she was going to teach in another state. Four days later, Stravino got a call from the state education department asking whether she would agree to take six hours of history courses that had little to do with anything that goes on in her classroom...

Jim DeCamp, an English teacher at Rush-Henrietta Senior High School in New York, says it's not just the education courses that are freezing out bright candidates. "There's a certain prejudice in the profession against smart people," DeCamp says. "The coach-turned-principal types are threatened by bright applicants. Intelligence is not valued by administrators."

A prejudice against smart people - in the field determined to "educate" our kids. Very, very scary. Pretty soon, smart youngsters will feel isolated within public school not only from their lower-acheiving peers, but also from lower-acheiving teachers.

Truth or Consequences? I've never

Truth or Consequences?

I've never been one in favor of high school exit exams, in part because so little seems to be done to combat the increasing failure rate. Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post reports that the situation may only get worse, as 70% of the nation's high-schoolers may be required to pass the exams over the next six years.

... now more states are moving toward using the tests. Typically, the report said, most students eventually pass the graduation tests after retaking them several times. But that could become harder to do as states make the tests more rigorous. "States are ratcheting up the standards and are making these tests more and more difficult," [Center on Education Policy director] Jennings said. "In a few years, the vast majority of kids are going to face difficult tests to get out of high school." The report said that in addition to providing greater support for students, states should provide alternative routes to high school graduation -- including waivers from educators, the use of substitute tests or diplomas based on collections of work judged by a panel of evaluators.

Matt Gandal, executive vice president of Achieve Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based group that advocates high-stakes tests, said he agreed with the report's conclusion that students should be given more academic support. But he stopped short of saying that states should strip tests of their consequences. "We believe consequences can be a strong incentive to improve performance," he said.

Well, yes and no. I mean, there's no incentive to improve for a test that has no consequences. However, tests in and of themselves are not supposed to improve education, nor are they capable of doing so. In some states, 69% of the students didn't pass the math portion of that state's exit exam on the first try. That's a majority of students enrolled in a school who can't pass the basics. Something is wrong with that school, but my guess is it isn't the quality of that exit exam, nor the consequences (or lack thereof) attached to it.

The appropriate response to this situation is not to require more exit exams or ratchet up the difficulty of the existing ones. I'd like to see states give schools with high failure rates a break from the consequences for a short-term period, in addition to the support needed to turn the failure rates around.

Much as I'm impressed to see an article in a major newspaper that quotes an advocate of high-stakes testing in place of the same tired quotes from critics such as FairTest, I can't say I agree with Mr. Gandal that the consequences in and of themselves will improve performance.

What part of "Leave No

What part of "Leave No Child Behind" didn't you get?

An important part of the Leave No Child Behind Act is the assessment of every schoolchild, because unless we know how much they know, we don't know what improvements they need, nor the best way to go about implementing those improvements. But it looks like California has been leaving out one out of every five children - often removing scores after children have taken the exams.

The Register analyzed three years of test scores and student participation rates at the state's 7,300 public schools. The newspaper found the error rate after first investigating the large numbers of students whose scores were dropped. API loopholes exclude about 828,000 students of the 4.5 million second- through 11th-graders statewide. Many scores are removed after students take the exams. Last year, more than 58,000 Orange County students - a group almost the size of Santa Ana Unified School District - weren't counted. While the state routinely reports 98 percent or 99 percent of students are tested at individual schools, only 82 percent of the test scores are counted on average.

In fairness, it seems they're doing it in desperation to obtain some of the $67.3 million that California has allocated to give as rewards to schools, but the end result is to make the test scores even more unreliable, and to mask the desperate need of the lower-performing students. No test score is a perfect measure, and by deleting their lowest scorers, California schools have degraded the API results even further.

Canada's mathematics standardized test scores

Canada's mathematics standardized test scores may be near the top, but Happy Fun Pundit describes an interaction with the, er, bottom of the knowledge curve. I've just thought of a great idea - you know all those testing critics who claim standardized tests are sterile and not enough like real life? Let's change that basic mathematics testing format from paper&pencil and fill-in-the-bubbles to a more real-life scenario. Let's plunk high school students down in front a cash register and let them deal with a customer like Mr. Happy Fun. If no sarcastic posting results, we know the student performed adequately.

Oh, and just scroll up to the top of his page and read all his bitingly funny postings (especially the one about youth voters). He's like potato chips - you can't read just one.

