Yet another hiatus...
I won't have internet access from home until the 31st (I hope I can survive that long) and this is Moving Week, so I'll be MIA for the next week. Here's hoping this hiatus will be the last I'll need for a while. Thanks for your patience, and be sure to check back in on April Fool's Day.
Shouldn't that be renamed "Michael Moore Day"? No, wait, he's a March Fool....
On the hot seat
I guess I hadn't really thought of the rules surrounding Florida's exam, the FCATs, as "laws", but they certainly are:
A draft report from Florida A&M University's Office of Inspector General accuses two laboratory school employees of violating state laws pertaining to copying and storing the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test was suspended at FAMU Developmental Research School earlier this month after the parent of a student informed the high school's principal that her daughter remembered studying the exact same materials in class that appeared on the 2003 exam...
James Saylor, a math teacher, math department chairman and seventh-grade test administrator for the 2002 FCAT, admitted to copying portions of last year's exam and distributing them to his students and other teachers as practice for this year's test. Two story passages in the copied material were identical to passages in this year's 10th-grade FCAT reading test. State law prohibits the reproduction of a state standardized test.
It's hard to believe that the teacher was unaware of this law, or really though that he was in no way jeopardizing security. His claim that, "I never assumed or considered that I would be exposing the students to the exact questions on the 2003 test, which is why I saw no harm in utilizing this resource" is either very naive or very uninformed.
It's my understanding that test items that are not disclosed, as the FCAT items are not, may be re-used in future exams. Re-use of items doesn't necessarily lead to changes in item difficulty or problems with test security. Items that will not be re-used, such as LSAT items, are distributed when the LSACT booklets are disclosed after the test administration. Given that Mr. Saylor had to be aware that the FCAT items were not officially disclosed by the state, it's surprising that he did not stop to ask himself why that might be.
He's not the only one in trouble:
Saylor told FAMU investigators that John Grayson, a guidance counselor and the school's testing coordinator, granted him access to the 2002 FCAT. "Mr. Grayson allowed me to look over the test material and copy the mathematics section," he wrote. "Mr. Grayson also suggested that I make a copy of the reading sections as well, which I did after his suggestion."
The report accuses Grayson of violating Florida Administrative Code that requires test booklets and other materials containing secure test questions, answer keys and student responses be kept in a secure place and accurately accounted for. During administration of this year's FCAT, a sophomore's entire test packet went missing, the report says. The report says that Grayson used a conference room - which students, teachers and administrators can enter and exit at will - to prepare FCAT test packets and two unlocked closets to store them.
Do you suppose the guidance counselor will plead ignorance of the test security laws as well?
Off the topic of testing
Looks like we're all going to be reading FoxNews and Instapundit and watching CNN for a while, and standardized testing will be on the back burner. I'll keep an eye out for stories, but my guess is that most of the media will be focusing on the war, even if in a tremendously stupid manner, a la the NYT story, on the first day of fighting, about how a few California lefties are whining about the war. Yeah, highlighting the fact that some software engineers and movie moguls don't support President Bush is so much more important right now that focusing on the battles that will help liberate Iraq. Sure.
Anyway, I will close here with an informative email from Brian C., a reader on the "front lines" of the SAT revisions:
I am not an educator, and the only reason I have any interest in 'psychometrics' (which I hadn't even heard about before finding your site!) is because of first-hand experience. I just graduated from high school in Korea, a country with a very nasty history with it's own standardized tests, and took the SAT I and II studying alone.
After reading about the 'new SAT' I have to say I am impressed. Although I scored well on the analogies section, I am all for taking it out of the test. It did force me to expand my vocabulary (and I think this will help in the real world) but I feel that the actual scores I recieved reflected too much on my 'skill' in answering analogy questions.
My opinion on the SAT II writing test is exactly the opposite of my thoughts on the analogy section. Although I recieved the lowest marks among my three SAT II subjects on the writing test essay section, I think studying for the test has improved my real world skills the most. I was forced to plan my writing for the first time. This immediately helped when writing essays for my college applications.
It's always good to read the reactions of those taking the test, rather than those over-reacting to them. Brian feels the writing test helped his real-world writing skills, which is the added benefit of any good test, and is the reason that "teaching to the test" is indistinguishable from teaching when the test is valid.
Too "radical" or "risky"?
