Number 2 Pencil

Happy Turkey Day!I have a

Happy Turkey Day!

I have a short day of work ahead of me, and then I get to battle the crowd at Philly's airport in order to fly home to SC. Wish me luck. And I wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving. I hope to be online again by Friday. Until then, check out why we should be thankful this Thanksgiving from the National Review, and go look at some great Thanksgiving cartoons at Slate's Editorial Cartoon Roundup. My favorite is posted below:

Marshall Ramsey, Jackson, Mississippi, 11.21.02

Par for the courseWhat happens

Par for the course

What happens when schools create exit exams? Not every student passes them. The reasons for this are varied, but most likely it's some combination of misfit between class curricula and test items (the schools aren't teaching what they're testing), and good ol' student incompetence. Not everyone is smart enough to earn a high school diploma, and declaring such a statement to be politically incorrect doesn't change the reality of it.

What really ticks me off about high school exit exams is that school districts that implement them refuse to stand behind the results. I posted earlier today about Massachusett's wimpy "certificate of achievement" for students who can't pass the MCAS, and now I just discovered through Joanne Jacobs that because only 30% of Washington State's 10th-graders passed the all four sections of the exit exam, school administrators are scrambling for ways to make the test easier. The administrators in questions aren't shy about admitting that the entire revision process is just a means to avoid legal action:

"We will get sued," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson predicted recently. "I want to win the lawsuit -- and I want to be fair to kids." Bergeson proposed several significant modifications to the grad test in her annual State of Education address on Nov. 15 in Spokane, including scoring adjustments, opportunities for retaking the test and alternative paths to a diploma for students who can't clear the WASL bar. She acknowledged that the issue of changing the test at all is ripe for controversy, which likely will heat up as the 2008 effective date nears.

Business leaders fear that educational standards will be weakened, while unionized teachers oppose a high-stakes test of any kind as a sine qua non for graduation.

Somehow, I'd have more faith in an administrator who was willing to brave lawsuits in order to be fair to kids, rather than cave in to demands and blame the messenger - the tests - when the kids have a miserable pass rate. Joanne's comments on the matter are particularly good.

Regular readers will know I'm no fan of exit exams. But schools that are serious about them should stand behind the results and refuse to dumb down the exams. A miserable passing rate may very well be a sign that a school's curriculum is not useful, and all this legal wrangling about what's fair to everyone tends to obscure the fact that these tests give us important information.

"Typical of large urban schools"Joanne

"Typical of large urban schools"

Joanne Jacobs found (through Highered Intelligence) an article about a school facing the typical urban problems - you know, a little bit of truancy here, a few disciplinary problems there - and prostitutes operating out of the boys' restroom.

Teachers wrote a letter claiming major problems are plaguing the South Central Los Angeles campus [of Washington Prep High School] including students who are gambling, drinking, cutting classes, using profanity, smoking marijuana, threatening teachers and committing sexual acts.

Several teachers told NBC4 they agree with the letter but only one would talk on camera if we didn't show her face. "You can walk around campus and you're not sure when class is in and when it isn't because there's so many students roaming around. There's not a respect for authority," she said.

Gee, wonder what the principal's take on the situation is?

"That is not the average student at Washington Prep, but is it happening at all? Yes, on an isolated basis," school principal James Noble said...Noble said the problems are typical of large urban schools...Noble held meetings with parents Tuesday night to address the concerns. He denied the charge that prostitutes operate out of the boys' restrooms.

See? "Typical", so no cause for alarm. Perhaps Mr. Noble agrees with the posting below that these problems just can't be avoided, thanks to "post-traumatic slavery disorder". After all, it's the root cause of all these kinds of problems. The lack of respect for authority so massive that teachers fear for their safety has absolutely nothing to do with it.

We feel their painYou know,

We feel their pain

You know, I spend a lot of time defending both psychometricians and psychologists, because, technically, I'm both (my Ph.D. is in Psychology). Whenever some columnist rants that all standardized tests are designed to keep minorities down, I take it personally, but I'm also always ready to debate those who feel the entirety of clinical psychology and psychiatric medicine is just so much hoo-ha. The field of clinical psychology has had many beneficial effects on human behavior. I see cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical-behavioral therapy, and drug treatment as godsends for those with depression, manic-depression, and personality disorders, not just a bunch of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo and quack medicine.

And what thanks do I get for defending clinical psychologists? A group consisting of a clinical psychologist and two social worker have come up with the purely scientific, empirically-tested, theoretically-sound, nope-no-political-motivation-here "illness" known as "post-traumatic slavery disorder". No, this doesn't apply to people who are currently slaves in certain other countries (*coughMuslimcountriescough*) - this applies to Americans, living Americans, even ones whose ancestors were not slaves.

As Dave Barry likes to say, I am not making this up.

Mims, Reid, and Larry Higginbottom, another black social worker, recently taught a symposium at the Simmons Graduate School of Social Work and are writing a book about what they call ''post-traumatic slavery disorder'' - a derivative of post-traumatic stress disorder. They are holding workshops to propose to fellow professionals that drug abuse, broken families, crime, and low educational attainment in segments of the black community can be directly linked to the trauma of slavery, and that ''black people as a whole are suffering from PTSD,'' Mims said.

Now, Mims, Reid, and Higginbottom - none with backgrounds in academia - have taken it upon themselves to try to educate other mental health workers about their theory, and promote a curriculum and therapy based on the idea.

"Low educational attainment" - yup, those low SAT scores are directly attributable to the trauma of slavery - and not in a social or cultural sense, mind you; in a psychological sense. So, the idea of personal "trauma" has now been perverted to mean "something traumatic that happened to someone else in the past", and all social and cultural ills in the black community can be considered due to a horrible, wretched government policy that was rectified 137 years ago.

But, if this theory were correct, wouldn't the Civil War and the eradication of slavery have been as resoundingly therapeutic as slavery was traumatic? After all, the patients who are allegedly suffering from "post-traumatic slavery disorder" live in the only country in the world that tore itself apart in a battle to end slavery, and whose black citizens enjoy a higher standard of living than the black citizens of any other country in the world. This is not to say that there are no racial problems and no racial prejudice in the U.S., but the proposal of this "syndrome" seems to suggest that the social programs and the civil rights movements of the last forty years have had no effect whatsoever, and that black Americans are in fact no better off now than were their counterparts of 1866. This idea is simply lunatic to anyone with a knowledge of American culture and history.

Is the battle for the acceptance of "post-traumatic slavery disorder" a courageous fight to help those who are all helpless victims of post-slavery depression and psychosis - ''black people as a whole", plus Latinos, so we're talking about a vast number of Americans - or is it in itself an insidious, racist idea that robs blacks and Latinos of the opportunity to view themselves as individuals who are masters of their own destiny? Is it the case, as Ward Connelly says, that "Some people are just looking for reasons to fail...this notion of a post-slavery syndrome falls into that category...We don't want young black kids to grow up thinking they are weak and can't look after themselves.''

Interesting thought: How would black Americans respond to a white psychologist who suggested that blacks had no control over their behavior now because of the existence of slavery so many years ago? Do you think that if a white psychologist argued that blacks were doomed to poverty, drug abuse, and low SAT scores because of slavery, that might seem, well, quite a bit racist? Why should it be any different because it happens to be a black psychologist in this case?

Anyway, if you find this idea as racist, condescending, and just plain loony as I do, then you must NOT miss the OpinionJournal's contest for the best trauma-related "disorder" ideas. It's hard to pick my favorite, but here are a few of them:

Bill Odom: I suffer from pretraumatic middle-aged white-male disorder. As I grow older I become increasingly traumatized by the mantle of responsibility that I will acquire. It will soon be my fault that African-Americans were forced into slavery. It will be my fault that Native Americans were stripped of their heritage and lands. It will be my fault that women were second-class citizens and don't earn as much as I do. It will be my fault that Muslims around the world must face Zionist aggression (and I'm a Methodist!). It will be my fault the homeless have no home, the pro-choice have limited choice, and the poor have fewer tax breaks. And I'm supposed to laugh all of that off on the way to the bank?

Benny Goodman: I've got PTID, post-traumatic Inquisition disorder. After Spain threw out all the Jews in 1492, my family lost all their money and had to wonder around Europe for years. I can't even hear the word "Spain" or "Spanish" or anything even close to that without going into convulsions. I cannot enjoy My Fair Lady ("The rain in S---- stays mainly in the plain"). In high school I had to take French, because the other language offering was S---ish, and you can't believe how much I hated that. Even the word "Danish" gives me the creeps; it ends in "nish"! Thus, I can only eat cookies, and cannot enjoy a good Blueberry da----.

John Kuszewski: PTSD--Polish something, something . . . darn, what was the question?

Certificates of "achievement"The Massachusetts Board

Certificates of "achievement"

The Massachusetts Board of Education is going ahead with its plan to award "certificates of achievement" to students who don't pass the MCAS, and thus cannot receive their diplomas. Critics of the decision believe that the award is a way for the Board of Education to give the student something, but this something is not very meaningful or useful:

The class of 2003 is the first that must pass the math and English portions of the MCAS exams to earn a diploma. After three tries, 12,000 seniors still have not passed.

Critics say the certificate will allow students to cross the stage at graduation but gives them few options thereafter. A diploma is required for most jobs and professions, and is necessary to receive financial assistance for continuing education...Education Commissioner David Driscoll said that once the state agrees on the final version of this certificate, it would "shop it around" to businesses and schools to convince them to hire or admit these students.

Driscoll also asked that federal financial aid be made available to students who don't pass.

Say what? So, a student must pass the exam to recieve a diploma, and the purpose of that exam is to underscore the standards set by the diploma - but if you don't pass, the Education Commissioner will do his best to get businesses to hire you and the government to give you money? Excuse me, but what's the point of passing the exam, then? It's just amazing to see what educrats will do as they contort themselves in order to avoid inconveniencing any student, no matter how unaccomplished.

And this is just sad:

Brookline High School junior Josh Kaufman said he planned to testify Tuesday against the certificate. A learning disability has kept him from passing the math portion of the MCAS, he said. He said the certificate won't help him get into college..."Ironically, I received a letter from Johns Hopkins University asking me to apply and the letter with the failing MCAS math scores within days of each other," Kaufman said in prepared testimony..."These certificates would leave many special education students who would otherwise have bright futures with little or no opportunity."

Josh, I hate to break it to you, but universities send out many, many letters to students encouraging them to apply, and those letters don't always go to students who have the qualifications. Your failing MCAS math score may very well be an indication that you are not able to do college-level math, because you aren't able to pass a test of high-school-level math. Then again, the MCAS math items may not be difficult so much as "linguistically confusing", which means the items may not be very useful for measuring math skills. Which means that Josh would be correct in taking Massachusetts to task for refusing to award him with a diploma, and those of us who criticize high-school exit exams would have a leg to stand on.

Here's a thought - let's go back to making high-school courses difficult, and rewarding. Let's flunk out those students who can't do the work. The kids can take tests for accountability to satisfy the government, but they won't need to take a test to verify the usefulness of the diploma. And let's make college admissions exams more difficult, so that we don't have to deal with the dilemma of high school exit exams that are more difficult than college entrance exams.

I've posted on here before

I've posted on here before about the sad quality of high-school textbooks, but it looks like college textbooks may be no better - at least where the definition of "terrorism" is concerned:

While all of the texts make a stab at defining terrorism, we quickly learn from the vast majority of them that terrorism lies largely in the eyes of the beholder. Almost all, in fact, trot out uncritically the cliche that one "person's" terrorist is another "person's" freedom fighter. One text makes this point four times in about eight pages devoted to the subject. Even a six-line description of the Terrorism Research Center's website contains a warning to students that in looking at "terrorist profiles and the Definition of Terrorism controversy, [k]eep in mind that one group's 'freedom fighters' may be another group's 'terrorists'" (Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 241). Four warnings in eight pages.