I'm baaaaack!Aaaah, my lovely in-house

I'm baaaaack!

Aaaah, my lovely in-house vacation is still going on, but I've decided to get off my butt and update this page - I suppose that should be sit down on my butt, instead. So much education news, so little time....

* Kids are headin' back to school, teachers and administrators are headin' back to stupidity. Zero tolerance is necessary for kids on aspirin and kids with bread knives (requires registration), but not for teachers on cocaine. What little respect I still had for teachers' unions is dwindling by the second... (Thanks to Joanne Jacobs and Instapundit for the link).

* Did I mention that my respect for teachers' unions is miniscule? It just got even smaller, now that the battle over school vouchers is heating up. The Education Intelligence Agency reports on the battle , with the unions planted firmly on the side of anti-education. The article also comments that "the NEA and AFT cannot survive in an America with a significant number of large-scale school voucher programs", which is the best news that I've heard all day.

Also in the same communique from the EIA - a discussion of what it takes to be considered a "highly qualified" teacher in California:

Because an elementary credential encompasses grades K-6, there is virtually no discussion of content in the student teaching program. Teaching reading to kindergarteners is lumped together with teaching reading to sixth-graders, so only the most general concepts are covered. The problem is even more pronounced in social studies and science. The credential program simply assumes a teacher candidate knows about the three branches of government, or the different kinds of clouds. What you don’t know you are expected to pick up from -- believe it or not -- the children’s textbooks. This puts some teachers only a page or two ahead of their students. And heaven forbid someone should call on you to teach art or music, because the credential program doesn’t cover them at all.

* Paperwork (and standardized testing) requirements may soon be reduced for homeschooling parents in Pennsylvania, thanks to a bill introduced by Republican State Representative Samuel E. Rohrer.

* A school superintendent held a rally - in a Baptist Church, no less! - to pump up teachers for the upcoming school year. He also talked about the new Continuous Improvement Model:

District officials also showed a film explaining how the Brazosport Independent School District in Texas developed and used the model to boost standardized test scores. The video noted the model revolves around an eight-step process, that includes identifying struggling students and providing help. Students who grasp lessons are taught the same concepts but in greater depth.

I wish the superintendent well, but once again I'm amazed that a program targeting students who test poorly and giving them more in-depth explanations of the academic subjects is considered a controversial, "new" program. What were they doing with those students before now?

* Well, here's the new Texas exam - the TAKS. The Texas Education Agency did a rough estimate with last year's TAAS data and predicted that "only 43 percent of Texas eighth-graders would have passed all sections of the TAKS this year, including less than one-third of minority students." Higher standards that will improve education, or a too-tough exam that will demoralize students? Remains to be seen.

* Are students who have English as second language disadvantaged by standardized tests? That's the complaint made by a group in Philadelphia called the Education Law Center. Co-director of the center Len Rieser said "he is particularly concerned about the prospect that English as a Second Language students will be less likely to receive a certificate - and possibly be less likely to graduate - because they typically do not score as well on the state tests as other students."

Am I missing something here? I thought that was the point of the tests. They should be designed so that a firm grasp of English is required to pass them because, well, a firm grasp of English is required (or should be) in order to be considered educated in the United States. If the schools are not teaching students English very well, then the schools should be criticized (and their teaching plans modified, presumably away from the harmful and ineffective bilingual eduation programs and towards English immersion), but the tests shouldn't be removed. After all, they apparently now serve as a method of assessing how well schools teach English to kids who didn't learn it as their first language.

* Two experimental schools in Louisiana are doing very well, according to Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP 21) results. LSU lab school director Edward Greene crows about the school's reputation as one of the best public schools in the state:

[Greene] said his school covers the subjects in the tests and then some. "For us, the key is we don't teach to this test, we teach beyond it," he said. "We offer a very high-caliber curriculum. We reach to a higher level and when you do that you should get results to show for it."

Gotta love a director who understands the importance of challenging the students.

* And finally, The New York Times reports that tests are not just for kids (subscription may be required). I don't often think of NYT articles on testing as "delightful", but I was delighted by this theory of what might happen if colleges start giving standardized tests to their students for purposes of accountability:

''The real reason we don't test is, we would rather not know,'' said Frank Newman, a former president of the Education Commission of the States who, as head of the Futures Project at Brown University, promotes accountability in higher education. ''We have a rhetoric about what we do,'' he said. ''That rhetoric is: when you come to our institution you get a great liberal education, you're going to learn to think, you're going to learn about the life of the mind, you're going to learn the great traditions of Western thought. If we start measuring, we will start finding out that you didn't learn how to think, you didn't learn about the great traditions of Western thought. Then we have a nasty little problem on our hands. If we find out that those students can't write well, who do we turn to?''