Education Secretary Rod Paige has come out in favor of the proposed teacher certification exam that will allow experts and professionals without education degrees to teach:
Education Secretary Rod Paige has joined a rebellion against sole reliance on traditional teacher certification, saying teacher colleges should no longer have a monopoly over who is qualified to educate children. Mr. Paige yesterday endorsed the new American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), whose mission is to certify subject experts, experienced professionals and military veterans as public school teachers, even if they don't have degrees in education.
"Some people will argue that this change is too radical, that it's too risky, that we should maintain the status quo," Mr. Paige said at a National Press Club event with board leaders. "Well, I agree that it's radical. It's radically better than the system we have now, a system that drives thousands of talented people away from our classrooms."
The ABCTE, started in the fall with a $5 million federal grant from the Department of Education, set off a firestorm of objections from education groups that argued that the approach was a "quick and easy" solution bent on "devaluing professional knowledge" and rushing teachers into the classroom.
As opposed to university education programs, which often do a miserable job of teaching aspiring teachers anything about their chosen academic field? If anything devalues professional knowledge, it's the academic system of teacher education; how else could we have arrived at the situation in which one-third of secondary school math teachers have undergone no substantial math education? And the numbers only get worse when one focuses on the high-poverty schools.
The ABCTE's "assessments maintain extremely rigorous academic standards for teachers," [Secretary Paige] said. "Individuals must be true scholars to earn this credential. And it provides an innovative option for individuals who would be turned off by the hoops and hurdles of traditional teacher preparation and certification programs. It focuses on what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to be effective, instead of the number of credits or courses they've taken. It demands excellence rather than exercises in filling bureaucratic requirements."
Amen. Alternative teacher certification is certainly not a new idea, and it requires a set of standards and rigorous testing. It will be interesting to see what they develop.
One way to improve test scores
This article is a satire, but it's not that far removed from reality....
Portland, OR - The school board of the recently merged Eaton and Franklin High Schools announced that 1,200 students would be laid off as part of their cost-cutting measures.
School Superintendent Marisa Fargman said, "We've got a lot of duplication among the students now that the merger is complete. Fifteen homecoming queen candidates is way too many for a district of our size, and 85 nerds is more than our jocks and preps can adequately harass. The board was given a mandate by voters last year to reduce class size, reduce expenses and improve test scores. We've satisfied all three goals by targeting the layoffs to our less-gifted students," said Fargman.
The Franklin-Eaton Big Red-Beavers sports teams were also affected by merger. "We ended up with three 'Coach Larrys.'
And the snafus continue....
My email access from home has been temporarily suspended, so I can't read any mail I've gotten at the Yahoo account for the past couple of days. I'll be able to read it this weekend, though, so keep that mail a'comin. I'll get to it all as soon as I can.
The comments function also continues to be iffy. I promise, one of these days I'll move to a site where you can actually leave comments and read my archives.
What's going on with the Oregon state exam?
Has Oregon been dumbing down its tests? That's what Greg Perry of Brainstorm Magazine thinks. He wanted to see if Oregon's taxpaying parents were getting their money's worth from the expensive, tailor-made Oregon State Assessment Tests (OSAT). He's the father of a fifth-grader at Franklin School, which is notable because it is one of the only schools in Oregon that has student data for both the OSAT and the Terra Nova for 3rd, 5th and 8th graders. The Oregon test is normed to Oregon students, but the Terra Nova is nationally-normed.
He's also an economist, so he likes to focus on empirical data. Here's what he found:
...our students' scores on Oregon's statewide assessment had a much different pattern [than the Terra Nova scores]. There was a sharp rise in scores starting in the late 90's that was not evident in our Terra Nova scores. What was going on? If scores on one test were going up quickly while scores on another did not, there had to be a reason...Was it because achievement levels were actually rising? Or had Oregon's tests gotten easier?...
Obviously, this is not a trivial question. If true, it would reflect pretty poorly on the state's claim that Vera Katz's School Reform Act was working. The Oregon Department of Education website tells us that achievement is way up: far more kids are meeting the reading and math testing standards than in the early nineties...I graphed the average state scores in reading and mathematics in third, fifth and eighth grade from 1991 to 2001. Eighth grade scores trended upward in a modest zigzag pattern, similar to the pattern exhibited by Oregon average scores on the SAT. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
Then a strange pattern emerged. The scores for third and fifth grades varied up and down from 1991-95, with a small upward trend. But beginning in 1996, the scores jumped up every single year, at an accelerating pace. An odd result, not consistent with the zigzag pattern one would expect...Had the tests gotten easier?