If students learn only one thing from most of these texts it is this: While no one really knows what terrorism is, whatever it is, we are one, as well.

There's more, so go read the whole thing.

If you haven't been following

If you haven't been following the heinous case of Robert David Johnson - the CUNY Assistant Professor who is being denied tenure because of his lack of "collegiality" - you can start reading here at FrontPage, or here at the Volokh Conspiracy, or here at the Harvard Crimson. Instapundit is also running periodic updates.

The CUNY Department of History has behaved shamefully during this entire affair. A brilliant young professor - beloved by his students, and with an outstanding record of publications and an impeccable record of academic training and performance - is now going to be looking for work because he questioned the wisdom of hiring by sex rather than qualifications, and questioned the sense of hosting a panel on the Middle East that included no pro-Israel speakers. Shameful, shameful.

Joanne Jacobs dissects "Hawaiian-style science"

Joanne Jacobs dissects "Hawaiian-style science" in yesterday's issue of The Jewish World Review. She links to Marc Miyaki of Amaravati, who is very indignant about the assumption that Hawaii is a backwards, agricultural culture. His rant on the "colour of science" leads naturally into a devastating critique of "Afrocentric science" and the link between PC ideas and bogus self-esteem props:

There are two reasons for tribalists to spend $2.5 million on 'Hawaiian science':First, it's a Feel Good about Your Ancestors Scheme™."Isn't it amazing that your forebears could do this!?""Yeah, whatever ... I wanna go home and download some more MP3s."

It's another attempt to raise self-esteem. But the idea of feeling good about yourself because of the achievements of some dead people (usually male) who looked vaguely like you is idiotic. Why should you leech off them for your own ego? Why not do something yourself and feel good about that? But nooo, that meaning thinking of yourself as an individual rather than as a member of The Tribe! Neo-Nazis who do nothing of value while constantly pointing at the works of the 'white race' as evidence of their 'supremacy' are the saddest examples of ego-leeches.

Second, it's PC. You know the drill. Haole science is impersonal and anti-environment. But Ye Olde NNNative Ways™ are spiritual (cf. 'Less Than' Venerable on "spiritual" matter) and in tune with the mana (divine force) of the 'aina (land). Sorry, just the sight of the word "rainforest" [in the proposed Hawaiian science curriculum] is a red (or should that be green?) flag for me.

This Colour-coding of science is, frankly, insane. Science knows no Colour and was never a European monopoly.

Right on, Marc.

Two more blogs to read

Two more blogs to read every day

If you're already short of time, too bad, because there are two newbie blogs that you must check out.

The first is the international blog Giants and Dwarfs, which is about "high politics, low culture, and everything in between". I particularly like the commentary on anti-Semitism on campus and the shortcomings of the vaunted Oxford tutorial system (their archives and perma-links don't seem to be working yet).

Next up is The Irascible Professor (no, not The Cranky Professor, this is someone else entirely), who provides "Irreverent Commentary on the State of Education in America Today". I found a nifty SAT-related article on his site; it's from September, but it's interesting enough that I want to comment on it now.

According to the College Board web site, there are three major changes planned for the New SAT...The SAT Verbal Exam will become the SAT Critical Reading Exam which will no longer include analogies. In their place, short reading sections will be added to existing long reading passages. As it states on the web site, "While analogical reasoning is important, analogies are rarely taught in schools and these questions have become rather artificial." I was considering writing to programs like the Word Masters Challenge, a national competition for students in grades 3-8 which encourages growth in vocabulary and verbal reasoning...According to WordMastersChallenge.com, "unlike other language-arts contests, which emphasize punctuation and grammar, this competition addresses word comprehension and logical abilities such as those measured for high school students by the verbal SAT I." Not anymore!

I agree with IP's frustration, but I also see this decision as a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" for ETS. After all, one of the main criticisms of standardized tests is of their artificiality, and if in fact analogies are not taught in high school - or college - and ETS finds it difficult to defend the use of them in college admissions, then they're going to drop that item type. I don't know of any data showing the correlation of that particular item type to college GPA, but I assume that ETS no longer felt the item was statistically defensible.

The New SAT will also have a new section called the SAT Writing Exam. This section will contain multiple-choice grammar questions as well as a written essay...In spite of their best efforts, I finished studying the College Board pages about the New SAT, and I was still filled with questions. They provided an email address for comments and questions, so I took advantage of it...The first prompt and professional reply I received was from an executive at the PSAT/NMSQT Programs at the College Board...For me, a discouraging part of her reply was about the essay. She said that on the PSAT, they would be offering an essay for in-school scoring with all the rubrics and support to enable teachers to both learn how these essays will be scored nationally and then to provide the scoring for their students. She added that it was a good professional development exercise as well as practice for the students. My interpretation of this is that the College Board will not be grading the essay on the PSAT; that will be left up to the teachers at the individual schools.

That's very interesting - I wasn't aware of that wrinkle in the grading scheme. I had assumed that the College Board and ETS were going to be using the new automated-essay scoring program that ETS has spent a great deal of time and money developing. Perhaps they aren't going to be using this system on the PSAT - only on the SAT. But there is another possibility, which is that ETS is going to be training teachers to be essay judges, and those results are then going to be used to improve the performance of the automated essay scoring system. I'm currently involved with the development of such a system, and it seems to be standard practice to assess the performance of the automated system by comparing the automated results to a set of human rater results for the same essays. Perhaps the first year(s) of the PSAT essays will be double-scored, by teachers and by an automated system.

The second response was from an employee at the SAT Program...She closed by saying that graduates of 2006 may be required by universities to take the New SAT, that it will be up to the individual admissions office. She said Admission Offices will be able to equate the math and verbal portions of the old SAT with the new SAT because the math, critical reading, and writing scores will still be scored on a 200-800 scale....With that reply, some more of my lovely tresses turned gray, but I have a reputation of overreacting to change. I suppose the psychometricians will work very hard to make sure a 650 on the old SAT Verbal test will be equal to a 650 on the new SAT Verbal test. I am still uncomfortable about the writing sample and I wonder how many seasons it will take their staff to read and rate the essays. How many snow days will pass until the results are mailed, and how accurate is a test that requires subjective grading?

IP has reason to be nervous about the subjective grading, but not so much about any equating of multiple-choice items. Equating is a very well-researched topic in testing, and multiple-choice items tend to be the easiest to equate, as they tend to have the highest reliability. Essays, on the other hand, are harder to equate, from both a prompt-difficulty standpoint and a grading stringency standpoint. It's going to take some work to ensure that every student receives an essay prompt that is of equal difficulty, or as equal as possible. Even if the prompts are relatively equal, differences in grading stringency will certainly affect the resulting scores. The purpose of an automated essay scoring system is to provide comparable scoring stringency across essays in the shortest amount of time, and I hope that ETS has plans to employ their system as soon as possible, rather than relying heavily on teachers as raters.

Apologies for the extended absence

Apologies for the extended absence - I wish I could say my absence was filled with as much damage and debauchery as Cold Fury encountered on his mini-vacation, but my life is just not that interesting. So let's start digging through the piles of linkage that have accumulated during the past week, and we'll see if we can find something interesting to write about....

Smart enough to pass, but

Smart enough to pass, but dumb enough to get caught cheating

The NYT has the scoop - two Columbia University undergrads have been charged with scheming to cheat on the GRE. The "high tech" plot involved "laptop computers, wireless microphones and a digital camera":

The scheme called for one man to take the test on a computer in a private room at the Sylvan Learning Center, then attach a transmitter to the computer and send images of test questions to a laptop in a van parked nearby, the police said. In the van, they said, the other student would save the images. He would also look up or calculate answers and radio them to the test taker, who would be wearing a wireless earpiece.

The police said the students told them they had designed the system, using equipment that Mr. Bakhru [one of the two men] said cost $12,000, in the hope that getting high scores on the test, known as the G.R.E., would earn them scholarships. But the police are investigating whether they were also going to sell exam questions to other prospective test takers.

I certainly hope the police are investigating that angle, because it's the only one that makes sense. No students who are smart enough to figure out such a high-tech scheme and willing to spend $12,000 to put it into place are doing so just to pass a simple test of verbal analogies and algebra questions. However, there's good money to be made in selling such items to students who aren't smart enough to know how to turn on a laptop computer, much less transmit items with one.

Earlier this year, the police said, both men signed up to take the examination at a testing center in Manhasset. They chose to retake it at the Garden City center, officials said, because it has a room where people with physical or learning disabilities can take the test privately.

Taking advantage of accommodated-testing loopholes - whoda thunk it?

Sergeant Bartkowski said investigators suspected that the men intended to make money from their scheme. He said that while questioning Mr. Bakhru, he had voiced sympathy about the difficulty of the test.

"He got very indignant and said, `I can ace this with my eyes closed,' " the sergeant recalled. "Common sense would tell you that they're in on this gold mine. If you could pass this test with your eyes closed, why set up this elaborate scheme?"

What a shmuck. Are we supposed to be in awe of Mr. Bakhru's intelligence? He's "smart" enough to pass the GRE with his eyes closed, yet not honest nor industrious enough to use that intelligence wisely and work for a living. Instead, he figures out the latest high-tech scheme to make money by stealing ETS's property, which belies any intelligence he might have. The difference between the brilliant Mr. Bakhru, and the scumbag who smashed my boyfriend's car window and stole his CD player last weekend, is one of degree, not of kind. Presumably, the only reason Mr. Bakhru didn't try to bilk a casino with this high-tech scheme is because he knows security would catch him on the spot and slam him into a Las Vegas jail cell, which makes him a louse AND a coward. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Big Arm Woman at Tightly

Big Arm Woman at Tightly Wound (Motto: Making fun of academics, 'cause it's easy!) links to me, which I much prefer to having her kick my butt. Go read her rants - I think any butt she kicks is going to stay kicked for a good, long time.

This test score brought to

This test score brought to you by McDonalds

A new study supposedly shows that high-calorie junk food might give students a cognitive boost on tests. The result is said to be "short-term":

The study compared nutritional content of school lunch menus from 23 randomly selected districts in Virginia on days of state-mandated tests against non-test days during the 1999-2000 academic year.

It linked high-calorie, low-nutrition meals with schools which faced possible state sanctions for underachievment. A 110-calorie bump over the regular lunch menu in those troubled schools increased passing scores by 11 percent in math, 6 percent in English and 6 percent in social studies over schools offering lower-calorie menus on the same days.

Previous studies have shown that the energy boost which comes from consuming glucose or empty calories has given students a short-term learning advantage.

The study can be purchased here. There's no evidence yet to suggest that the research was funded by Krispy Kreme, but I have my suspicions.....

We don't need no stinkin'

We don't need no stinkin' grammar

Hey, who cares if some Canadian math textbooks are riddled with grammatical errors and unsound items? After all, as Education Minister Jane Purves says, "The good news is that the mistakes do not involve the integrity of the mathematics." And one member of Newfoundland's Education Department called the critical report “nitpicking - What they’ve identified is that the majority of errors are differences in interpretation, opinion".

The article only gives one example of an error that does seem to involve mathematical reasoning. Still, it's sad to hear an Education Minister say that it's "good news" that a textbook is riddled with any kind of errors.

There's dumb, and then there's

There's dumb, and then there's hopeless

As long as we're determined to test every child in the U.S., can we impart a bit of common-sense by making sure that they understand why the answer to the question, "It's okay to kiss your rattlesnake on the lips" is "False"?

