Number 2 Pencil

Happy Birthday to me

Okay, well, it's not quite my birthday yet. My birthday isn't until tomorrow, October 1st - but I'm swamped with work, and will be in a research seminar all day tomorrow, with two presentations that I've yet to polish. So I probably won't be posting any more today, and I'm definitely not going to be posting tomorrow. All my spare time will be used to boil, scrape, and scour clean in the inside of my house, because my parents are arriving for a visit on Thursday. Oh, sure, my mom said don't bother to clean - like I really believe that.

Anyway, after the hell week I've had last week, I've had virtually no time to reflect on turning 35. In fact, now that I'm driving around with a still-smashed-up car and drinking ulcer medicine four times a week, it's tempting to whine and complain that 35 already sucks. But I should be grateful and count my many blessings, and appreciate my health while it's still in a condition that repair is possible. The car, I'm not so sure about.

Now that I think about it, I feel much, much older than when I started this blog, but in a good way. Perhaps "wiser", or "more accomplished", is the more appropriate term than just plain "older." In February of last year, I was convinced of several things:

1. I'd never be able to afford to settle down and buy a house
2. I'd never find a job in Philly that I liked; if I did, I wouldn't be qualified for it
3. I'd never find the perfect guy for me; the only guy I thought was perfect wasn't interested in me and never had been
4. I'd have a hard time finding new friends in the area

and

5. No one other than my friends would ever read this blog

Happily, I can reassure my turning-older self that in the past 19 months, I've been proven wrong on each and every one of these. So, if you feel like sending birthday wishes my way *coughAmazonwishlistcough* feel free to drop me a line *coughAmazonwishlistcough* or send me an eCard *coughAmazonwishlistcough* or express your birthday wishes in any way you see fit *coughAmazonwishlistcough*. Not that I'm fishing for anything.

Zero tolerance for untucked shirts

A school in Dallas, TX, is over-the-top in the zero tolerance department. The new dress code is being strictly enforced, to the point where an untucked shirt guarantees a student a suspension:

Teresa Montgomery said she was enraged when her straight-A student called her in tears telling her she was going to be suspended. "She is not a problem child; she's never been in trouble," Montgomery said.

Administrators say dress code violations are more routine at the beginning of the school year, as students test the limits.

Or, as students slowly start to realize that utterly unintentional, innocuous acts are going to be punished severely. Over 700 students have been suspended in two months thanks to this draconian punishment system. And this improves the atmosphere of the high school how?

Of more than a dozen districts contacted by The Dallas Morning News, none suspend students for dress code violations unless they become disciplinary problems.

Terry Barnard, a Duncanville school board member, said the board asked administrators over the summer to tighten dress code enforcement after years of complaints that students were breaking the rules with no consequences.

Oookay. So they go all the way over into serious consequences for an untucked shirt. This is as absurd as no consequences. There's an argument to be made for dress codes; there's no argument to be made for scaring 13-year-olds into compliance with a set of standards so rigorous that teachers would not necessarily be able to comply with them.

It boggles the mind to think that the school is comfortable with giving teachers authority to suspend a student over an unintentional dress code violation, but doesn't trust those same teachers to simply tell students to tuck in their shirts, and make it stick. If the kid says no, or talks back, then the teacher can start to consider discliplinary options. Until then, just help the kids correct their clothing errors (are they going to start suspending girls for runs in their stockings too?) and get them to class on time.

Toys for iraqi children.

Bloggers Dean Esmay, Donald Sensing, and Chief Wiggles have organized an Iraqi Toy Drive for the youth of Iraq. The details are here. Be sure to read the comments for lots of good suggestions about inexpensive toys that will be suitable for Iraq's kids, and make sure you use the most recent mailing address for them (you're shipping the goods to Chief Wiggles at an APO address, so you're not paying for postage to Iraq).

I think I'll be hitting my local dollar store today to stock up on crayons and drawing paper, and I urge the rest of you to do the same. Or, there's always the option of visiting the Oriental Trading Company, which has loads of great stuff, and they will ship to an APO box. And don't miss the heartfelt review of the toy drive (and the condemnation of those who would oppose it) over at A Small Victory.

The lawsuit rodeo in dallas, texas

An education activist in Dallas is suing his local school district in an attempt to force them to release the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) results, among others, at the classroom level. Activist Russell Fish believes these results will show the public how well - or how poorly - certain instructors are teaching. The school district, which vehemently opposes releasing scores, claims that to do so would violate student privacy. Interestingly, Mr. Fish has the NAACP on his side:

Legal experts say that if Mr. Fish's suit is successful, it could be used as a precedent to open up performance data on teachers all over the state.