Mr. Terry was not successful in obtaining the past test items, so he went back to the data he already had in his possession:
Since we had several years of data in which students took both tests, if the OSAT was getting progressively easier, the inflated scores would be revealed by a multiple regression analysis. After pooling the data for both the Terra Nova and the OSAT for the years 1996-2001, with special variables representing each year, I ran the regressions. If there was any inflation in the scores, these variables would be both positive and statistically significant....
At the third grade level, the OSAT was apparently inflated by five points from 1997 to 2001. At the fifth grade level, the scores were inflated by almost 15 points from 1996 to 2001. To put these results in perspective, note that the OSAT mathematics average score statewide increased by seven points from 1996 to 2001. If the Franklin results are an accurate prediction of the results statewide, it suggests that the state scores actually declined by eight points from 1996 to 2001.
What might explain this result? One possible explanation is that teachers are teaching to the test, in this case the OSAT. However, the two tests track each other so closely that any effort by teachers to boost OSAT scores would almost certainly boost the Terra Nova scores. Another explanation is that the assessment experts at ODE have done a poor job of equating tests from year to year. This might explain the results for the reading assessment, because the differences do vary from year to year. However, for the mathematics assessment, the gap between the OSAT and Terra Nova widens each year for third and fifth grade students. This kind of trend seems deliberate, not random. Another explanation is that the results may be simply a fluke, a product of a very small data set in a special situation..
To me, the most plausible explanation is that Oregon's math assessment has simply gotten easier.
Mr. Terry then goes on to check the Oregon test scores against the SAT and NAEP scores. He discovered that, despite the gains on the in-state exam, the math gains on NAEP and the SAT actually lag behind the national average. However, state exams and the SAT aren't necessarily intended to measure the same thing.
I'm impressed by his willingness to examine the data, something few testing critics (and even fewer parents) are willing to do (of course, Oregon didn't make it easy for him to obtain these data). The score jumps in and of themselves are surprising, especially when they aren't accompanied by similar jumps in Terra Nova scores. The Terra Nova exam is consistent from year to year, and the OSAT obviously is not. However, I'm not as willing as Mr. Terry to assume that the apparent difference in test forms is deliberate. Test equating is not an easy process, and it's possible that a change in mathematical test content could have resulted in a change in the difficulty of the exam, despite attempts to equate the forms. However, if the content was changed, the parents should have been notified.
I'm also impressed by a sidebar questioning the value of the OSAT, especially its subjectivity:
Subjectivity: In a quest for the holy grail of assessment--measuring nebulous skills such as "critical thinking" and "problem solving,"--Oregon has developed a myriad of assessments such as writing sample tests, math problem-solving tests, and portfolio assessments. These faddish assessments are costly, cumbersome, lack reliability and validity, and take too much time away from instruction.
This is, in a nutshell, what I have always said in response to education reformers who unthinkingly recommend performance assessments as a useful alternative to standardized multiple-choice exams. This is not to say that such assessments cannot be useful - just that they are often more expensive, time-consuming, and unreliable than testing critics would have you believe. They are not a simple alternative to tests which seem too "sterile", or which don't seem to measure the "higher-order" skills.
Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for catching this first.
The specter of the affirmative action debate
The ramifications of the decision on affirmative action at Michigan State will affect colleges across the country, including the one I attended for graduate school. The officials at UNC-Chapel Hill are already fretting about the implications of removing race from the college admissions process:
"This is maybe the most important case to impact higher education in decades, because of the societal implications it has," said Jerry Lucido, Carolina's director of undergraduate admissions. "If any use of race as a factor [in admissions] is overturned by the Supreme Court, it will affect all public and private universities in the United States currently practicing affirmative action"....
While UNC and Michigan don't share the same admissions process, there are similarities. For UNC, Michigan's law school case is most relevant because that school, like Carolina's undergraduate admissions office, counts race as one of several factors when considering applicants. The other lawsuit, opposing Michigan's undergraduate college, targets that university's use of a specific system that assigns points for characteristics such as race. UNC does not use any sort of point system. The court's review of the Michigan cases will be its first substantial foray into college admissions since 1978, when it denied the use of racial quotas in Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke...
Many educators say a Supreme Court decision to remove race from the admissions process would be disastrous. At Carolina, top administrators, admissions officials and many faculty members have backed Michigan, and a group of law school professors put together a 34-page brief outlining its support for affirmative action.