What a moron. What a total idiot nutbag twit. As an amateur herpetologist, this guy sums up everything that drives me bananas about reptile ignorance. For starters, snakes are not ours to take from the wild, as this fellow did. There are hundreds of reputable breeders in the U.S. who sell only "captive-bred" animals - meaning, they started with wild stock way back when, but since then have selectively bred animals in captivity so as to satisfy the needs of pet owners without depleting the wild stock. There is absolutely NO reason to take a snake from the wild, and many reasons not to. Even if you're selfish enough not to care about the snake population in the wild, or about the stress on the snake of suddenly being taken from its natural environment and placed into an artificial one that may be sub-optimal, you should at least know that snakes can carry ticks, mites, and salmonella. Even a non-venomous snake can be detrimental to your health.

Taking snakes from the wild is dumb, but I'll give a free pass to every kid who ever brought home a harmless, pretty little garter snake. For a grown man to bring home a hot (i.e., venomous) snake from the wild is complete idiocy. I have zero respect for those who think it's "cool" to keep venomous snakes around. There are some serious collectors and breeders who are VERY careful with their snakes, but they are outnumbered by the bozos who consider a rattlesnake to be a status item.

Such people aren't a danger only to themselves. Southern Florida currently has a helicopter rescue team named Venom One that delivers a wide variety of anti-venom across Florida to victims of exotic poisonous snakes. Why was Venom One created? Because asshats with more money than sense thought it would be cool to import cobras and mambas and taipans to keep as pets. Snakes are escape artists, and exotic hot snakes that escape into Florida's swamps have plenty of heat, humidity, and warm-blooded critters to eat. And then they bite humans, and what do you know? Most U.S. hospitals don't keep antivenom on hand for snakes that aren't native to this country. Imagine that.

But this assratchet goes one step further. He doesn't wait for the wild hot snake he brought home to bite him - no, he has to prove to his friends that he can KISS IT. And the snakes kisses back.

If we teach kids nothing else in school, can we at least teach them that this is a really, really bad idea?

Time and time againThe WSJ

Time and time again

The WSJ has an article today on the issue of timing in standardized testing. This is the first article I've seen that brings together the issues of timing in K-12 testing and at the post-K12 level.

Beginning in 2005, the new federal education law will require each state to test every child every year in reading and math and, starting in 2007, in science. The law carries sanctions for the schools -- children in low-performing schools can transfer to better ones, taking their funding with them -- and those sanctions will get steeper every year...Timing standardizes conditions so that student results can be compared among schools and across states. That especially matters on so-called norm-referenced tests like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, which is published by the University of Iowa, and TerraNova, which is published by McGraw-Hill Cos....To make sure every child has the same chance to do well, most norm-referenced exams come with elaborate instructions about lighting conditions, breaks, classroom temperature and time. "If we want unstandardized measures, we have grades," says Wayne Camara, research director at the College Board, whose SATs are norm-referenced exams.

But there are equally strong operational reasons to time tests, he adds. Schools want to know when their classrooms will be free for other uses, parents want to know when to collect their kids, and the test companies need to budget for proctors. The SAT also worries about a wily test taker walking away with a test booklet if students are allowed to leave whenever they choose. And grade schools worry about giving up teaching time. "There's too much going on in school, too much to learn to give unlimited time. It's wasteful," says H.D. Hoover, professor of education at Iowa and the senior author of the Iowa test.

The 13-part Iowa test is given in 5½ hours and designed so that 95% of test takers finish it, he says. The College Board says 75% of youngsters finish 100% of the SAT, but that it falls a bit short of its other goal -- that 100% of youngsters finish 75% of the test. Test companies insist their exams aren't "speeded" -- that is, they don't make children rush through questions to see how many they can complete in a short amount of time.

Good point. Much of the journalistic discussion I've seen on test time limits doesn't note the distinction between a "timed" test and a "speeded" test. A completely untimed test is, for the reasons given above, unworkable, impractical, and vulnerable to abuse. Good tests are designed so that, although test takers can't lollygag, almost everyone should be able to finish within the time limits.

The article also points out, "...timing complicates testing for disabled children, who account for about 12% of all youngsters nationally", and while the author seems fairly objective, the point of the article seems to be supportive of the policy of removing time limits from tests for all children.

This is a very big issue in testing right now, and I'm glad to see it covered in mainstream media. I don't think that K-12 testing should be highly speeded, but the necessity of time limits will guarantee that some students will not finish. The point to consider is, is speed part of the construct being measured? If it isn't, then the time limit should be set so that almost every youngster, if not all, will finish the tests. However, I'd like to see more debate on whether speed is part of the constructs that we're trying to measure, both with K-12 testing and with college admissions exams. The article seems to assume that speed is never going to be a construct of any of the skills that we want all K-12 students to have. But if we're willing to give children reading tests that allow them to take all day to read a few simple passages, are we educating them to read very well in that case? Are those reading skills going to serve them well in real life?

Frequent readers of this blog know that I often say that problematic test results are not necessarily an indicator that the test is flawed, but instead may be an indicator of something wrong with the learning process behind the skills being measured. Do we have any measure of how fast kids should be able to read? Yes, a child who needs triple time to answer a reading passage is technically "reading", but is does their extreme slowness in this skill perhaps put them at a different level of educational acheivement as youngsters who can read much faster? Shouldn't the number of children who currently can't finish tests under the time limits be a reason to discuss just why they're reading so slowly, and not an argument to abolish time limits altogether?

The article quotes a VP at NCS Pearson who thinks that time has nothing to do with what schoolchildren should know:

But it also highlighted a debate among testing professionals: Why time tests at all? What matters "is that you demonstrate what you know, tell us if you've mastered the content," argues John Twing, vice president for testing at NCS Pearson Inc., which writes and administers the annual Texas state exam, among others. "Time confounds how much you know with how quickly you recall it," he says.

I disagree. Time doesn't "confound" your knowledge. It's true that a test that is highly speeded is going to reward those who think quickly more so than those who think slowly, but speededness and timing are not the same thing, and I think it makes sense to decide how slow is too slow when it comes to academic performance. If it takes a student all day to answer a set of math questions, that could be evidence that the student was taught to solve such problems using a confusing and inefficient method. If we remove time limits, we remove any evidence that students are being taught to think inefficiently.

*Sigh* Sorry to disappoint you

*Sigh* Sorry to disappoint you faithful readers (I seem to have about 200 of you a day, which is 200 more than I expected when I first started this blog), but the semester is winding down and I find myself in a real crunch for time. Things are going to be so busy over the next three weeks that blogging will be sporadic. I'll try to catch up on evenings but that may not be possible. But do check in often to see if I've gotten anything new up, because even if I don't have time to write something pithy, I'll be sure to link to Joanne and Daryl and the Cranky Professor and all the other edubloggers out there.

Joanne Jacobs has some great

Joanne Jacobs has some great stuff up today (I take weekends off from the blog; you can tell that she doesn't). She has a new column on high-tech testing up on Tech Central Station, and grateful for the article I am, because it defines adaptive testing (something that the layperson may not know about) and it has lots of good info on the overall rise of computerized testing.

Maryland mania: Joanne also has two Maryland education-related links, one encouraging, one ridiculous.

The encouraging story is about a new school superintendent in Maryland's Anne Arundel County who's determined to narrow the test-score gap that separates whites and Asians from African Americans and Hispanics. Superintendent Eric Smith has taken some risky chances in an ultimately-successful attempt to narrow the achievement gap, known as the "the holy grail" of school superintendents:

Last spring's scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test provide a glimpse of the academic chasm among college-bound students. White high schoolers across the country scored an average 1060 out of a possible 1600 on the widely used entrance exam, while Asian students did even better, posting an average of 1070. But black students lagged behind with an average of 857, and Hispanic students scored an average of 910. Locally, those gaps were even bigger. In Virginia, black students scored 210 points behind white students--848 to 1058. In Maryland, the divide was 244 points, with black students scoring 848, whites scoring 1092. In the District, where the majority of students are black, black students trailed whites by 424 points--819 to 1243.

Superintendent Smith is among a group of superintendents who were recently recognized for implementing the right approach to target minority students. Their methods depend on early intervention that frees the students from the soft bigotry of low expections - and relies on constant testing to boot:

All set concrete performance goals for their districts, and in most cases "those goals were outlandishly audacious," says Michael Casserly, the council's executive director. And everyone--from the superintendent to school board members to school principals--was held accountable for achieving the goals.

They replaced a mishmash of reading and math instruction with a rigorous common curriculum throughout the whole system. And they tested their students--sometimes as often as every eight to 10 days--to ensure they were mastering the material. In Charlotte, for example, all students were given six-question quizzes at the end of every math chapter, and the students who hadn't "gotten it" were given extra help. "We didn't wait until the end of the semester to find out that the students were falling behind," Smith says.

In 1990, Smith moved to Danville, Va., to become superintendent of the 8,500-student system. For the first time, he had the power to go after the achievement gap in a big way. Right away he began centralizing the elementary reading curriculum and pushing teachers to boost minority reading scores and find ways to keep high school students from dropping out...Two years later, he took over as head honcho of Newport News's school system, where he started talking, immediately, about improving the performance of African American students and raising the standards of every school...The community was skeptical. At one meeting... people told Smith: "You will not do that here. They'll ride you out of town." But he persisted.

"You will not do that here"? You will not raise standards in an attempt to convey to African American students that the tests are not culturally biased, that they can do as well as the white and Asian students? Good thing Superintendent Davis didn't listen to such nonsense. He stepped on a lot of toes and outraged a lot of teachers, but the minority students in his schools have the improved test scores and class performances that back up his methods.

Joanne's other Maryland story is a link to an outrageous rule given to a fellow blogger's child in a Maryland school - "Do not refer to yourself [in a family tree] as an American unless you are an American Indian". Insane.

"No time to pop the

"No time to pop the champagne cork..."

That's Governor Gray Davis' comment about the latest round of California's STAR scores. I don't have a link to the email I received, which is entitled, "Monday Morning Memorandum", and is authored by Senator Ray Haynes. It looks like a reprint of a snail-mailing for political purposes - the party affiliation of Senator Haynes is not given, but it's not hard to guess from the contents of the article.

Here's the high points, which are actually low points:

The California Standards Tests, implemented widely this year, are the true barometer of student learning in the state. How did our students fare on these tests?

Two-thirds of the state's students scored below proficient in "language arts" (what used to be called "English"), and only half of our students were considered proficient in other core disciplines such as math and earth sciences. And that's just the good news. Even these red-flag scores mask some pockets of failure that are eye opening.

According to the California Standards Test results, nearly 90 percent of California's 11th graders aren't proficient in algebra or geometry. In U.S. history, 70 percent of our high school juniors are considered below proficient. Science scores fell dismally in the middle of math and history. If you wonder why more than half of all California State University freshmen need remedial classes, this may clear things up.

Abysmal, indeed. The explosion of remedial courses in Cal State schools merely disguise the problem and do nothing to solve it. The Senator also take a few swipes at Govorner Davis:

Governor Davis vowed earlier this year to fight a "war on mediocrity" in our public schools. Looking at these test scores though, it's apparent that he is having a problem identifying the enemy....

The Democrat-controlled legislature and administration are lobbing grenades at the wrong targets. First you have the Superintendent of Education intimidating home-schoolers, and you have the legislature threatening charter schools, trying to suffocate them with the same regulations that smother other public schools...In recent years, the legislature has tried to put charter employees into the local teachers' union and restrict charter schools from running certain independent and home-study programs (home-schoolers), a move that affected 27,000 students in these innovative plans....