Who, indeed? I say we push for a Leave No Beer-Soaked, Baggy-Clothes-Wearing, Dorm-Living Young Adult Behind Act immediately.

Hi, everyone, just want to

Hi, everyone, just want to say that I am going to be incommuni-bloggo for a few days. Nothing serious, just need some downtime. If you're new to the site, I recommend the "Why did I create this page?" and the "Oldies but Goodies" links on the left-hand side of the page.

Keep those emails comin'!

The National Review online has

The National Review online has two provocative articles this morning. The first is by Mark Goldblatt, entitled "What is Racism?". He comments on a peculiar phenomenon, one that every psychometrician who's had to defend standardized testing data has noticed:

After the Amadou Diallo shooting in 1998, for example, I noted in a newspaper column that 16 of the previous 19 cop killers in New York City had been black or Hispanic males — a relevant point, I thought, in explaining why cops might be edgier around dark-skinned males than any other demographic. For digging up that statistic, I was accused of racism. Yet the numbers were accurate; even though they concerned race, even though they cast dark-skinned males in a negative light, the numbers themselves were unequivocal, undeniable, and unbiased. Again, the mere acknowledgement of truth, however unpleasant, is never in itself evidence of racism.

Mark's experience is similar to what many psychometricans are beginning to experience.

In the past, standardized test results by race have often been the subject of controversy. For example, say that two exclusive groups, Race A and Race B, take a test, and the mean score for A is one standard deviation above the mean for B, but both have similar distributions (such as a bell-shaped curve). Not everyone from A did better than everyone in B, but in general A appears to be the more proficient group. The controversy has traditionally arisen from how that mean difference is interpreted:

* One can conclude that B is genetically less capable, because of some trait due to race, than A, and that this mean difference is thus not correctable. I don't think anyone would argue with this being defined as a racist argument.

* One can conclude that the test is biased against B, due to some aspect of the test or the construct being measured. In my mind, this is still somewhat a racist argument, because it still assumes that there is some quality attributable to all members of B, based solely on race, that impairs their performance, but here the problem is correctable (the test) rather than innate.

* One can conclude that B was less well-prepared, as a group, than A. This is the argument for nurture, not nature, that suggests society has a problem in the way it treats or educates members of B.

And so on, and so forth. These types of arguments have been bandied about for 50 years. What is new, and this is related to what Mark commented on, is that we seem to be rapidly approaching a time when the mere reporting of a statistic such as a mean score difference can be viewed as a racist act in and of itself, just like the mere reporting of crime statistics. It's easy to find examples in the news every day of tests and test developers being vilified for having the audacity to publish a test on which everyone does not score the same.

Also in the National Review, John McWhorter follows up with another piece on the hardship benefits in the UC system. He speaks from experience, as a professor at UC Berkley who feels the new "race-neutral" policy is actually an attempt for whites to assuage their guilt over the past, by making sure it doesn't happen that a "brown student of any background [is] held to the same standards as others".

And the linking continues apace..

And the linking continues apace..

Hey, Joanne Jacobs is on FoxNews again, and she linked to my post on ETS's decision to stop flagging extra-time test scores. If you're here from Fox, welcome!

I have also posted on the other topics that Joanne covered in the FoxNews piece - the UC system's appalling focus on sob stories rather than academic skills, and the hypersensitivity of current item-writing guidelines. Oh, and if you want even more commentary on the UC system, go to Erin O'Connor's Cant Watch and check her posting for today. Her detailed analyses put my glib comments to shame.

If you emailed me back in May when my blog appeared as FoxNews' Blog of the Week, and you never heard back from me, I greatly apologize. Emails were lost when my email account was swamped.

If you've been reading me since then, bless you.

Thanks to all My

Thanks to all

My hits are up, thanks to other bloggers sending readers to me. I figure I should stop and thank them all....

Overlawyered.com - Follow all those ridiculous court cases online!
Spleenville.com - Andrea Harris and her cat are going to rule the world.
Joanne Jacobs - The first source for education reform news.
Cold Fury.com - Don't pass him on the right.
Sand in the Gears - More of a threat, and an itch, than he thinks.
Education Weak - Keeping a close eye on government schools.
Homeschool and Other Educ. Stuff - We don't need no thought control.
Gene Expression - Renaissance Man.