What exactly do they fear will happen if race can no longer be used in the admissions process? Why, that, "in the short term" at least, schools will become whiter and less diverse (because whites are not capable of contributing to the diversity of a campus in any way, don't you know). The historically black universities in North Carolina, on the other hand, believe that the end of affirmative action could be positive for their campuses, because students who might otherwise be admitted to Chapel Hill solely for diversity purposes may choose to apply to a school that is more suited to their needs (the black SAT average score at UNC-Chapel Hill is 184 points lower than the white SAT score).
Affirmative action proponents would like people to believe that, if affirmative action was reduced, and race could not be used in the admissions process, all campuses would suddenly become lily-white, and no non-whites would be able to attend college anywhere. "De facto segregation" would become the rule. That's simply not true:
...opponents argue that diversity is little more than a buzzword and doesn't have a clear impact in the classroom. [Or, it might have an impact - just not the one that diversity proponents hoped to achieve.]
"The notion that students improve their learning of any subject based upon who is sitting with them in the classroom is really preposterous," said George Leef, director of the Pope Center for Education Policy, a Raleigh-based, conservative think tank. "Universities should stick to educating students and not to ameliorating social tensions"...
Leef, with the Pope Center, believes ending affirmative action would simply lead students to the universities that best fit them. Minority students who legitimately belong in elite universities would still enroll in them, while others would still gain entry to second- and third-tier institutions that better fit their needs, he said. "The sky will not fall," Leef said. "Students will go to institutions where they're academically suited."
Affirmative action proponents do believe the sky will fall:
On average, black students admitted to Carolina last fall scored 184 points lower than white students on the SAT -- 1,116 compared to 1,290. But [Carolina's director of undergraduate admissions Jerry] Lucido defends the admission of black students with lower test scores, saying the standardized test doesn't adequately predict success of eventual graduates. He also points out that, in the last five years, black students have improved at a greater rate than the general population on SAT tests, the number of advancement placement courses taken, and other measurements.
Okay, if the SAT doesn't predict success of graduates, then why do we care whether black students are improving their SAT scores at a better rate than the general population? And how can affirmative action, which holds black students to lower SAT score standards than the general population, be considered one of the factors in causing black students to improve their scores? This technique of trying to have it both ways - of downplaying the importance of SAT scores while boasting about the reducing black-white test score gap - is typical of many affirmative action proponents who are test critics at heart.
"Any abrupt end to race-conscious admissions threatens a return to de facto racial segregation to many public institutions of higher education throughout this state and region," [UNC law professor Jack] Boger wrote in the brief. "Any such resegregation ... would be absolutely devastating to our state -- and, we believe, to our national future."
Could there be any statement more insulting to black students than to say that, if race could not be a factor, black students will no longer be admitted to most schools? Isn't this the same thing as saying that black students cannot possibly compete on their intellectual merits alone? Why is it politically correct to say this? Isn't this also the same thing as admitting that the K-12 system does a great disservice to many minority students, yet the suggested solution is to continue to cover that up by holding students of different races to different standards? I don't think this is progressive, nor do I find it compassionate. I do think that, in the rush to support some sort of affirmative action policy, its proponents have a tendency to make rather hysterical statements that unintentionally insult the students they are so desperately trying to support.
John Rosenberg of the blog Discriminations has been keeping a much closer eye on this debate than I have. And he's appalled with what he's reading. I particularly enjoyed his comments about Lani Guinier's article in the Nation:
[Ms. Guinier writes] High-stakes tests correlate well with socioeconomic status, but they are poor at predicting grades and totally unable to anticipate future career success. It was not affirmative action that kept the white plaintiffs out of Michigan; it was the mirage of merit (including commitments to social privilege and affluence) that was primarily responsible for their fate.
[John replies] I'm relatively agnostic about these tests, but the point is, or should be, that if they're no good they should be dropped. I have no problem with that. But obviously all the schools that maintain, on the one hand, that we shouldn't use grades and test scores to keep out minorities have no problem using grades and test scores to keep out whites. If they're no good, they shouldn't be used at all. What is offensive, to both law and a sensible and widespread conception of fairness, is double standards
Exactly. Ms. Guinier glosses over the fact that the SAT was never intended to predict future success after college; therefore, to say that it does not do so is not a valid criticism of the test. She also makes the fallacious claim that SAT scores do not predict grades (they do), without providing any data to back up her claim (you only need to read the first paragraph of this report to refute her statement). Finally, she claims that the white students with higher SAT scores had only "the mirage of merit", whatever that means. So if a black student makes a low SAT score, we should still assume that that student might be smart, but if a white student makes a high SAT score, we should assume that is only because they're rich, not smart. Have I got that straight?