Governor Davis, the man who made education his "first, second, and third priority," needs to wage war against the status quo. If he does so, mediocrity will disappear along the way. Defending and promoting charter schools is a must. They will help raise our children's test scores and better their chances for success as adults.

I'll see if I can find these STAR numbers on the web to take a closer look at them.

Update: Mike McKeown of Mathematically Correct, who I'm going to start referring to as the "InstaNumberMan", needed a mere two hours to find my post and put in a comment with a link to the STAR data. It's here, and Mike's of the opinion that the test scores are one of the few things that Governor David didn't really screw up. By keeping the testing system in place, Governor Davis has made it clear which programs are working and which aren't. As Mike puts it,

It will be hard to move kids up in high school, after all, they spent K-5 in Whole Language and the worst of fuzzy math (MathLand and TERC, with CPM when they hit Algebra). There may be hope that those who were just starting school in 98 or 99, when the new books started hitting the schools, will do well. Certainly, LA Unified, formerly one of the worst, is doing an excellent job of building reading and math scores in elementary school. They use Open Court and a standards aligned math text.

I rock!Thanks to the wonders

I rock!

Thanks to the wonders of Bravenet's IP information, I discovered that a link was posted to me yesterday on Ted Nugent's United Sportsmen of America "Nugeboard". The poster named the thread, "Is this gal Anne Coulters cousin??" and said "I love her"! Woooo doggy. I don't know who "Kansas Warrior" is, but I'm glad he's on my side.

Got a busy day today......but

Got a busy day today...

...but here's a lot of good readin' for you.

Santa Monica High School senior Steve Miller kicks some ass - respectfully and politely - as he describes his efforts to get just one libertarian and one conservative speaker to appear at his high school.

Courtesy of Instapundit, we discover Stanley Fish arguing for stronger sanctions against professors who violate academic standards. Don't miss Instapundit's previous FoxNews article on academics and accountability.

Glenn Sacks has a theory about why college enrollment for males is dropping.

Homeschoolers in Northeastern Illinois are receiving visits from the police. A local superintendent has made the outrageous (and illegal) demand that a group of 28 homeschooling families must appear for a "pre-trial hearing" to prove they are in compliance with the law - which doesn't require them to have district approval before they teach their children - and he's sending police to their homes to convey the demand. Intimidation, anyone?

Another textbook war in Texas - the books most preferred by districts might be the books most likely to have a "sanitized content" that "avoid words or concepts that might offend 'a score of heavy-duty, aggressive special-interest groups'". The proposed solution of taking textbook choice out of the hands of the district and giving teachers the freedom to choose their own books might improve the textbook quality, except for one tiny little point mentioned in the article - "4 in 5 of the nation's middle and high school social studies teachers neither majored nor minored in history".

Jeff Jacoby covers the campus diversity fraud, and Joanne Jacobs pokes fun at highly-ambitious mothers who are placing their infants "on the tummy track". Both articles are in today's Jewish World Review.

And, finally, a battle over standardized testing in taking place - in Ontario, Canada, where there is no long history of standardized testing in schools. The teachers' unions are - surprise! - against the testing, which means that Canada isn't so different from us after all.

Thanks, againThanks for stopping by,

Thanks, again

Thanks for stopping by, all you visitors from RightWingNews and JoanneJacobs.com. Guess you just had to see what a "foxy" psychometrician looks like, didn't you? :) Click here to visit the bullying policy blog that Joanne referred to, and click here for the VRWC card that I made earlier this week.

It's been a good blogging week, but I must take a little break. I have numbers to crunch, regressions to run, code to write, two exams and a quiz to assemble, 22 homeworks to grade, a lecture to write, a house to clean, two snakes to feed, groceries to buy, Court TV to watch, and a boyfriend to cook dinner for.

I also need to call my parents, because my thirteen-year-old nephew William is waiting to hear from the Medical University of South Carolina as to whether he will be able to recieve a kidney transplant in the near future. He is currently on dialysis three times a week and has a catheter installed in his chest, and both his father and his grandfather (my stepfather) are waiting to hear if they are matches, so that they may donate one of their kidneys to him. I wish I could go down for a visit, but unfortunately I have no time off from work right now, and won't get to see them until Thanksgiving. I'm thinking good thoughts/saying prayers/chanting mantras/casting spells for him (I'm rather multi-religious), and I would appreciate any readers out there doing the same.

Also on my weekend agenda is a visit to the North American Reptile Breeder's Conference and Trade Show in Valley Forge, PA. I consider myself an amateur herpetologist, and snakes have been my passion since childhood. I'm looking forward to this show, in particular because the show rules are that no "hot" (i.e., venomous) snakes will be shown, and no "wild-caught" snakes will be available. This means that only reputable breeders will be showing animals, and those bozos who think that it's cool to keep a king cobra as a pet, or that it's cool to gather snakes from the wild, won't be in attendance.

For a photo of Sabio, my most adorable Variable Kingsnake (L. mexicana thayeri), click here.

Found a new blog today

Found a new blog today - Cold Springs Shops. Seems to be a combination of education, political commentary, and current events. Blogger Stephen H. Karlson comments on the message sent by the proliferation of remedial college courses, and where we should target change to reduce the number of those courses:

I think we have a Complex Proposition here. Perhaps the message those students taking remedial (make that "middle school") courses are sending is that the middle and high schools are not doing their jobs. Regime change begins in kindergarten. Perhaps the message is that the admissions office has been engaging in affirmative discrimination, with lower admission standards for some students than others, who will be at greater risk of failure, absent such support, than students who were admitted under tougher standards. Regime change continues at the admissions office. Or perhaps the message is that having sufficient bodies to pay the bonds on the office buildings and athletic facilities each year, whether or not those bodies remain in residence, once "remediated," to complete a degree. Regime change must include the central administration in that case.

I think he's right on all three counts.

Also, Dr. Karlson discovered Highered Intelligence's link to an interesting Jay Mathews article in the Washington Post. In the article, Mr. Mathews discusses a new kind of survey assessment for college performance ratings:

Not many people will notice, but this is an important day for American colleges and universities. Their best measuring device, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), releases its third annual report today. As uncomfortable as many colleges are with NSSE (pronounced Nessie), they appear to be stuck with it and its demand that they listen more carefully to their students.

But before you rush, full of hope, to read Nessie's new report on its Web site www.iub.edu/~nsse, be ready for some disappointments. The Nessie surveys are deep and informative, and their power is growing, but most colleges are still afraid of them and either shun them or bury the results.

The Nessie surveys of freshmen and senior undergraduates measure academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment. Questions include: How many written papers or reports of 5 to 19 pages were you asked to produce this year? How often did you work with other students outside of class to prepare an assignment? How often did you discuss ideas with faculty outside of class? Did you study abroad? How do you rate the quality of your relationships with other students?

...The latest report says that although 87 percent of undergraduates rate their college experience good or excellent, 26 percent of seniors say they never discussed ideas from their reading or classes with faculty members outside of class. Forty percent of undergraduates say they spend 10 or fewer hours a week preparing for class, much less than what their professors say is necessary.

Are the colleges eager to have this sort of information made public? What do you think?

When U.S. News wisely asked colleges for some of their Nessie survey results this year, the magazine was only able to publish the data for some schools---86 in the print version and 116 online www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/ college/rankings/ranknsse_brief.php -- because so many colleges refused to make them public.

Many colleges are so appalled at the notion of asking students how well they are learning that they don't even let the Nessie surveys on campus. Kuh proudly says that "the NSSE database now includes information from institutions that represent more than half (52 percent) of all undergraduates attending four-year colleges and universities." But very few of the best-known American colleges are participating. None of the Ivy League colleges have taken part.

Does the Ivy League colleges consider themselves "above" this kind of survey? Highered Intelligence has a couple of theories on that subject:

It's a great and tightly kept secret among the academic elite that the schools with the highest rankings are often the easiest...But just because it might be easier at a "good school" doesn't mean that those schools don't have a qualtiatively diferent [sic] experience. The great secret may not be the only reason so many schools seem hostile to Nessie.

...These rankings, these data, are being used for individual decisions, a single student deciding where to go. Even if the Nessie people surveyed EVERY SINGLE STUDENT at a college, they can only produce an "average" encapsulation....All of this means that while prestige is nice, the "college experience" is a profoundly individual thing that cannot be summarized for a newspaper article. Predicting it is useless - it cannot be done.

So the Ivy League schools might be easier, but that doesn't mean that the students at those schools don't consider themselves just as much, if not more, actively engaged by their studies as students from less prestigious schools.

Test score gapsJoanne Jacobs reports

Test score gaps

Joanne Jacobs reports today on the test score gaps that exist even in Chicago's highest-performing schools. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, states must separately track minority, low-income, limited-English and special-education student and demand that each subgroup within a school meet the standards, as opposed to the school meeting standards overall, and now high-performing schools are revealing low-performing subgroups. Joanne's commentary is based on an article in the Chicago Tribune (registration required) entitled, "Scores reveal surprise gap". I think the "surprise" is only from those who expected the test score gap between Causasians and certain minorities to be closed within the short period of time that the school reform movement has been active.

The depressing numbers:

At Naperville Central High School, for example, 88 percent of white juniors passed state math tests, compared with 36 percent of African-Americans. At Barrington High School, 85 percent of white students met standards in reading, versus 27 percent of Hispanics....If even one subgroup fails to reach the goal in either reading or math, the school is considered academically troubled. According to the Tribune analysis, between 1,550 and 1,900 of 3,800 eligible schools had at least one subgroup of 20 or more students fail to meet state standards in 2002. Included on the list are such perennial all-stars as Hinsdale Central High School, Beye Elementary School in Oak Park and Springman Junior High School in Glenview.

Joanne's commentary:

At my alma mater, Highland Park High, 84 percent of white students passed the state math test; only 5 percent of Hispanic students passed. (Fifteen percent of HPHS students are Hispanic? In my day, it was less than 1 percent.)

The Trib also reports on a small elementary school, nearly all black and all poor, where more than 70 percent of third graders meet or exceed state standards. The long-time principal insists that teachers teach what the standards say students should know.

Students also appear to be using Accelerated Reader, which I've heard good things about. Kids select a book to read and then take a comprehension quiz on the computer. They get points for reading and understanding challenging books.

So what's the answer? Some think that minorities may not feel that they can succeed, and intervention programs that boost the performance and expectations of minority students have been successful, so I think this theory has some support. Of course, the Trib article has the obligatory quote from a social scientist who blames society for these results and insists the gap will not be closed until everyone in society is made more "equal". Although I see nothing wrong with attempts to close the gap by working intensively with minority students, comments about how society has be to made "equal" for everyone make me nervous. This smacks of massive government intervention, income redistribution, high taxation, and the focus on keeping everyone the same, rather than encouraging each individual to achieve at their highest potential.

No more freedom of speech

No more freedom of speech - or assembly

A new anti-bullying policy has just gone into effect at all East Providence (RI) schools. The policy is based on zero tolerance, but that doesn't mean "zero discretion", as one administrator put it. Hard to see how zero tolerance can mean anything other than zero discretion, considering that a first bullying offense requires a reprimand and a parent conference, with the penalties increasing to expulsion by the fourth infraction.

Will this give administrators more leeway to get rid of students who continually beat up other students? Yes, but they should have that power anyway, and I don't think anyone can complain about the expulsion of a truly violent child. The controversy here lies in, not surprisingly, the extremely broad definition of "bullying":

"unwelcome physical contact with the intent to harm, embarrass or demean another student," but also "verbal abuse, including teasing, name-calling and harmful gossip; and emotional abuse, including humiliation, shunning and exclusion."