Mr. Fish, 50, is a retired electrical engineer and volunteer tutor. He also calls himself an "education activist." He says he has been using school district computer records to track public education in Texas for more than a decade...

Mr. Fish claims that the school district fears public knowledge of teacher quality. He also claims that the district's charge that students can be identified from the data is bunkum (and I have a tendency to agree, if the data are released with identifiers rather than names). Teachers, on the other hand, are legally able to be put in the spotlight, according to Mr. Fish's counsel.

What data are we talking about here? The Value-Added Teacher Assessment (usually called VAT), in which teachers are linked with test-score gains made by their students over some time period, usually a couple of years. The theory behind VAT is the opposite of what our hapless Mr. Alford claimed yesterday; VAT states that teacher quality is the critical variable in student educational gains, with race, SES, gender, and so on falling a distant second in the amount of impact.

The article gives a good description of VAT, so I won't go into all of it here. Suffice it to say that schools intended the data to be seen only by administrators and the teachers involved, for the purpose of "internal discussions." Texas releases a lot of other state-, district-, and school-level data, but has traditionally drawn the line at teacher-level data:

The thought of holding teachers publicly accountable for their own classroom test scores summons up a variety of fears among critics who say public schools already place too much emphasis on high-stakes testing. They argue that many variables other than "teacher quality" intrude on test scores and that it's unfair to focus so much attention on the instructor.

"If you are going to publish teacher rankings, then also publish the heroics and beautiful things that teachers do to ennoble our youngsters," said Dr. Erika Karres, an education consultant and former teacher in New York. "You can't consider teachers and students as machines that you can gauge by an input-output industrial model."

Dr. Karres doth protest too much. We know that teachers are more than their test scores; on the other hand, a teacher whose "heroics" leaves students lagging behind when it comes to performance on objective measures is not doing his or her students any favors, no matter how "beautifully" they may be doing it.

The district and Mr. Fish wholeheartedly agree that a couple of years of ineffective teaching can have devastating effects on a child's school performance. Where they part ways is in the decision to hold that knowledge confidential, or release it to the public. Be interesting to see how this turns out.

Mr. Fish has a theory. He says public education used to be "a sacred trust" run by very smart women whose career opportunities were limited to teaching, nursing and a few other professions. "They firmly believed in their bones that they had been placed on earth to impart knowledge to boys and girls," he says.

Clayton Trotter, Mr. Fish's attorney...argues that even-handed public policy should require teachers to be treated the same as police officers, firefighters and other publicly funded professionals whose personnel records are mostly classified as open records. In Texas, state law specifically prohibits public disclosure of a teacher's annual performance review.

Homeschoolers shine at National Merit time

More and more homeschooling kids are making into the elite group known as National Merit Scholars each year, and even those who were once skeptics about homeschooling are starting to be convinced:

The number [of homeschooled students] awarded National Merit Scholarships, the top prize, has jumped by more than 500 percent since 1995, from 21 to 129.

Many parents in this unconventional group embrace convention, when it comes to standardized tests -- to prove to doubting relatives, neighbors and friends they haven't gone off the deep end.

It's a shame that homeschooling parents feel the need to convince others that they haven't gone off the deep end - but I'm glad the tests are there to help them convince others of the power of home-based instruction.

A success story at a challenging school

Van Esselt Elementary School in Washington State has become a NCLB "success story," despite the challenges posed by a student body with 80% below the poverty line, and most of which speak English as a second language. Principal Hajara Rahim has struggled for nine years to help raise the educational quality of the school, and she seems to have done a great job of it:

Van Asselt is the kind of school that educators call "challenging."

As part of the improvement effort, Rahim said, the school also began tracking its students more carefully, assessing their skills with tests at the beginning of the school year, in the middle and at the end, which allows teachers to tailor lessons more effectively...They coordinated the after-school program to reinforce the school-day instruction. They emphasized homework, in some cases recruiting members of the community to help students whose parents are illiterate in English.

The result? Math proficiency scores at Van Asselt, as measured by the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), have nearly doubled in just two years. Just amazing.

ba ha ha ha!

This has nothing to do with testing, but it tickles me so to see an identity thief get what he deserves. I just had to post it.

The relationship between social studies and voting

The Opinion Journal links decreasing voter participation to the dire state of public school social studies education these days. The theory is that dumbed-down social studies education, which is so "tailored" that kids often don't learn about anything not directly related to them, has resulted in a new "standard":

The percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted fell to 32% in 1996 and 2000, from 50% in 1972. A study in 2000 found that only 28.1% of college freshman kept up to date with politics, a record low and down from 60.3% in 1966. "The current generation of young people may set a new standard for both civic disengagement and civic misinformation," writes J. Martin Rochester in his Fordham essay.