Overstepping her bounds
Although I disagree with the "fascist" rhetoric in the headline for this article, I do agree that this example of professorial prejudice is one of the worst that I've heard lately. It's hard to imagine that a professor really thought she could get away with penalizing students who refused to write anti-war missives to President Bush and local politicians. Luckily, FIRE got involved, and the university in question dealt with the situation appropriately. One person who commented on this story on another site mentioned that it might have been appropriate in a speech class to ask all the students to write a letter that was the opposite of their point of view, which is true, but that is certainly not what this professor was doing. Shame, shame.
Full Metal (and Rock and Jazz) Jacket
Help the morale of our troops by donating to TroopTrax. They'll be using donations to purchase music for our men and women fighting in the Middle East. It's the little things that count.
My guess is that TroopTrax won't be buying too many Dixie Chicks cds, though.
The effects of diversity
Fearless fellow edubloggers Erin O'Connor and John Rosenberg are all over a recent study suggesting that the more "diverse" a campus is, in terms of having more minority students, the less satisfied the students are with the quality of the education at that campus.
John provides some information about the methodology of the study:
[the authors] not only asked administrators, professors, and students at 140 colleges how they felt about campus diversity, but they also inquired about the institutions' general educational environment, making no references to diversity. Following the survey, the responses were correlated to the number of black students at each institution, since the authors argue that the debate over affirmative action has primarily centered on black students at predominantly white colleges.
And Erin focuses on the results:
As the number of blacks enrolled at a school increases, the study found, students' satisfaction with the quality of their education, the quality of their fellow students, and the school's work ethic decreases. The more diverse the student population, the more students claim to have experienced discrimination. The more black students there are on a campus, the more faculty complain about the work habits of students.
[Erin's comments] There are many possible ways to interpret such data, and correlations should never be mistaken for causations: just as it would be a grievous misreading of such findings to argue that the presence of blacks on campus in and of itself drags down the educational quality of the school, so, too would it be wrong to argue that racism accounts for the heightened dissatisfaction of people studying and teaching at more diverse schools. All that we can say for sure is that the easy, glib assurances colleges offer in their brochures, their policy rationales, and their curricula that a diverse campus is an automatically enriched one do not stand up to close examination.
Erin's point is well-taken, and I'm happy to see some substantive data to back up the claim that the drive for "diversity" may have unintended consequences, and is not, perhaps, what should be driving college admissions. I'm also glad that Erin underlines the point about correlation not being mistaken for causation.
However, the devil's advocate in me finds it interesting to think that even if there were a causative effect here, it could very well be in the opposite direction from the one Erin mentions above. In other words, it could be that the worse the school is to begin with, the more likely they are to prop up their reputation by striving to be more "diverse", instead of taking steps to improve the educational quality of the programs and classes at the school. After all, bragging about the diversity of the school is a good way to take attention off miserable graduation rates or low average SAT scores. But when the diverse student body shows up, they realize they've been sold a fake bills of goods, and the overall student satisfaction goes down.
The study is not free on the web, but you can order a copy here. I'm curious about the particular correlations that were used - I'd love to examine the numbers a bit more closely - but I'm not going to spend the money on the article right now. Not when Home Depot is calling my name...
Thumbing his nose
The MCAS has a staunch opponent, at least when it comes to the use of the test as a graduation requirement. His name is Martin Thrope, he's on the Arlington (MA) School Committee, and he's asking the other board members to go ahead and give diplomas to students who fail the MCAS, yet fulfill all the other graduation requirements:
[Mr. Thrope] was a leader in the fight against the MCAS exam as a sole graduation requirement and has spoken out against the idea for the past three years. The exam tests students in core curriculum and the State Department of Education has made passing the MCAS a graduation requirement. The decision has angered local school authorities, who say the department has no legal ground.
Thrope's motion read: "Resolved that the Arlington School Committee will continue to award diplomas to all students who meet local performance standards based upon multiple assessments as indicated in the Education Reform Act of 1993."
As always, my standard question about this dilemma is: Why are students fulfilling every other requirement, yet failing to pass the MCAS? The article mentions that Arlington may have only one or two students who fit this description, yet you usually find this sort of exit-exam opposition only when many students are affected by it.
Good thing they're going after the really dangerous people
If you're a hapless kid who takes Mom's calculator to school, only to discover that it includes little mini-tools like a 2-inch knife, you get suspended for 10 days. But if you're an education union member, it's perfectly okay to disguise yourself with a paper bag in order to punch out the Education Minister. At least, the people involved obviously thought so before the assault (thanks to the Opinion Journal's Best of the Web for both of these stories).