Shunning and exclusion. "Emotional abuse". This means that if Sally chooses not to play with Mary, and asks her friends to play with her instead of with Mary, Sally is bullying Mary, just as much as if Sally had smacked her across the face. This policy makes no distinction between violent children and those who, for whatever reason, choose not to include others in their games. Yes, Mary would be hurt both by being shunned and being smacked, but I see no reason why school administrators should get so involved in the former, when Mary is free to go find someone else to play with.

So, if a group of kids decide to shun a loud, obnoxious bully, is everyone guilty of abuse? After all, if we're supposed to have "zero tolerance" for bullies, and kids tend not to like bullies, why can't kids be free to shun other kids who they don't like?

If these rules are intended to teach children how to behave when they grow up, then we should allow them to shun to their heart's content, because shunning is an old, valued, and perfectly polite way of conveying, "I don't wish to be associated with you". Just ask Miss Manners. I myself make it a point to shun Holocaust revisionists, white supremacists, Scientologists, Mumia supporters, the folks at FairTest, left-wing conspiracy theorists, drug abusers, Islamic fundamentalists, and people who think that all whites are racist and all Southerners are stupid. Who I shun is part of who I am - we are defined by our enemies as much as by our friends.

A kid who shuns another kid is not being "abusive". They are merely excercising the freedom of assembly that all Americans, even rug rats, enjoy, and we aren't teaching them a meaningful lesson by calling shunning "abuse". It is a valuable tool that society uses to convey to others that their behavior is not welcome or acceptable, and we should give kids the power to use it.

Schoolchildren in Ithaca, NY, can

Schoolchildren in Ithaca, NY, can now be graded on "cultural tolerance". I can't find the Cornell Review article that FrontPage cites as its source, but the gist is that children will now be graded on their ability to be pacifist and to refuse to condemn the actions of others - even when those others are responsible for world-wide murder and mayhem. Apparently, it's more important that children think of President Bush as a "bully" than for them to feel free to dislike murderers and fundamental extremists. Yet another example of the liberal crowd pushing to make sure that children don't grow up to express "diversity" of thought where political philosophy is concerned.

Good article on the bilingual

Good article on the bilingual ed controversy in FrontPage Magazine today. FrontPage is taking newspapers to task for refusing to support English immersion classes, which would best serve the needs of the "diversity" readership who the newspapers so publicly court. Key quotes:

In every subject area tested, grade-school immigrant children in English immersion classes [in California] have outpaced kids whose parents signed "waivers" that kept them in bilingual ed...

If English immersion without waivers or other opt-outs is unreasonably "inflexible," editors should inform the Army Language School in Monterey, California, which has built an international reputation by forcing students to think in the language they’re learning. Catholic schools also should be let in on the news. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, who didn’t shrink from opposing Proposition 187, the initiative targeting illegal aliens, or Proposition 209, banning racial quotas, kept monastic-like silence on Prop. 227. Hardly surprising, because his parochial schools teach all students in English. Latinos account for more than 46 percent of L.A. County’s 92,500 Catholic school students, but there is no bilingual ed. No waivers. No exceptions.

And no problems, judging by the results. While nearly three in 10 Latino students in California’s public schools drop out of school, more than 97 percent of the state’s parochial school students go on to two- or four-year colleges, according to Catholic school figures.

Compliments warm a woman's heartWow,

Compliments warm a woman's heart

Wow, I make myself a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy membership card, design courtesy of Michele, and send it in to RightWingNews, and the next thing you know, they've put me on their daily news as "Foxy New Member of the VRWC".

"Foxy". I like that. I haven't been called that since 9th grade, but I like it. And it looks like I got about 15% more traffic solely as a result of that link. Gee, if a female blogger wants to increase her hits, all she has to do is let rumors fly that she's easy on the eyes. Who knew? =)

Speaking of preschool students (see

Speaking of preschool students (see below), Joanne Jacobs discovered a funny (in both senses of the word) plan in action in British schools to help increase - you guessed it - self-esteem. God forbid a 4-year-old should have a slightly unformed sense of self, much less be a quart low on the arrogance factor. Teachers are supposed to assess

"indicators [that] probe a pupil's sense of self, belonging and personal power and pinpoint the areas in need of development. Educators...work through a series of questions for each individual. For example: Do other children often choose this child to play with? or does this child have a group they go around with? Does this child like to look nice? or does this child take care to select the latest trends?"

Does this child take care to what? I mean, I know that the Brits place a ton of importance on being up on the latest fashions and listening to the most up-to-the-moment pop music, but what the hell does that have to do with self-esteem in pre-schoolers? And get this game:

At the pre-school age - three to five years - a series of games is encouraged...This may see a child repeating a positive phrase about him or herself: "I am Polly and I am pretty."

Other children in the group may then be asked to chant the phrase back to the child: "You are Polly and you are pretty".

To which Joanne replied, succintly and correctly, "Polly is a gawky loner, right? How long will it take for the other children to be chanting: "You are Polly and you are poopy." Or something of that ilk."

Geez, whatever happened to the idea that it wasn't acceptable for the teacher or the children to comment on appearances and mannerisms? I thought school was supposed to be a place where you were rewarded for your actions, not judged on your looks. And yes, I consider encouraging youngsters to give compliments based on looks to be "judging" each other on looks. If it's OK to notice out loud that Polly is pretty, why isn't it okay to notice that Priscilla isn't? And what if I don't think Priscilla is pretty - why can't I keep my mouth shut, instead of chanting some bogus compliments?

Forcing the children to say these inane rhymes will not guarantee that they come up with more insulting ones, but this is also a huge waste of the teacher's time. And since when should pre-schoolers be forced into making sure that everyone else's self-esteem is up to par? My pre-school teachers didn't make me chant rhymes about what other students looked like. They taught me to read.

Here's a hint, British teachers - teach Polly to read, and read well. Then she'll grow up to kick ass on her A-levels, and she won't give two flips about whether the other students think she's pretty or not.

These people are almost too

These people are almost too dumb to make fun of.

Not the pre-schoolers, I mean. They seem like relatively sharp moppets, but they're going to go where they're told to go and say what they're told to say. And until we lower the voting age to 6, I figure that politicians won't pay too much interest to the needs of this constituency.

It's the school administrators here who are almost, but not quite, too dumb for me to insult. The administrators who believe that children should learn to protest war against Iraq before they know where the country is, who runs it, and any history of it. The administrators who believe that learning to draw a peace sign takes precedence over learning how to spell your own last name. The administrators who see children not as future citizens who should be educated to their full capacity, but pawns in an endless, illogical, pacifist denial-of-reality - why, if we can get children to protest war, doesn't that prove that war is wrong?! Shouldn't that change President Bush's mind?! Won't that stop Saddam from being such a bad guy?

The rally, which seemed a logical extension of classroom learning to organizers, struck Berkeley College Republicans Treasurer Andrea Irvin as exploiting the children for their parents’ political beliefs.

“It is incredible that these parents are using their children to advance their political agendas,” she said. “That these teachers are indoctrinating the young children is unconscionable. They are using the kids as puppets.”

So much for the "creative, higher-order" thinking that teachers tend to espouse. This rally makes it obvious that Berkeley administrators believe that no one - not even 6-year-olds - should be allowed to think for themselves about the war on terrorism.

Thanks to Charles of Little Green Footballs, who discovered this travesty first. The comments on this posting make for a great read.

The Washington Post is running

The Washington Post is running a series of articles about "people affected by the No Child Left Behind law". Something tells me that WaPo is only going to turn up cases of negative effect, and not cases where schools were able to improve tests and performance from the federal funding. But no matter, let's see what they have to say.

The first article is about the qualification rule for teacher's aides. Under the NCLB Act, teacher's aides must earn an associate's degree or pass a state or local test by 2006. Some teacher's aides consider this to be too much of a challenge:

[Ms.] Hylton, formally known as a para-educator in the Baltimore County school district, has a high school diploma and has worked in classrooms for 11 years. Like thousands of teacher's aides across the country, she was hired before Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in January. Because of the law, she will lose her job unless she earns, at minimum, an associate's college degree or passes a state or local test by 2006.

"I like being with children, but I'm going to have to make some changes," Hylton said after the reading lesson last week. "I'm 40 years old. Going back to school is hard."

The move to raise requirements for teacher's aides is among myriad changes outlined in the sweeping legislation but one of the least publicized. The law also gives children in failing schools the choice to transfer and sets a timetable for teachers in high-poverty schools to become "qualified" in their field.

Nationally, there are about 642,000 aides, with their titles varying from school to school: paraprofessionals, instructional aides, educational assistants or, simply, "paras."...aides often lack formal training but possess intimate knowledge of a school and its community.

Maureen Dreibelbis, 48, worked after high school, married and then volunteered at her son's elementary school in Delaware. When a teacher's aide opening came up, the principal offered her the job. She makes $18,000 a year after 13 years of assisting in the classroom, and worries about being let go if she can't meet the new regulations. "If I don't pass [the test], I may be out of a job," said Dreibelbis, who has taken college courses but lacks a diploma. "With the economy being the way that it is, I worry about people who graduate with teaching degrees and are willing to settle for being a para, and they'll bump me out of my job that way."

So what is this test that has all of these aides so concerned?

Maryland, Virginia, Arizona, Tennessee and 16 other states plan to use a test called ParaPro, which measures reading, writing and math skills and the ability to help teach those subjects to children. Designed by Educational Testing Service, the company that puts out the SAT, the test is available online beginning this week and will be offered in a pencil-and-paper version in January, ParaPro coordinator Inez Bosworth said. Other testing companies are developing similar exams.

So, we're not talking rocket science here. I went to the ETS site and found this information on ParaPro. You can download the Test at a Glance for free here. The test is 90 multiple-choice questions (15 of those are pretest questions that don't count towards the score), and aides have two-and-a-half hours to answer those questions. The test covers very basic reading and math skills, and how well the aide can help convey those skills to the students. The questions are very straightforward - What's the main point of this (very short) reading passage? What can we conclude from looking at this (very simple) bar chart? What digit is in the hundredths place in a four digit number? Which of the following four (two-syllable) words is not spelled correctly? And so on.

There isn't anything here that a teacher's aide shouldn't be able to do. This test measures extremely basic reading and math skills, and the questions definitely highlight areas where students might have the most questions - the areas where a teacher's aide should be able to help the student. A teacher's aide who cannot pass this test has not been very well educated - and if the passing of this test is interchangeable with an associate's degree, what does that say about the rigor of such a degree?

One aide that was interviewed for this article gets the point of the testing, and sees the new standard not as an obstacle for aides, but a method of improving the overall education program:

Holloway, the aide in Louisiana, said that despite the pressure and stress, there is a benefit to the new law. "It finally recognizes that I am an important part of a child's education. I am not an ancillary."

And I can be assumed to have at least as much education as the children who rely on me to help supplement the teacher's lessons. This is a good thing.

"A cloud of allegations"A new

"A cloud of allegations"

A new SAT cheating scandal has appeared. As many as 100 students at the Branson School in Ross, California may be investigated by ETS, after allegations of SAT cheating reached ETS's New Jersey headquarters. No information is given on why ETS might invalidate the scores in this article, which is not really surprising - ETS is not going to reveal how they identify cheaters. However, testing companies discover cheaters the same way that many police departments solve crimes - someone calls the authorities to report the cheaters.

Interesting controversy brewing in California

Interesting controversy brewing in California - parents are urging the Salinas Union High School District board to rehire a teacher who quit because he was fed up with standardized testing:

Munoz, 23, was hired as a teacher for the 2001-2002 school year under an emergency credential. His one-year contract was renewed this school year. He said he quit because the focus this year changed to preparing students for the state's standardized test and also because he felt the administration wasn't treating him fairly.