When I was in college (late 1980's), I remember waiting for my boyfriend so he could cast his vote for Michael Dukakis. I didn't cast a vote, mainly because I had very little idea what was going on with either candidate. By graduate school, I was watching the debates, but nothing about either candidate seemed to affect me to the point where I felt the need to vote in either '92 or '96.

Now, of course, it's a different story for me, thanks in no small part to the blogosphere (and September 11th, and the fact that I pay taxes, and etc). So how can we get the bloggers to invigorate political education? Some college courses require students to survey blogs; I think that needs to be pushed down to the high school level as well.

One educrat speaks his mind

Edublather extraordinaire from Hal Alford at the Verde Valley Online new site:

There is considerable controversy surrounding the federal "No Child Left Behind Act" because the law is based almost solely on competency testing...

While a single-test assessment system may be well intentioned, the practice seems to violate many fundamental psychometric, pedagogical, and ethical principles and standards of the education profession and may be harming rather than helping many children. The testing practice can be especially damaging to children of poverty who lack the supports and assets that are available to children elsewhere. It should be no surprise that most of the 276 schools identified as "underperforming" for the 2002 school year, were from schools located in economically distressed areas.

It is no surprise, because many of those schools are in fact "underperforming," and are shortchanging their students of an education. The whole point of NCLB was to refuse to allow loopholes for schools that don't use the money they have to educate children as well and as efficiently as possible. If the tests were removed, these schools would still be underperforming; we just wouldn't have objective evidence of it. These results are a validation of the testing program, not a criticism of it.

Characterizing schools as "underperforming," as the Arizona State Department of Education has done, publicly embarrasses and stigmatizes children and entire communities. Should a school under perform according to test results for a second consecutive year; they are classified as "failing." The law requires that "failing" schools take corrective steps, such as replacing the principal and allowing parents to send their children to other schools. This becomes costly and creates chaos for already beleaguered schools.

Oh, how sad. Much better that an inefficent principal remain in place. Much better that parents be forced to keep their children in bad schools, with no input other than their tax money. How dare they want the same choice that more financially-gifted parents have? If schools are so already-beleaguered, why should parents be forced to stay and support them?

Due to external pressures on schools to perform well on the tests, educators are reluctantly but invariably gearing their curricula to "teach to the test," a practice that undermines the teaching and learning process and negatively affects teacher and student morale.

I've said enough about "teaching to the test" before, so I won't go into all that again, but let me just point out that the test in question is AIMS, Arizona's Instrument for Measuring Success, and it measures only reading, writing, and arithmetic. Try as I might to go the distance with these testing critics (and I admit I don't try too hard), I just can't get worked up about teachers being forced to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic in an timely manner.

Are they doing so in Arizona? Doesn't yet seem like it. Here's a sample high-school level reading test. The readability of items on this form can range anywhere from fifth-grade on up, even though it's 10-, 11th-, and 12th-graders who take this exam. Note that the two sample items are a technical manual and a weather map. Then go to this document, scroll to page 7, and note that only 62% of 10th-graders, 42% of 11th-graders, and 32% of 12th-graders met expectations on this reading exam.

Granted, the 11th- and 12th-graders who took the exam were either new students or previous flunkers, but those results are still wretched. Some Arizona teachers have a much worse problem than morale; they're also incompetent.

...The tests are almost exclusively focused on math, reading and writing and ignore other important areas of learning such as art, science and social studies.

Which are all just oh-so-useful to kids who haven't mastered reading yet. It's admirable that Hal wants schools to focus on science, but when kids haven't mastered reading weather maps, I'd say they're not quite ready to start learning meteorology yet.

The tests fail to account for individual learning styles and developmental capacities, and they ignore state-of-the art research on multiple intelligences, including emotional intelligence. The emphasis on testing is certain to leave many children behind feeling discouraged and less confident about their ability to learn.

Gak, choke, urk.... *chugs Maalox* Ahhh. That's better. I really should be more careful about reading such piteously weeny edublather, at least while I still have these ulcers. My gag reflex is more sensitive than it used to be.

But seriously, while I hate to beat a dead horse, almost 40% of the 10th-graders flunked the basic reading comprehension part of the AIMS, and the math results are worse - MUCH worse. And Hal is worried about their emotional intelligence? Can these kids spell "emotional?" Can they count the number of letters in the word? Hal's emotional senses sure seems to be working overtime here in his concern for these kids. While some kids might indeed be "harmed" by tests, my guess is that those who haven't bought into the educrat theory that EI is more important than reading or math skills will come away relatively unscathed.