More about the SAT additions
A while back, Joanne Jacobs and I both commented on a study about a new addition to the SAT (scroll down to the entry "New revised SAT passes the test" on this page for my comments). Both of us felt that the results from a preliminary study were encouraging, but I didn't have time really think about the issue before I posted my little blurb on it.
Luckily, psychometricians who have much larger brains than mine read this blog, and one of them emailed me to say a few things. His comments were so good that I asked if I could post them on my blog, and he said he'd be honored. The honor is all mine.
So, here's "Bob M., a very well-known and respected psychometrician", and his take on the new SAT. Go read the original article above if you haven't already, and then take a look at this:
The way to think about a news story like this is the way you think about a lab experiment in which a certain compound reduces tumors in mice. It's good, it adds to knowledge in the right direction, and many lifesaving treatments started this way. But in medicine, many positive results at this stage don’t become widespread treatments for humans because there are many steps along the way where the approach may not pan out. Mice are different enough from people that effects for one species can be quite different from efforts for another. Mouse tumors are not identical to human tumors. Even when there are positive effects, a treatment can have serious negative effects as well. Some treatments work, but can't be manufactured or distributed effectively.
So too with a single form of an assessment that works well in a relatively small scale field trial. Assessments like this can prove valuable in research, instruction, clinical applications, and popular psychology uses. But here are four interconnected issues that would have to be resolved for this test to become useful at the scale, and with the consequences, of the SAT:
1. Multiple tasks need to be mass produced. You can't give the same cartoons to caption, or pose the same decision making scenarios, over and over again indefinitely in a high-stakes assessment. Do you understand the underlying demands of the tasks well enough to generate an infinite series of them, each unique yet all getting at the same basic knowledge or skill in comparable ways?
2. Responses need to be mass evaluated. Cost is one issue, but it can be addressed. Tougher is attaining and maintaining accuracy, and comparability over time and across different tasks. This too is possible. An example is Advanced Placement history essays. There are different topics every year, but there is enough structural similarity in the kinds of things they ask students to do that the rating procedures are essentially the same over time. They require only tailoring to the specifics of each topic. Can this be accomplished for a new task type?
3. High-stakes tests are win-lose games. Be assured that the instant a new test comes on line in a program such as the SAT that both coaching schools and cheaters will be gaming the system. (The first is appropriate, legal, and to the good. The second is like figuring out how to get free candy from the new snack machine.) The old joke is that of all the ways to get higher scores, actually learning more is the hardest. The way that a single form of a new and unfamiliar test works can be quite different than the way a well-known and highly scrutinized test works in a high-stakes environment. The best tests are the ones for which concerted efforts to score high lead to learning worthwhile things along the way! Can the multiple forms and evaluation standards provide useful information despite rigorous analyses of how they are built and scored?
4. Students from all over the world take tests like the SAT. Are items that are hard, hard for everyone for the right reasons? Both providing captions for cartoons and suggesting actions in realistic scenarios lean more heavily on cultural knowledge than do tests of algebraic reasoning and sentence comprehension. A high stakes test has to be bulletproof nowadays (properly so) against sources of difficulty that are not what the test is aimed at measuring.
I am very thankful for Bob's comments here, and I hope you've enjoyed reading them. Also, I'm particularly chagrined at not catching the cultural issues that he refers to in point #4. I don't see how writing cartoon captions could not be extremely culturally-dependent, which subverts the purpose of the SAT for college admissions when applicants come from outside the US.
A glimpse of the dark side
Laura, who's one of my most loyal readers (and commentators), found this little snippet of yucky news. A trouble school in Memphis was showing stellar improvement, so it seemed - until it was discovered that the principal had been cheating. Over 15% of the students were not allowed to test, monitors were banned, and the answer sheets were doctored. I was seeing red about this story anyway, and then I focused on these two statements:
Educators say the case illustrates the dark side of the nation's intense focus on school test scores....
Some observers say they aren't surprised administrators and teachers are driven to cook their numbers. "The pressure being put on schools is unreasonable," said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, a national organization critical of standardized testing.
Excuse me, but why can't this story be seen as an illustration of the dark side of the kinds of educators and principals that education departments are producing and schools are hiring these days? That principal cheated every one of those students by doctoring the results - but we're not supposed to realize that this reflects badly on the principal, and on the education program from which she graduated? Instead, we're just suppose to buy the "we're all victims" line and feel sorry for those in charge of the school? I don't. I feel sorry for the children under their command.