[Superintendent Fernando] Elizondo...defended the district's use of standardized tests, which are required by the state. He said the tests identify areas in which students need improvement and also help them prepare for the state's exit exam, which all students, beginning with the class of 2004, must pass in order to graduate.

Trustees on Tuesday heard a report that said 19 percent of the district students in the class of 2004 have yet to pass the math test, and 7 percent still have not passed the reading portion. "This will help students learn what they need to know," Elizondo said.

So it's not just about the tests, but that Mr. Munoz also felt he was "unfairly" treated. No details are provided, so no way to tell what he means by that. It's also hard to tell if Mr. Munoz was given a curriculum that was impossible to follow and that did not help him educate his students, or if he just felt that his teaching style was impeded by having to teach the basics that are covered on the exams.

It's interesting because a teacher who resigns in protest may have a valid point to make about standardized tests. In some school districts, the tests may be invalid, or unrelated to the state standards. The curriculum that that tests cover may be impossible to teach, or may hinder the students' mastery of the basics. Teachers are known for their opposition to standardized tests on principle, though, so it may be that Mr. Munoz was just one of those teachers who is more interested in having his students learn "self-esteem" and "creative thinking" than learn the basics of math and reading.

A new charter school has

A new charter school has been proposed in Pennsylvania, and they await approval from the local school district. Future principal Janet Shelton has a good comment about standardized testing:

Charter schools are subject to most of the rules regulating public schools and the students must take the same standardized tests. The schools are reimbursed by the school district on a per student basis, typically between $5,000 and $6,000.

Standardized testing should not compromise the individualized program, said Janet Shelton, principal of Tobyhanna Christian Academy and future principal of the charter school.

"We've always done standardized testing. They're not mutually exclusive," she said. "You have to do testing. Otherwise, how can you assess what you're doing? It can't just be what you think."

Amen.

Oh, this is too funny....Thanks

Oh, this is too funny....

Thanks to RightWingNews and Michele from A Small Victory for the idea.

Michele, you're now on my perma-links. You go, girl.

Update to the speech codes

Update to the speech codes posting from 11/11/02.

(1): UPenn President Judith Rodin makes a timely speech about combating anti-Semitism while protecting free speech. The Instantman found it first.

(2): I would be remiss here if I didn't mention Daniel Pipe's Campus Watch, which monitors anti-Semitic, pro-Islamic Terrorism events and commentary on campuses. Predictably, many of those listed on the site have complained that they are being "suppressed" or that their viewpoint is being "crushed", when in fact their comments are merely being distributed to a wider audience, not all of whom agree with them. I particularly like Mr. Pipe's defense of the site that was published in the Chicago Maroon.

(3): Steven den Beste comments on the recent measure passed by the Council of Europe that criminalizes "hate speech" on the Internet. The definition of "hate speech" is incredibly broad, which comes as no surprise - in fact, any political speech that criticizes the scope of the International Criminal Court charter would be illegal. So, we're already pretty far down that slippery slope, given that this resolution effectively makes all politically-incorrect internet commentary in Europe punishable by fines or jail time.

Americans just don't understand those

Americans just don't understand those "inexplicable" skills

Paul Peterson of the Hoover Instituation has written a scathing review of the performance of American high school students on international tests.

It's been pointed out time and again that our students do poorly on math and science skills, as measured by TIMSS (The International Test of Mathematics and Science Study), perhaps because of that "inexplicable" something that Asians have and we don't. Americans tend to ignore these results, as though math and science were truly elective skills for getting through life - but Mr. Peterson points out that American students don't even read English all that well:

Americans barely reach the international literacy average set by advanced democracies, according to a report issued by the Educational Testing Service after looking at the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). Unlike the math and science surveys, the IALS was given to a cross section of adults aged 16 to 65. Despite the high expenditures on education in the United States—and the large numbers of students enrolled in colleges and universities—the United States ranked 12th on the test.

Apologists will find excuses for these outcomes; immigrants pull down U.S. scores, it will be said, overlooking the fact that other countries have immigrants too. Lifelong learning opportunities are greater in the United States than elsewhere, it will be claimed, so young folks will eventually reach the levels of the oldest group.

But such excuses don't ring true. All signs point to a deterioration in the quality of American schools. Europeans and Asians alike have rapidly expanded their educational systems over the last fifty years. In the United States stagnation if not decline has been apparent at least since the seventies. Even our high school graduation rates are lower today than they were a decade ago.

Sad but true. Joanne Jacobs has more on the story.

The cost of accountabilityMany standardized

The cost of accountability

Many standardized testing critics claim that such tests are overly expensive and leave under-funded school districts strapped for cash. Caroline Hoxby takes a look at the data and finds such claims to be overblown (link goes to free digest form):

According to the Association of American Publishers, total revenues from the sales of tests, related teaching materials, and services amounted to $234.1 million in 2000. But even though this figure includes revenues from a wide range of tests (I.Q., diagnostics for disabled children, career guidance tests, and the like), Hoxby calculates that the revenues amount to only $4.96 per student. Even adding in the cost of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only significant test not produced by a commercial test publisher, the accountability cost per pupil reaches only $5.81. Since the overall average cost of educating a child in the United States in the 2000-1 school year was $8157, payments to all test makers represented just 0.07 percent (seven-hundredths of 1 percent) of the cost of elementary and secondary education. Put another way, Hoxby states, even if accountability costs were 10 times as large as they are, they would still not amount to 1 percent of the cost of public education!

And she doesn't stop there:

Finally, Hoxby examines the common criticism that accountability systems result in "teaching to the test." Noting that the goal of accountability systems is to give schools strong incentives to teach the material that is ultimately tested, she argues that we must distinguish between teaching the test (bad) and teaching the curriculum on which the test is based (good). Policymakers mean to encourage teaching the curriculum, but they should discourage teaching the test, which occurs through outright cheating and when teachers know the test questions and prepare students with specific answers. Hoxby notes that annually revised tests and outside proctors who deliver, administer, and return tests to the test-grading company would cost no more than $4 per student, which is less than 0.05 percent (5 one-hundredths of 1 percent) of U.S. school spending per pupil. With such cheap solutions to the problem of teaching the test, there is no reason for any accountability system to have less than sterling integrity.

I've always thought that the costs of testing paled in relation to the cost of hiring multiple adminstrators and officials per school and the cost of the initiating harebrained alternative education programs. It's nice to see some data that back that up. Someday when I'm feeling less cheap, I'll pay for the download of the entire article and take a closer look.

P.S. And what does cost too much? "Diversity" - the regulated, publicly-funded, mandatory kind.

A "Down-Easterner" insists that standardized

A "Down-Easterner" insists that standardized testing won't help school reform. This article in the Lewiston, Maine Sun Journal calls the No Child Left Behind Act "appalling" and "burdensome". I agree with the burdensome part, as I think that requiring schools, many of whom were following their own paths, to conform more closely to a national standard is a burden of sorts. I just happen to think it's a necessary one.

The author's complaints:

There’s nothing wrong with high standards, but this law strips states of authority and hamstrings schools with demands that are not likely to be fully funded, ever.

So is that a recipe for disaster, or will schools cut out all the dead-wood administrators and teachers and become more efficient at education? Low-income schools can perform well - and such schools often rely on testing.

States - and local taxpayers -- already are burdened by the chronic under funding of the special education act of 1975.

Well, my regular readers can guess what my response to that is. Why continue to fund such an act, when a better alternative is to change how we teach kids to read so we can stop putting so many of them in special education classes?

And we wonder: Is more standardized testing the answer?...We doubt that forcing educators to appease demands for better test scores will fix the country’s outdated schooling system.

No, and testing in and of itself was never meant to. Testing is an objective and relatively inexpensive way to see if reforms work. Any school administrator who believes that merely giving more tests will fix whatever's broke should be transferred to a paper-pushing job in Antarctica. But invalid test scores aren't going to help us see where the problems are, and won't help us see when we've fixed things. So it's important to establish that we have a valid and reliable measurement in place to assess the reforms.

We ought to take a good portion of the $26 billion authorized for the upgrade and study the system itself. Are the physical and intellectual structures of institutions really conducive to learning? What are the alternatives?...Let’s find out.

By all means, let's, as long as we are allowed to consider the failures of past educational pet theories, such as holistic reading and the New Math, to be part of that research. A lot of different things have already been tried, but educators are often loathe to admit that any of them have failed.

And let’s look at the scientific evidence revealing that people learn in many different ways, using many types of intelligences...Most schools offer alternative programs for “at-risk” kids. But they might not reach that verge-of-failure stage if teaching methods were tailored to learning styles.

I agree totally, but what does that have to do with removing tests? How do we know if kids have learned if we don't test them on it? Is the author pushing for more flexibility for teachers to help kids learn the basics, which are very easy to test, or is this a slippery argument for "Some kids learn differently, and we just can't test them"? It's hard to tell.

Hold the FCAT accountableA good,

Hold the FCAT accountable

A good, pre-election clear-eyed look at the FCAT in the PalmBeach Post:

The FCAT isn't going away, and it shouldn't. The test is part of an effort that began a decade ago to set standards and hold schools accountable for achieving them. With those goals in mind, the test's shortcomings are obvious...Parents, teachers and students also need relevant, timely FCAT results. Now, schools giving the test in February and March get results at the very end of the school year -- or later. That's too late to help students who are behind, and too dated to help the next year's teachers gauge the students' abilities.

...As the FCAT becomes more important, the state must hold the test accountable.

Amen. Most of the complaints that I receive from parents are not about the existence of the tests, but that the scores are not returned quickly enough to give their children the feedback they need.

More campus lunacyOnce again, the

More campus lunacy

Once again, the campus environment is looking like some sort of Bizarro World where the First Amendment is bad, but anti-Semitism is OK.

First up is an aggrieved group at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville - that very same university where some students wanted a columnist expelled for expressing politically-incorrect thoughts. Now, various members of members from the Black Student Alliance, Black Law Student Association, and the Progressive Student Alliance are marching to condemn racism. A worthy cause, but contained in a list of goals that they provided for the university is a request that is in direct violation of the Constitution.

Some of the goals submitted to administration include...implementing a racist speech and conduct clause in the student handbook and adding a diversity and anti-racism class to the curriculum...Although the implementation of a hate-speech clause technically violates the First Amendment, [BLSA President] Conner and concerned students are looking at the law to see what can be done.

Here's a big hint, Mr. Connor. Nothing can be done. The First Amendment is the law of the land, and college students don't deserve to have their constitutional rights taken away just because they disagree with you. If the university does pass such a speech clause, it will be subject to the same bombardment of ridicule and lawsuits that other universities have endured. I'm glad to see that Instapundit has written about this. Hopefully, his blog entry will generate enough noise for UTK to realize what a mistake it would be to give in to these students' requests.

Update: The Instantman continues to be all over this story. Click here to read commentary on the negative press that UTK has already garnered.

Moving on, we have students across the country taking advantage of their right to free speech by condemning Israel, described as "one of the world's most multiethnic societies, is an open society with democratic institutions, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and an independent judiciary." You wouldn't think college students would have a problem with that sort of society, would you? But you'd be wrong:

A few months later, a pro-Palestinian rally on another university campus featured posters of soup cans depicted with drops of blood and dead babies, labeled "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license," and posters reading "Zionism equals racism" and "Jews equal Nazis." No, this rally did not take place on a Middle East campus. It was at San Francisco State University on Holocaust Memorial Day in April under the guise of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

At Yale, a poster-board memorial to the 14 Israelis killed on a bus in a bomb attack in late October was torn and scattered across the lawn. At Indiana University, a pig's head was left at the door of the campus Hillel centre for Jewish students. At the University of Chicago, campus buildings and pro-Israel flyers were defaced with anti-Jewish graffiti. And the list goes on.