It worries me that Hal deliberately chooses to say that kids, rather than being discouraged about what they've learned, are instead going to discouraged about "their ability to learn." Please tell me he's not going where he's going with this...

The single-test assessment system discriminates against visually and linguistically limited learners who might otherwise be uniquely talented. History is full of examples of famous individuals who were said to have learning disabilities such as Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, and Albert Einstein. One can only wonder how they would have performed on standardized tests?

Yep, that's where he was going - the sacred space of learning disabilities.

All of you LD advocates who insist that Albert Einstein was learning disabled can just. Stop. It. Now. This claim, invented by LD advocates and repeated by gullible educrats, has been disproven by Einstein's biographers. Einstein was a quiet youngster, to be sure, but was a wonderful student from day one and was reading physics books by age 12. The only tests he ever flunked were ones he didn't bother to study for. He was not dyslexic. He would have been bored out of his gourd by the AIMS, I'm sure, but if he'd shown up for it he would have passed it.

What is it with LD advocates and these great history figures? All three of the great men mentioned above have been "diagnosed" with learning disabilities well after the fact, by those who have a political axe to grind. Was Winston Churchill learning disabled? Even the sketchiest biography mentions that he was shy and had a speech impediment, but notes that as soon as he discovered his passion (the military), he was a whiz-bang student. Does this mean we should conclude that all LD students are just bored, and goad them to work harder? Or should we follow Winston's example and send them all to military school?

The practice of wholesale versus individualized testing is also psychometrically unsound and it violates the ethical codes of professions whose members have been principally responsible for the evolution of the testing movement, such as the American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. The standards of these professions remind practitioners that assessment should be highly individualized and that educational and counseling decisions should never be based on single test scores alone.

Buried within this mound of edublather is this, the one valid criticism of testing in this article. I've written about this before. Note that the AERA qualifies its own claim, though, by saying that if only one test score is used for a high-stakes decision, there should be ample validity evidence, and the students should be allowed multiple chances to pass, and given remedial education if they fail. For example, all schools that use exit exams follow these rules, and they often provide alternatives (or loopholes) for students who don't pass the exit exam. What Hal wants you to believe is that the AERA's own statements forbid the use of standardized exams in high-stakes situations, which is not true.

Most importantly, the results of any test must be interpreted in light of many other factors including gender, age, race, ethnicity, disability, language acquisition, and socioeconomic status.

The document that Hal is allegedly getting this from is the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, and I've got my copy right here. The standards state quite clearly that:

* Overall passing rates need not be comparable across groups for a test to be considered fair
* Validity evidence should be presented for all subgroups
* Differential item functioning should be examined for all subgroups
* The test items should be examined for biased or offensive content
* Mean group differences should be investigated to ensure that the differences are not due to contruct-irrelevant skills
* Separate prediction lines should be used if the test is found to have differing predictive validity for different subgroups.

This is all from the section on "Fairness in Testing and Test Use." Note what Hal didn't mention in his "summary" of these standards? He doesn't mention that group mean differences are not in and of themselves unfair, and that if all validity and correlational evidence suggests it, it's perfectly okay to hold both Group A and Group B to the same passing score, even if the result is that 20% of Group A flunks while 80% of Group B does. No demographic information about the two groups is a priori of importance.

It's simply not true that the test results must be interpreted in light of gender, race, etc. Not if the test has been found to be unbiased. It shouldn't be assumed that the test is biased without empirical evidence, either.

[Devoted Reader Laura points out that students with organic disabilities who are unable to progress beyond a certain point, such as those with Down's Syndrome, should not be held to the same testing standards as other students. I agree, but I understand why NCLB demands that schools test these students. It's to discourage the schools from fudging their averages by placing non-disabled students into special education. There's a solution here that takes care of both problems, but I don't know what it is.

The Guidelines do note that test developers should make exceptions for disabled students, and this is the only group that is singled out for special treatment. But my comments above still hold for when Group A and Group B differ in a way that is not being directly measured by the educational assessment, such as race, sex, income level, etc. There's no reason to label a test as automatically unfair if fewer female students pass it, or fewer Hispanic students pass it, or fewer poor students pass it.]

Many empirical studies have shown that there are strong correlations between test scores and such factors as family income, education of parents, single-parent families, and school enrollment. Simply put, children who have two educated parents who are economically secure are much more likely to do better on tests than children who do not have the same assets.

And they're likely to do better in school; they're less likely to have run-ins with the law; they're more likely to have better health, and to go on to college, and to do well in life. This is a statement that supports marriage, not one that invalidates testing. Every measure of academic achievement correlates positively with family income and parental education; that's not a reason to believe those measures aren't assessing a valid construct. Grades correlate with income, too; does Hal believe we should abolish those?