Testing and other various irrelevancies
Sooooo....I really feel I should get back to blogging. I should be ready to tear apart some anti-testing screeds and make fun of yet more zero-tolerance lunacies. However, I have this strange mix of spring fever, home ownership, and general anxiety about the state of the world going on. It's finally warming up outside, and all the snow has melted, but the increased sunlight seems to be negatively affecting my sleep (that happened when I visited Finland last summer, by the way). The wallpaper has been conquered, but now I am messing about with huge drum sanders, caulk, and spackle.
Most importantly, it's hard to feel as though this blog is, you know, relevant, when I consider that President Bush will be delivering an ultimatum at 8 pm tonight, meaning war is imminent. I've tried to keep the focus of this blog on standardized testing, but what do I say when my primary topic is so far from the minds of most Americans, including mine? I'm reading the political news and the CNN and FoxNews updates just like the rest of you. Not even the president is concerned with the No Child Left Behind Act right now, so how useful is this blog, anyway?
That much said, I've found a few things I'd like to post, but it's difficult getting back into the testing groove.
Still struggling
Hi, I'm still alive - but the wallpaper is still kicking my tail. And Yahoo is still eating messages. If you're the person who sent a really nice email in which you praise my blog and vent a bit about the opposition to standardized testing, and then said you knew you were "just preaching to the choir", I really appreciate your email - but it's gone now and I can't reply! I also can't remember your last name (although it might be Bullock). Many apologies.
I hope to be up and blogging next week. Thanks for your patience.
Snafus galore
Sigh. I'm so sore from scraping off wallpaper and pulling up carpet. Sometimes, my naivete surprises me. I thought that, as long as a house wasn't a "fixer-upper", large amounts of work would not be required to make it presentable (in my eyes). Obviously, I was wrong. So, so wrong. I'm convinced the previous owners slapped the wallpaper on with epoxy, and no one bothered to cover the nice hardwood floor with a tarp before painting the walls pepto-bismol pink. I might as well dump my boyfriend and marry someone who works at Home Depot; that's where I'm going to be spending all my spare time anyway.
So blogging will be intermittent. To add insult to injury, my Yahoo mail is futzing around and eating messages. If you sent an email to me over the weekend with a suggested article for me to read/blog, could you please resend it? Thanks.
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A call for more competitive vouchers
This appeared in my inbox today, from the Bill Evers mailing list; it's also available here on Fox News:
Now that the Supreme Court has said that religious schools can cash tuition vouchers, people who want better schools should demand more than limited versions of school choice.
Genuine competition is our best hope for a better K-12 education system. The potential rivalry that results from limited programs is not enough to foster a competitive education marketplace. In a truly competitive setting, public and private schools would compete equally for customers. The government wouldn't favor public schools over privately run schools. Existing school choice programs provide public school users much more funding than private school users. And only a small fraction of families are eligible. The Milwaukee program, for instance, allows vouchers no larger than $5783. But the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) spend $10,228 per pupil. Families cannot supplement voucher funds with their own money-a form of price control. Only low-income families can participate, and no more than 15 percent of MPS enrollment.
What follows is an eloquent, economically-based arguement for expanding the voucher programs. Who could be opposed to more choice for parents and the freedom to supplement vouchers with their own hard-earned money? Who do you think?
Slanting the numbers
As Media Minded puts it, "John Rosenberg of Discriminations has been reading his Washington Post closely," and John takes apart a story on the University of Virginia that plays fast-and-loose with the graduation rate numbers:
[the article] presented numbers from the University of Virginia in such a way as to suggest that, at least at UVa, Williams' warning [that blacks should avoid attending colleges where their SAT scores were more than 200 points below the average] was inappropriate. In fact, the way it presented the numbers was inappropriate.
It said that at UVa black SAT scores lag some 200 points below the average of "the entire entering class." Obviously, then, they lag more than 200 points behind the average of entering whites and Asians, which is the more relevant comparison.
Similarly, it said that the black graduation rate within six years was 83.3 percent "compared with 92.1 percent for the class." Again, the relevant comparison is not to the entire class, which includes them; it is to the graduation rate for students admitted without preferences.
It said that UVa's black graduation rate is "high," presumably because 80 sounds close to 90...it would be equally true to say that the rate at which blacks fail to graduate is also "high," more than twice that of whites and Asians. (Roughly 10% of whites/Asians fail to graduate after six years; roughly 20% of blacks fail to do so.