Too dumb to pass, but

Too dumb to pass, but smart enough to hire a lawyer

Liza Porteus of FoxNews writes today about the recent rash of parents suing schools over their children's grades. I commented on this previously, but I discussed only the one case in Arizona. Ms. Porteus lists cases in Ohio and Kansas as well. Thankfully, the Ohio case was dismissed, possibly because the student's excuses for not attending class were not acceptable, but the Kansas case is a true abomination.

When Piper (Kansas) High School biology teacher Christine Pelton discovered that 28 of her 118 students plagiarized an assignment, she gave them all well-deserved zeroes. The school board, under pressure from parents, reduced those penalties and told Pelton to change the project's weight of the total semester grade. Pelton responded by resigning the next day. You can read more about it here, here, and here.

Says it all, doesn't it? Students are not to suffer the consequences of their own actions, as far as their parents and the lawyers are concerned. Students aren't expected to not copy from each other. And how do you suppose the students feel who didn't plagiarize, those who are still possessed of some sense of responsibility, conscience, and decorum? Do you think they feel this decision by the school board is in their best interest?

Marie Gryphon of the Cato Institute is absolutely correct when she is quoted in the article as saying, "...Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), for example, encourages and empowers parents to sue schools in order to obtain educational options for kids with special needs...If the present climate is too litigious, our lawmakers deserve much of the blame". I'm just waiting for the first lawsuit claiming, "I didn't like my kid's low Stanford 9/CTBS/SAT score" or "My kid is traumatized by standardized tests and can no longer function", or some such variation on that theme.

Ms. Porteus also mentions something of which I had been previously unaware, namely that "The No Child Left Behind education law President Bush signed in January included a teacher liability section to help ensure teachers, principals and other school professionals are able to undertake 'reasonable actions to maintain order and discipline in the classroom.' The law also maintains teachers are protected from most lawsuits if they were acting within their responsibilities."

James Morrow has a great

James Morrow has a great post about the nefarious attempt to dumb down education in South Wales (Australia). He describes himself as "an unapologetically fanatical elitist when it comes to education" (my kinda guy) and bemoans the attempts of the public education system to "combat incipient braininess" and circumvent the need for a good vocabulary. Go check him out. The diversity post directly above this education post is fantastic as well.

Local testing newsMaryland - New

Local testing news

Maryland - New CTBS scores may actually be TerraNova scores.
Kent, Washington - Third- and sixth-graders could end up taking more than one standardized test a year.
Colorada - CSAP test scores are flat,, yet the students appear to be making progress.
Honolulu, Hawai'i - Ninety-five high-poverty schools may be labeled as failing.

And in Sun Valley Middle School in Los Angeles - a success story and a half. Can't wait to see those Stanford 9 test scores.

Here we go again...

Here we go again...

The University of Georgia is now following in the University of California's footsteps by broadly expanding the non-academic factors that will determine admission, now that race can no longer be used as a factor. At first, UG's factors don't seem as bluntly ideological as UC's - "Creativity, maturity and a history of public service" are now important, along with "maturity...creativity, intellectual curiosity, commitment to service and citizenship."

However, they managed to slip "a respect for cultural differences and ability to overcome hardship" into the list of helpful character traits. My guess is, having a truly libertarian respect for cultural differences (such as not hating dead white males, Christians, or conservatives), and the demonstrated ability to overcome the hardships of AP courses and the SAT, won't satisfy those requirements.

Failing grades aren't enough information

Failing grades aren't enough information - we need guidelines!

The Rockford (Illinois) school board held a meeting this week to figure out why on earth 23 eighth-graders were promoted to ninth-grade after failing every single one of their courses. It appears advancement decisions are not just based on grades, and a student's test scores might be good enough to justify promotion.

Let me get this straight. The use of standardized tests in decision-making is criticized in the news almost daily, allegedly because such tests are narrowly-based, culturally biased, and "don't measure anything", yet a school board feels comfortable using test scores to promote students who have demonstrated that they lack the intelligence, or the organization, or the persistence (they're lacking something) to pass a single course in eighth grade. And the board thinks these students are ready for high school?

Teacher reports also count in the decision, and boy, doesn't that give you confidence in the accuracy of those reports? How much educrat jargon is needed to justify promoting a student who has failed every single course?