This is the same old tired argument that, "It's just not fair that some kids have more advantages than others." Ironically, it's being used here as an argument against an act that is trying to ensure that kids from poor homes still get a good education in school.

Or, put another way, one can predict with astoundingly high probability that children from neighborhoods of poverty, many of whom are children of ethnic minority, will achieve poorer results on the tests than their affluent counterparts, irrespective of the quality of teaching.

But it's not irrespective of teaching, you see. These kids are more likely to go to bad schools, but if they come from poor homes or uneducated parents, they're more dependent on those schools for everything they learn. And those schools are less likely to hire good teachers and less likely to hang on to the ones they have. The good schools that don't buy this argument - the schools with outstanding achievement despite high levels of minority or lower-income enrollment - do so, in part, by relying heavily on testing. They don't tolerate poor test scores any more than they tolerate bad teaching.

It is for this reason that the National Association for Multicultural Education called for an end to the misuse of standardized and state mandated testing because it only creates more barriers to equal opportunity for large numbers of Americans.

Not true. The barriers are already there. A kid who can't read a weather map in 11th grade is at a disadvantage whether we test that or not. The tests are not the barriers. They're showing us which schools are the barriers. And when this many people are steamed about them, I know the tests are showing us something we should be looking at.

Assessment results should be interpreted only in relation to other behavioral data and the socioeconomic and cultural background of learners. They should take into consideration the diverse learning style and varying developmental capacities of all children. The best kind of assessment is ongoing, within each classroom, and geared toward teaching each child better in terms of his/her genuine needs.

Not true. This kind of claptrap is what allows educrats to believe that it's okay if a child of a certain "cultural background" can't read at grade level, or that "diverse learning styles" are what prevent well over half of Arizona's 8th-graders from passing the math portion of the AIMS. Good teachers instinctively tailor their approach for individual students, and to use tailored teaching as an excuse for letting kids flunk is an insult to their intelligence, and to ours.

You know, Hal is a retired principal. His school, Mingus Union High, seemed to do okay, despite a nauseatingly PC mission statement. This report card even brags about the high number of Flinn Foundation Scholars they've produced (which are chosen, in part, on SAT scores). But the school recieved only a "Maintaining Performance" rating this past year. Could that be the ultimate cause of this outpouring of seemingly-well-intentioned yet sadly-misinformed testing criticism?

Testing vocational students

Should vocational students who fail the MCAS nevertheless be allowed to graduate? Some advocates think so and, along with groups such as the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrator, have filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts:

Even as vocational schools improve their scores and reduce failures to the single digits, advocates hope to change the law through the courts so that tech students are evaluated as much or more on their trade skills than on MCAS.

Lyons supports a class-action lawsuit that would allow schools to graduate vocational students who fail MCAS provided they demonstrate proficiency in their trade. Such students would be presented with a "certificate of occupational proficiency."

On the one hand, the vocational schools claim that their students are learning a trade, and thus deserve an exemption. To me, that claim carries more weight than their second reason, which is that the MCAS is "unfair" to votech schools because such schools have more "low-income and special-needs students." The lower-income students, at least, are the ones who are most in need of education and were the students in mind when NCLB was implemented. Wouldn't the MCAS serve at least as a reminder to vocational schools that, in this day and age, a student with a shoddy education in math and English is going to be at a disadvantage even if the student is good with his hands, or has learned a specific trade?

Some schools seem to have taken up the challenge and devote more time to academics (and to MCAS prep):

At Shawsheen, 300 students took the test last spring, 88 of whom are considered of special needs. Yet their proficiency in English language arts jumped since last year from 34 to 54 percent while math proficiency more than doubled from 14 to 35. Meanwhile, failures declined from 13 to 4 percent in English and from 41 to 18 in math...

Voke students across the state improved in English and math and saw failure rates drop.

Another form of motivation

The schedule for students at Shelbyville Junior High (IL):
Practice, practice, practice.
Repitition, repitition, repitition.
Testing, testing, testing.
Balloons, balloons, balloons.

Informing the business crowd

The NCLB Act is "hard work," educators tell business leaders. Imagine that:

Superintendents for the Gainesville and Hall County school systems paired up Thursday to talk to area business leaders about the federal No Child Left Behind Act...

Standardized tests do "better at finding out what you can remember, (such as) dates and facts," Fordham said. "But when it comes to deeper understanding, they're not as good as they claim to be."