Are students free to hold such views? Yes, but while the author, Ms. Yacowar-Sweeney, does not call for the expulsion or suppression of such students, she unfortunately does ask that we "implement fair and clear speech codes on campus and penalize those who do not abide by them".

No, Ms. Yacowar-Sweeney, we shouldn't do that. Much as I empathize with victims of racism and anti-Semitism, I am of the belief that good speech always drives out bad. We do not change peoples' minds by illegally banning their speech. In fact, we cannot punish them for holding certain beliefs.

I understand the frustration. When Ms. Yacowar-Sweeney sees a college student holding a sign that reads, "Jews equal Nazis", she sees red, as do I. But we can't punish someone who holds up this sign on a campus. Despise, yes; ridicule, yes; make our own opposing signs, yes; punish, no. If they can be punished for holding signs that say, "Jews equal Nazis", I could be punished for holding signs saying, "Radical Islamics Support Terrorism". And I don't want someone taking away my right, or any student's right, to hold that sign.

Let me make it clear that I am not condoning the types of protest that fall into the category of depriving others of their right to speak, such as the abominable riot at Concordia University that blocked Benjamin Netanyahyu from speaking there, or the constant ruckus and disruption that seems to accompany every non-politically-correct campus speaker. I understand the distinction between "free speech" and inciting a riot, either via "fighting words" or by tossing rocks through windows. Vandalism and destroying property are not protecting by the First Amendment and should be punished regardless of whatever "sophisticated" political philosophy accompanies them.

But holding a politically-incorrect viewpoint, and expressing it, is protected for all Americans, even those on college campuses. After all, without this right, students who attended a speech by Hanan Ashrawi, a controversial Palestinian leader, would not have been guaranteed the right to peacefully voice their disagreement with her comments. The college speech code is a slippery slope. While only the most hateful speech may be punished with these codes today, what's the distinction, really, between a code that denies college students the right to make racial jokes and a code that denies them the right to make any commentary on race at all? There isn't any. Once colleges start on that path of denying others the right to hold viewpoints other than the politically-correct ones, there's no stopping.

What's more, we all know that "hate speech" codes are not fairly applied. Some groups are protected from hateful speech more than others. No white student is going to be able to go to the dean of his or her school to protest being called a name like "honky". No male student is really able to protest the anti-male rhetoric that comes out of many Women's Studies programs. Whatever group is judged to be "disadvantaged" or "oppressed" on campus is going to receive more protection than those who are not. So not only is Ms. Yacowar-Sweeney's call to implement anti-anti-Semitic speech codes wrong, such a speech code isn't ever going to happen, not while anti-Semitism is chic on college campuses. Speech codes are not about preventing hate so much as they are about robbing certain groups of the right to speak their minds.

Learning-disabled students - or teaching-disabled

Learning-disabled students - or teaching-disabled educators?

Kids who have trouble learning to read tend to get tracked into special education classes - where things don't get any better. Lisa Snell reports in Reason Online that schools may now be using the "learning disabled" labels as a way to get more money - and avoid rectifying bad educational programs:

This winter Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which dispenses $60 billion a year to school districts around the country. While there’s no question that IDEA has provided legal protections and services for students with handicaps, it has also created perverse incentives that encourage schools to call kids disabled as a way of attracting more funding and masking instructional failures...

Nearly 12 percent of American students in kindergarten through 12th grade are assigned to the special education system. Children with severe disabilities, such as mental retardation, autism, blindness, and deafness, account for only a tenth of these students. The remaining 90 percent are described as suffering from conditions that are less obvious and harder to verify objectively...[specific learning disability] SLD is the most common label, accounting for more than half of all students covered by IDEA. SLD diagnoses, which have risen by 34 percent since 1991, are the main factor contributing to the dramatic increase in special education enrollments since 1976.

To prevent overuse of the [SLD] label, federal regulations stipulate that it be limited to students who show a "severe discrepancy" between their achievement in one or more subject areas and their intelligence, usually as measured by an IQ test. For example, a child who scores lower on a standardized reading test than on an IQ test might be classified as having a reading disability.

Or, it just might mean that the child is generally bright but has been given a lousy method of learning to read, such as the "whole words" method. I fail to see how a discrepancy on an IQ test automatically translates into a failure to be able to learn to read - a true disability - rather than a reflection of poor teaching of reading skills. Of course, if schools can get more money for special education, there's certainly more incentive to just label poor readers as learning disabled.

The entire article is very good, and Ms. Snell states that an alternative to the "special ed" track exists - early intervention with intensive reading instruction:

The experience with early intervention programs that emphasize phonemes (basic units of speech) indicates that the rate of truly intractable reading problems is close to the rate of other serious disabilities. In five recent studies, when kids with poor phonological skills were given intensive instruction in phonemes and phonics, the expected incidence of learning disabilities, originally 12 percent to 18 percent, was reduced to around 1.5 percent.

That's a big whopping reduction. Think schools will be willing to give up that federal money earmarked for disabilities and switch to phonics? They should, but I'm not holding my breath.

Background info on standardized testingI

Background info on standardized testing

I came across two interesting repositories of information the web recently - A History of Standardized Testing, and the online encyclopedia's Wikipedia's entry for standardized testing. Let us consider the information, and the sources.

The "History" article comes from an odd site that is an assortment of all sorts of information, and God knows how much of it is accurate (the recipe for Fettucine Alfredo looks good, though). The author is Frank Moriarty, and a Google search of that name turns up an author whose interests appear to be primarily NASCAR and death metal. Could this be another death-metal/psychometrics link? Hmmm, I seriously doubt it. However, I can't find another Frank Moriarty on the web whose interests overlap with educational testing, so let's drop that line for now.

So, don't know about the person who wrote this, nor the site it's listed on...but the information is pretty accurate, and even-handed. A quickie timeline brings us the present, where "accountability" is needed in standardized forms to free evaluation from the bias of teachers and schools. Mr. Moriarty is using the word "bias" correctly here, because bias means systematic error, and a sympathetic teacher may systematically inflate her students' grades to keep them from failing. Often, in testing criticism, you will see "bias" used in a very incorrect fashion, and tests that show large group mean differences, or that have a high-stakes outcome that will disadvantage some groups more than others, are often mislabeled as "biased".

This is followed by decent explanations of "norm-referenced" testing, "reliability", and "validity", although Mr. Moriarty errs in his interpretation of reliability. A reliable test is not necessarily a meaningful one. A test that is reliable has no systematic error and will give the same scores across time. Meaningfulness is instead related to validity - does the test measure what it's supposed to measure? A test cannot be valid without also being reliable, but a test can be reliable without being valid. Reliability is internal consistency, whereas validity is concerned with external validation. I could try to measure IQ by having students throw a baseball as far as they can. The distance of the throw will be correlated across attempts, so the measure is reliable, but it's utterly invalid for the purposes of measuring IQ, because distance won't be correlated with other indicators of intelligence.

Mr. Moriarty then goes on to quickly state a few pro- and anti-testing comments. The old "teaching to the test" canard is dragged out here. Interestingly, when discussing fairness, Mr. Moriarty forgets to state that standardized testing was meant to remove negative bias as well as positive bias, so that students are judged only on their performance, and not on other aspects of their identity. Nice schoolteachers might inflate grades, but not-so-nice teachers might be peddling "the soft bigotry of low expectations", and a students who comes from a disadvantaged background and scores high on standardized tests will have a much better idea of his true educational potential.

Moving on, we have the Wikipedia. Never heard of it. The main page states that the Wikipedia is "a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language. We started in January 2001 and are already working on 90171 articles in the English version, with more being added and improved all the time. Anyone, including you, can edit any article right now, without even having to log in." Oooo, does that mean I can edit the standardized testing page if I find an error? Let's see. It's a short entry, so I can quote:

Standardized testing is used as a public policy strategy to establish stronger accountability measures for public education. While the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) has served as an educational barometer for some thirty years by administering standardized tests on a regular basis to random schools throughout the United States, efforts over the last decade at the state and federal levels have mandated annual standardized test administration for all public schools across the country.

No comments there.

Standardized tests usually take the form of multiple choice exams, simplifying the problems of scoring and awarding points.

And reducing the cost, shortening the turnaround time, making the tests more reliable, etc. etc. Little points that anti-multiple-choice people would like you to forget.

The idea behind the standardized testing policy movement is that testing is the first step to improving schools, teaching practice, and educational methods through data collection. Proponents argue that the data generated by the standardized tests act like a 'report card' for the community, demonstrating how well local schools are performing. Critics of the movement, however, point to various discrepancies that result from current state standardized testing practices, including problems with test validity and reliability and false correlations (see Simpson's paradox).

Relibility and validity are always an issue in high-stakes testing. The question is, are these problems intractable, or do they merely exist now, with the possibility of rectifying them rather than demolishing the testing program altogether?

Critics charge that standardized tests in fact become a mandatory curriculum placed into schools without public debate and without any accountability measures of its own. Many feel this ignores basic democratic principles in that control of schools' curricula is removed from local school boards, which are the nominal curricular authority in the U.S. While some maintain that it would be preferable to simply introduce mandatory national curricula, others feel that state mandated standardized testing should stop altogether in order that schools can focus their efforts on instructing their students as they see fit.

Well, that's a valid ideological viewpoint. The problem is that children currently have to attend public schools in their neighborhoods, and the same critics who oppose testing also tend to oppose vouchers and school choice. This means that students are stuck with whatever their local school board deems appropriate, which is NOT always what the parents would prefer for their children, and which can be substandard. The attempt at a national curriculum is not meant so much to intrude on local school board decisions as to ensure that kids everywhere will be taught the basics, at least.

Critics also charge that standardized multiple-choice tests encourage "teaching to the test" at the expense of creativity, in-depth coverage of subjects not on the test, and skills such as writing, which are not covered by the tests.

Sigh. Can we call for a moratorium on the phrase "teaching to the test"? Or can we force testing critics to spell out the real meaning of the phrase, which is "teaching skills that can be adequately tested", as opposed to sketchy educational skills such as creativity, self-esteem and multicultural awareness? No testing critic has yet made a valid argument for why teaching basic skills, and then testing those skills, is contrary to the purpose of education. And while we're tossing the word "expense" around, do these critics have any idea how much money it takes to create tests to measure "creativity", much less hire people to grade them?

Boost your scores - and

Boost your scores - and your allowance!

A Florida elementary school came up with a rather, er, unique way to boost test score - they handed out leftover district money to students who did well on the FCAT. And, gee, they don't see anything wrong, or odd, or unfair, about a school paying kids to do well on mandatory standardized tests. After all, that money's gotta go somewhere, right?

Discovery Elementary School in Palm Bay was giving students money for top scores on the FCAT, but after Florida Today inquired about it, the school has ceased the practice. "We didn't know at the district level that this was happening," said Lynn Clifton, a spokeswoman for Brevard County Public Schools. "It came as a surprise, even the area superintendent didn't know about it."

Principal Barbra McCalla said she doesn't understand what all the concern is about. "The state gives us reward money, so we didn't see why we shouldn't share it with the students," McCalla said. "Schools reward students for tests all the time. I don't see what the difference is."

Um, yes, schools do "reward" students, in the sense of giving them good grades and approval, but the purpose of those is not to lead to an increased bank account. Schools reward students by helping them realize their potential, not by paying them for performance. Schools are also supposed to be teaching students about the love of learning, learning for learning's sake, and how everything in life is NOT all about money.