Nice to see someone else paying attention to the numbers out there.
Back in the saddle again
Howdy, folks. Sorry for the extended absence. Things with the house are going smoothly but require a lot of my time. Hopefully I'll soon be back on a blogging schedule again.
Quick hits:
Two good "diversity"-related articles at today's Jewish World Review - Burt Prelutsky writes about the folly of assuming that only skin color provides diversity, and Thomas Sowell points out the hypocrisy of Californians who cry racism whenever Republican policies disadvantage blacks, but see no problem when their own "open space" laws have the same effect.
Great Moments in Zero Tolerance: A six-year-old Ohio student takes a plastic bread knife from the cafeteria, and receives a 10-day suspension for being in possession of a "weapon." Meanwhile, a teacher in North Dakota makes "an honest mistake" in bringing a loaded gun to campus in a gym bag - and apparently receives no punishment from school administrators, although misdemeanor charges will "in all likelihood" be filed later in the week.
A Michigan middle-school math teacher learns the hard way that phoning in a bomb threat to the school is not an effective way to gain a free day off. Can't we put that sort of question somewhere on a standardized test for teachers?
The real meaning of "special education" - you can't be expelled from these classes. Not even if you attack the teachers and other students. Ten days of suspension is the cap on punishment.
The pro-America contingent on college campuses is emerging. They're prepared to do battle with campus liberals and speech-code enforcers, as well they should be. As this story from NC State demonstrates, speech is only "free" if it parrots the party line. Otherwise, censorship and litigation are the only proper responses.
Yesterday afternoon, Philadelphia students cut class to hold a anti-war demonstration at City Hall. One group of enterprising "peace activists" even handcuffed themselves to the doors of the Armed Forces Recruiting Center, which explains all those helicopters I saw hovering above the city. That's right, folks. Students of a public school system so bad that it's been partially privatized cut class to demonstrate their complete ignorance of U.S. foreign policy and international politics. They don't protest their crappy school buildings and idiotic teachers, but they'll fight for appeasement of tyrants. They chained themselves to the door of a center that recruits men and women strong and smart and brave enough to go fight (anonymously) for our freedom far away from the relative safety of Philadelphia - in my mind this only emphasizes the shallow, attention-seeking yet cowardly natures of the protestors. School administrators say they urged youngsters not to cut class. I think the only appropriate punishment is mandatory summer classes on U.S. History, with special emphasis on the times - such as the freeing of slaves during the Civil War - when war was the answer.
Hi, y'all. Blogging is temporarily suspended while I get things figured out with my new home. I closed on the house this past weekend, and have been busy doing things like tearing down wallpaper and paying large sums of money to get the oil tank filled up. If we're going to go to war just to take over oil fields, as the "peace" protestors keep saying, I wish we'd hurry up and do it so that it doesn't cost me a hundred bucks every month just to heat my place.
Blogging should resume as normal tomorrow or Wednesday. Thanks for your patience.
Update: Okay, I lied. I don't have time for much commentary, but here's what you should read today:
The always-superb Thomas Sowell has a great article on the bogus mantra of "relevance" in modern education. He nicely sums up the futility and counter-productivity of attempting to teach children only that which is "relevant" to them. As he rightly notes, if all classes for poor minority students must be made "relevant" to them (see ethnomathematics), how will those students ever learn to function in a different environment?
And here's Joanne Jacob's weekly summary of educational follies, including a blurb on ethnomathematics.
Here's central planning and racial politics at its worst - students are being bused away from schools with plenty of room for them because no more than 42% of the school population can be black. So, new schools were built with taxpayer money in minority neighborhoods, but the kids in those neighborhoods have to be bused to schools further away, to force the new school population to be more white. Who thought up this insulting travesty of a rule? Why, the NAACP.
Daryl Cobranchi found this positive article about homeschoolers in Pennsylvania.
If you haven't read the bilingual blog of The Dissident Frogman, you must. Equal parts profane satire and blunt seriousness, this renegade Frenchman writes unapologetically pro-American screeds and spends many creative moments with Java and Photoshop. Click on the banner at the top of the page (under the header graphic) to see a brutal applet about the price of the "peace" that the protestors desire. It's not for the squeamish.
Finally, Sarah Bunting of TomatoNation.com always makes me laugh. Her most recent piece is about a charity spelling bee that she entered with her family - her very sarcastic, very competitive family.