Actually, standardized tests can be as good as they claim to be for measuring "deeper understanding," if the items are well-written and the subject material is well-integrated. There are a few guidelines out there for writing good test items of this type; this manual, by Case and Swanson, is adaptable to many item types, is used in many item-writing workshops, and is considered to be somewhat of an industry standard. But that's a lecture for another day.

I'm not sure why this speech needed to be given to the Greater Hall Chamber of Commerce's board of directors. Perhaps some of you readers can enlighten me.

Assessing scientific knowledge in Massachusetts

The first science, technology, and engineering portion of the MCAS was administered to students in Massachusetts this past year, and the public schools hope to use the exam as a guide to curriculum changes:

While other students were taking Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests in English and math last spring, fifth- and eighth-grade students took the first science, technology and engineering exam, which will be a permanent fixture on the test schedule from now on...

The tests help to prepare students to take science MCAS tests in 10th grade, which will become a requirement for graduation in 2006. Subject-specific tests in biology, chemistry, physics and technology/engineering will be given to 10th-graders as a pilot program in 2004 and 2005, but scores count in 2006.

Here are the disclosed 2003 science test forms for Grade 5 and Grade 8, if you're interested. The multiple-choice items seem pretty straightforward, although the subject material covered is so broad that the items seem to really jump around in terms of content, from ecosystems to the earth's crust to biology to auto mechanics. Really - item 12 on the eighth-grade exam asks which car part belongs to its control system, and if the answer is not, "Fuel tank," then I feel really stupid. [Update: Reader Chris tactfully points out that the control system probably involves the steering wheel, not the fuel tank. I tell you, my days with no caffeine just keep getting better and better.]

The open-ended items seem a bit tougher. Students must list the necessary items and steps for conducting experiments, describe animal and plant cell functions, and describe wind patterns. Straightforward, but certainly not something the students can BS or fudge answers to, I would think. The 32% number for the proficient/advanced group, while not stellar, is about what I would expect from today's public school students.

Weary in Carolina

South Carolina's students are confounding the state's DOE; the students improved substantially on math but dropped at every level on English, according to the most recent Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT) scores. Right now, almost 30% of SC's students do not score at even the "basic" level in English/language arts, a drop of 4 percentage points, whereas math scores increased by 6 percentage points. Educators blame test fatigue for the decline:

Something happened (in English/language arts) that we can’t explain,” said Sandra Lindsay, deputy state superintendent. “We’re checking everything we can think of.”

“By that time, they were losing focus,” said Mini Johnson, a fourth grade teacher at Lewis Greenview Elementary in Columbia.

That's possible. Educators have moved the English portion to the beginning of next year's exam, and if their theory is correct, the decline in scores will not continue.

College roundup

Essayist extraordinaire Victor David Hansen is one of the featured authors in the National Review's new special on higher education. Yes, every other page is an ad, but it's worth reading (and the ads make me nostalgic for college days, which I didn't think was possible). The topics include the heavily-politicized college atmosphere, the impact of September 11th on campus discussions, and the controversies surrounding community service for college students.

-------------------

Are Georgia's college hopefuls not that motivated to do well on the SATs? That's the theory of Governor Sonny Purdue, who ultimately hopes to see the SATs required for the HOPE scholarship. Right now the scholarships require only a B average in core curriculum classwork, which allegedly has led to grade inflation in Georgia's schools. The interview with the governor is here. Controversial? What do you think?

The governor didn't suggest a minimum score. But he said even a low minimum SAT would help create an incentive for some students to do better on the exam.

"It would be devastating for minority students," said House Education Chairman Bob Holmes (D-Atlanta), a member of the HOPE study commission who is African-American. "Even the people at the College Board indicate you should not use this as a reflection of how well students will do in college."

That's interesting, given that the College Board markets the SAT as a method of indicating college readiness, to be used in combination with grades. I wasn't aware of any press release or research from the CB which stated that the SAT was not related to college performance.

And we're not really talking about high standards here. One suggested SAT cutpoint for the HOPE is a score of 1000, which is an average score nationwide, but above Georgia's average of 984 (the lowest in the nation). That requirement would have disqualified almost one-third of the HOPE scholars in 2000 - and remember, these are kids with B averages in high school. Luckily, Governor Perdue has faith in his students and doesn't expect minority scholarship offers to plummet if the SAT is included in the equation.

-------------------

Professorial gadfly Mike S. Adams is back with another column at Townhall.com. This time, he's written an open letter to UNC's Director of Diversity, in which he wonders why the new spirit of moral relativism and non-judgmentalism that's so prevalent on campus shouldn't be extended even further - say, to pedophiles?

-------------------

From AZCentral.com's College Guide, here's how to master tests without technically cheating. The suggestions, which are fantastically unimaginative (I mean, what student isn't going to try to buddy up on homework assignments or get copies of old tests these days?), reminded me of my experience as a TA for a legendary, tough old teacher in my graduate department.