Discovery gave fourth-graders who earned top marks on the writing portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test $20. Those who earned the second highest score earned $10. The money was distributed this year once the results were available. Discovery's writing scores for fourth-graders increased from 3.3 in 2001 to 3.7 in 2002.

Orange County Public Schools provide incentives for students to perform well on tests as well, spokesman Lynn Wright said. But the schools don't offer money. "Incentives are good, but that is . . . umm, we don't do that," he said.

School Board member Rich Wilson said he was unaware of the practice and didn't think it was appropriate. "If you go through life expecting monetary rewards and there is no opportunity for that reward, you will not perform," he said. "I personally don't think it's a good idea. I think the reward should be the personal satisfaction of reaching a goal, whether it's a test score or going from a C to a B."

Funny how some people don't understand why some tasks in life are done in order to better oneself, to help others, to make the world a better place, or just generally to gain personal satisfaction rather than monetary rewards. Kids, in particular, don't know this yet, which is why a school, of all places, shouldn't be teaching them to expect cold hard cash after each educational milestone.

Jay Mathews has another good

Jay Mathews has another good WaPo education article - this one is about the obstacles that administrators place in the way of good teaching. The particular jargon that he quotes is priceless:

Alan Coleman, a sixth-grade teacher in the D.C. public schools, has been reflecting recently on clumsy school administrators, like the supervisors who demand that the relevant performance standard--with its proper number, title and description--be posted beside any admirable student work teachers put on their classroom bulletin boards. Here is one he is supposed to display with a good analytical essay: "The student demonstrates familiarity with a variety of functional documents that identifies the institutional context of the document."

"Who this is for is anyone's guess," Coleman said, "as the standards are written in educational jargon that means nothing to the students."

The truly scary part is that this administrator could be writing standards for that district's educational tests.

The demise of bilingual education

The demise of bilingual education (in some places, anyway)

Massachusetts pro-bilingual educators were left high and dry after ballot initiatve "Question 2" passed on Tuesday, which means that bilingual education in the state is going to be replaced with English immersion:

The ballot measure replaces bilingual education, which uses English and a student's native language, with a one-year program taught only in English. Districts must change how they teach immigrant children by the time school begins next year. Framingham's bilingual director, Susan McGilvray-Rivet, said she'll have to redesign the district's program.

The outcome of the vote disappointed Marlborough School Committee member Nancy Stevens. "I'm concerned about whether this is the (best) program for the kids," Stevens said. "For some kids, a half a year may be OK; for other kids, it may take them two years."

Well, we'll just have to see. Maybe a year will work out fine for most. What's important is that Massachusetts will now be able to assess any improvements that English immersion classes make possible.

Lincoln Tamayo, chairman of the "Yes on 2" campaign, said the fact that more than 70 percent of voters approved the measure means Beacon Hill lawmakers should keep their hands off the law. "If they try to fool with the will of the voters, I will be there making sure the politicians are doing what they are supposed to be doing," Tamayo said. "No more compromising."

He has a point. Seventy percent is pretty decisive.

Districts will also have to test students learning English as their second language every year using a national standardized test, [Framingham assistant superintendent Walter] McClennen said. The MCAS is the only test currently used, he said, and adding a test costs money.

True, but standardized testing doesn't tend to be as expensive as critics claim, and with the MCAS testing program already in place, adding a new test may not require that much more overhead.

And adding a new test is essential. If the results show that English immersion doesn't work better than bilingual education, I'll be willing to accept those results. Unlike some bilingual-education believers, I'll go with what the data show, instead of being nasty to those who disagree with my theories. So far, though, there is evidence to suggest that English immersion provides kids with a better grasp of the language, as measured by standardized test scores. I'll be interested to see what happens next in Massachusetts.

On the other hand, Colorado students will still be subject to bilingual education classes, because a similar Ron Unz-backed initiative, Amendment 31, was soundly defeated.

What made the difference?

Unz said there was one big difference between Colorado and Massachusetts: a $3 million donation to opponents from medical equipment heiress Pat Stryker...Stryker's daughter attends Harris Bilingual School, where students learn English and Spanish. Her gift is thought to be the largest individual donation to a ballot initiative in Colorado history.

And how was that $3 million used?

The [$3 million] donation was announced two months later [in the campaign], the day before a radio ad blitz began. Again, Welchert and Britz [of the No to 31 campaign] shrugged off advice. Many in English Plus, made up largely of educators and parents, wanted "happy ads" featuring classroom shots.

Instead, the TV spots are dark, showing still pictures of sad-looking children while an announcer ominously lists the faults in Amendment 31. In one, the announcer states children who speak little English, largely Hispanic students, would disrupt the education of "your children" - presumably the majority white families of Colorado.

Media critics called the spots "ugly" and said they preyed on the fears of white voters.

"Yeah, it's ominous," Welchert says in response, "but it's cutting through."

Boy, just the fact of the ads' existence is ugly; the fact the ads were effective is even worse. It's also ugly that pro-bilingual education teachers will probably view this election result as a triumph, when in fact it just means that Colorado's upper-class parents - like the heiress who donated all that money - don't want their kids in class with those "disruptive" non-English-speakers. Those voters essentially validated the point that many bilingual education critics make - that such education is separate-but-unequal. This wasn't a triumph for anyone, least of all the kids involved.

Apologies for the light posting...it's

Apologies for the light posting...it's been a hell week.

Hee hee heeWow, nice gains

Hee hee hee

Wow, nice gains for the Republicans yesterday. Jeb Bush took Florida by a huge lead, thus disproving the claims of Democrat bigwigs about how Jeb's education platform was going to do him in. The Weekly Standard has several good articles up about the election (don't these guys ever sleep?), including essays on allegations of Republican race-baiting and civil rights violation and the "Floridazation" of American politics.

Apologies to all - this

Apologies to all - this sinus infection is kicking my behind, so posting will be minimal. I'll keep an eye on the elections, though, and I'll try to blog on the results of Bush-McBride competition as soon as they become available. Of course, if the election is actually fixed we can go ahead and start Bush's celebration party, right? =)

Until then, here's some good election day commentary:

Ten key races for conservatives

Taxes, school bonds, and math (for California voters)

A hopeful summary from RightWingNews.com

A nifty interactive map on FoxNews.com.

Computerized-adaptive testing hits South BendThe

Computerized-adaptive testing hits South Bend

The benefits of computerized testing are many, and while there is debate among psychometricians as to whether these benefits outweigh the disadvantages, most agree that many students today feel very comfortable taking tests on computer, that computer administration can lead to shorter testing time and quicker scoring time, and that in some cases the computerized mode can enhance the validity of the test by allowing for innovative item types to be used.

Most computerized tests fall into one of two categories: computer-based linear tests (CBTs), and computerized-adaptive tests (CATs). CBTs are administered on the computer in a linear fashion, in which each student sees a preset group of items, although not always in the same order. Some CBTs are very simple and are basically paper-and-pencil tests administered via computer.

CATs, on the other hand, use a computer algorithm to adapt items to each student's performance, so that different students may see completely different sets of items, and item difficulty is tailored to the estimated student ability. The item administration algorithms and scoring algorithms used in CATs can differ greatly across tests, but all CATs adapt items to test-takers. The current forms of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) are CATs, and have been for almost a decade.

There is a great deal of literature on the advantages and disadvantages of both CBTs and CATs, and I'm not going to go into any of it now, except to say that I was not aware of any operational computerized-adaptive K-12 standardized test. But now, schools in South Bend, Indiana, have implemented computerized-adaptive tests for students, and the initial reaction is promising:

Under way is the science test portion of the new [computerized] standardized test that Niles Community Schools have gone...the Northwest Evaluation Association tests also tests students at their own level, giving them harder questions after each right answer and easier questions after wrong ones. So far, the test is passing the student test.

"These tests are more challenging," Jordan Parks, a seventh-grader at Ring Lardner said after finishing up the science test. "I was real happy to go to computers. It's more fun. It's way better than what we do in class." Classmate Cricket Fisher also likes the new way of testing. "I think it's a lot easier with the computer because a lot of people are used to using computers," she said. "And it's a lot quicker for everybody to use a computer."

Test results also come back quicker, as in the very next day, allowing the district to give the test twice during the year, something it could not do with the old Terra Nova test it was using. "The limitation of any paper and pencil (standardized) test is we could only give it once a year," Jim Craig, Niles Community Schools director of curriculum, said. "And often you would not get the results for two or three months.

"The NWEA test is administered on the computer and it allows us to test students in all four of the subject areas (math, language arts, science and social studies) we need to. We can use it anytime we want to administer it, including the beginning and end of the year."

The quick turnaround time and flexibility in testing administration are two of the most-cited advantages of computerized testing, and while computerized testing is expensive, the price of such programs drops in accordance with the prices of computer equipment, and this new program in South Bend costs only $3000 more a year than the old pencil-and-paper testing program.

The disadvantages of CATs are that they tend to be expensive, if a computer system is not already in place, and that while some security issues are easier to handle in CAT (i.e., there are no test books available to steal or preview), other new issues arise. CATs draw from item banks that may not be large enough to accommodate the needs of each test-taker, so that, for example, the smarter test-takers tend to all see the same items. This security problem becomes more severe as the number of test-takers and the stakes of the test increase, so although these tests in Indiana are "high-stakes" in the accountability sense, I don't think that they will face the same groups of determined cheaters that ETS has to deal with on their computerized-adaptive admissions tests. I'm happy to see educators taking a chance on this technology, which I believe is well-suited for schoolchildren and standardized accountability tests.

More structure, pleaseThe 1970's vogue

More structure, please

The 1970's vogue for "open classroom" designs has run its course, and schools in Cincinnati are now building walls and going back to the "traditional" schoolhouse designs:

Open classrooms came into vogue in the late 1960s and ran rampant in the 1970s. Noise, technology needs and security concerns have all contributed to their demise in many schools. Mariemont High School was built with open classrooms about 1971."It was state-of-the-art at that time," said James Renner, Mariemont High School principal. "We had people coming from around the world to see how education was going to be in the 21st century. It proved not to be the case, at least in secondary education." Open classrooms were established to provide for flexibility in scheduling, team teaching and active learning. But schools soon began putting up partitions and bookcases to divide space.

"As we quickly found out, it was just not conducive to an academic learning environment," Mr. Renner said. "It was just tougher for high school kids to deal with ... I think they forgot to take into account the distractibility.." And so, after 22 years teaching in the same room, Mariemont math teacher Debbie Keefe finally has walls and windows. When she started, the five classroo ms in her pod were open. Eight-foot barriers later went up, but didn't help the noise level much. "You could hear everything," she said. "Next door, if they were talking about algebra properties and you were giving a test on algebra properties ... It happened more than once, believe me."

"For those of us who remember new math - like new math, I think, it was a good idea gone bad," said principal Ken Baker. "It [an open-walled design] does create a sense of community and awareness. Those were probably the prominent things in the 1960s. Let's all be together - kind of a commune type of thing."

Imagine that. It's hard to believe that increased "flexibility" was once considered a good reason to build schools that afforded teachers and students virtually no privacy, security, or control.

Not that I'm in favor of the prison-walls-and-metal-detectors look that some schools install, either by design or disaster. But anyone with a drop of common sense could have told the 1970's educrats that high school students do require some structure to be able to focus on their lesson material, and that any design that increased distractability could have also had a negative effect on the students' ability to learn. I suppose, however, if the goal was to create an environment that was more hippie commune than schoolhouse, the open floorplan was the way to go.