This professor reused exams from year to year, but his exam questions were so monstrously esoteric and vague and broad and eccentric that you literally could not pass his exams unless you reviewed copies of previous exams, so that you'd have some idea of what you were in for. The items were unlike any that I'd seen on any other statistics exams, and it took people hours to finish these tests.

I took the course one year and TA'd it the next. When the time came to grade the first batch of exams, I asked the professor for the key, and he said there wasn't one. I was just to solve all the exam items on my own, and then check it against the class's work, and call him if there were any problems. It was like having to take the class all over again - but I admit, I really got a lot out of it the second time around.

-------------------

And finally, Slick Willie, otherwise known as former President William J. Clinton, has created a foundation to provide free test preparation services to Little Rock students. The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation is teaming up with the Princeton Review to fund a program forstudents who are headed for college and would like to take the SAT or ACT, but cannot afford any test preparation courses. Right now, Arkansans who take the SAT score above average on the exam - but they represent only 6% of Arkansas's graduating seniors.

Howdy

Hi, everyone. I'm at work and online but still feeling quite a bit under the weather. Of course, that could just be due to the lack of coffee, or the general lack of anything spicy, acid, peppy, or invigorating in my bloodstream. Hopefully, I can soon reintroduce caffeine, chocolate, and alcohol into my system; otherwise, life might not be worth living.

But I'm doing much better and hope to get a post or two up today.

Blurgh.

Tempting though it is to spill all the details of my oh-so-wonderful day, I'll just say that I spent the day in the ER, that I don't have GERD but instead esophageal ulcers brought on by another medication, and leave it at that. Blech.

So now I have all sorts of chalky medicine, and I'm eating like a very, very old person (did you know Ensure comes in flavors like butter pecan?), and hopefully everything will go down easily and stay down. I do feel better already, and it helped to have my boyfriend with me all day (and the doctor and nurses weren't bad, either). Hopefully I'll be back to normal in no time. Blogging should resume on Friday; Saturday at the latest.

today's schedule

Hello, everyone. I have lots of meetings today, but also a doctor's appointment to keep, because my GERD symptoms are so severe that I'm having a lot of trouble just getting around. I don't think my doctor will send me to the hospital right away for tests, but you never know.

I'll hopefully be blogging late this afternoon, but if you don't hear from me, I just wanted to give advance warning as to why that might be. I don't want to scare you guys (I'm not about to keel over on you), but I also don't want a possibly-long stretch of non-blogdom to go unexplained.

Do teddy bears get issued at orientation, too?

I was greatly amused by this article (found through WSJ's Best of the Web), which *giggle* reports that a total of four students have *snicker* fallen out of bunkbeds at a certain school, and this is a lot considering that school has just started, so *snurf* the school is going to insist on *teehee* guardrails being installed on beds that don't already have them.

How callous of me to poke fun at poor, injured students from some elementary boarding school, right? Think again. The school in question is the University of Buffalo:

Four University at Buffalo students have injured themselves falling or jumping out of bunk beds in the first month of school, an unusually high total that concerns school officials.

"...or jumping?" The hell? Jumping implies intent, in which case the administrators should invoke Darwin's theories and remove all guardrails at once. Perhaps the students jumped because they were late for class; perhaps they jumped because they were suicidal over having to take a statistics class this semester, and they were too lazy to drag their tails out to the nearest bridge.

Either way, why's the U of B administration got to be involved when adults choose to jump from a bunkbed? What's next, height markers on the walls in the manner of depth markers on pool perimeters?

In response, UB administrators are warning students to be careful when using the beds, and the school is ordering guardrails to install on all beds that don't already have them. The series of accidents is surprising to officials, who say UB typically receives one report a year of a student falling out of a bed.

You know, I did a lot of wild and stupid things in college. Things I won't write about here, because I know of at least one minor that reads this blog (Hi, J!). But I never did anything quite so wild as majorly hurting myself falling off a bunkbed, nor anything so stupid as reporting it to the college. I mean, seriously. Who tells their campus administrators that they fell out of bed?

"It's an unprecedented situation for us," said Joseph J. Krakowiak, director of UB's residence halls. The students who fell reported minor injuries - the most severe was a broken ankle - in incidents that took place over the past four weeks in UB residence halls, said Dennis R. Black, vice president for student affairs.

Okay, are they all fallers now? Or do we still think some of them were jumpers? Man, that suicidal one must be pissed about that broken ankle. And if that's the most severe injury, why were the other three reported at all?

There's no common thread among the accidents, Black said. In one case, for example, a sleeping student either heard a phone ringing or dreamed she heard a phone ringing and hurt herself when she jumped out of bed to answer it.

*mgphfhg* Okay, I will not laugh, I will not laugh...

In another, a student woke up one morning to find himself lying on the floor next to his loft bed and sporting a bloody lip, Black said. The student could only assume he fell out of bed but wasn't jarred awake.

*snortpdmhpgh* Okay, so he's a jumper AND he has blackouts. Or maybe he got the bloody lip somewhere else and just passed out on the floor?

Another student fell when she eschewed the bed's ladder and tried to climb down onto the top of a nearby desk.

Bahh hha hah hhah! I mean, come on. If she was the one with the broken ankle, then I feel bad for her, but surely it's not the college's responsibility to make sure that she comes down out of bed in the proper manner in the morning, is it? Suppose the guardrails were there and she just clambered over them to step onto the desk, and then subsequently slipped and fell after landing on a pencil? What's the college supposed to do then, lash students into bed at night and unstrap them in the mornings?

This last accident, though, given that it was in the morning, is the one most attributable to muleheaded stupidity, and least attributable to alcohol. I find it very interesting that this article doesn't even mention that most famous of balance/judgment destroyers until the verrrry end, nor does it report whether intoxication was related to any of these accidents - and we know it had to be. That guy on the floor with a black lip? Please. If his veins contained more red blood cells than Rolling Rock, I'd be surprised.

The loft beds in use at UB's dormitories typically aren't used as bunk beds in a traditional sense, with two students sleeping one above the other. Most often, the UB beds are raised as much as five feet off the ground so that students can fit storage boxes, a computer desk or a chair underneath.

So, five feet. Not that low to the ground. About nose- to chest-level with most students. You'd think that young adults smart enough to get into college would eye this distance and wonder if maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to plan on sleeping on the floor when inebriated, or to make sure to use the ladder that the school so thoughtfully provides.

The university sent an e-mail to students last week urging them to be careful in using their loft beds, particularly if they've consumed alcohol or used drugs or medication. The e-mail also asked students if they want a rail installed now or if they want their bed lowered to the floor.

Actually, considering how often college students engage in binge drinking, I'm sure there were more falls than were reported. During Pledge Week people were probably dropping like coconuts throughout the dorms. And it's not that I don't think guardrails would be a useful feature on beds placed that high. I just think it's ridiculous that the tone of this article, and the administrators' comments, seems to be that everything that happens inside a dorm room is U of B's fault, and that students just can't be expected to be responsible for their own choices, be they beer-drinking or ladder-avoiding ones.

Mississippi flunks in history

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has issued "flunking" reports to 23 states, including Mississippi, that were based on the "comprehensive historical content, sequential development, and balance in each state's history curriculum."

One professor says she's not surprised:

"Our state standards are very vague in terms of giving teachers guidance in what history content should be taught," said Mary Beth Farrell, a University of Southern Mississippi professor who supervises student teachers who teach social studies in grades 7-12.

"Usually, what happens with thematic approaches, the focus is not on history, but on themes," Porter said. "A cultural interaction theme might mention a few events while teaching culture ... It's not really teaching solid American history."

No, doesn't sound like it is. What on earth is a "cultural interaction theme," anyway? And why is that considered by educators to be a better way of learning history than learning facts, dates, and the chronological unfolding of events in the US or in the world?

These grades, by the way, are part of the recent Fordham Institute project, "Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies" that has been so much in the news lately. In case you're wondering, the six states that recieved A's in History are Alabama, Arizona, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York.

Pennsylvania, where I live, got almost the lowest possible score, and its standards begin with the claim that:

History...is a narrative—a story. In order to tell the story it is not sufficient
to simply recall facts; it is also necessary to understand the context of the time and place and to apply historical thinking skills.

However, the state then goes on to teach history in chronological fashion by grade, so that students don't study colonial history after 6th grade, and don't study much that happened after 1890 until they reach 10th grade. To further complicate things, the study of History is divided up into twenty somewhat arbitrary categories, and students study only small "thematic groupings" of people from long periods of time, so that the historical context and sense of time is lost.

Alabama, on the other hand, which got a very high score, begins teaching students about slavery and its legacy in the fourth-grade, going from the country's origins to the civil rights movement. In fifth and sixth grades, students cover much of the same material, much more thoroughly, and their studies again take them from colonial days to the present. Thus, the chronology of history is drilled into young Alabamians from the start, before they've even reached high-school level history.

And what was so bad about Mississippi's History standards? The Mississippi Social Studies Framework mission statement states that social studies is meant to "promote an understanding of the world, human interaction, cultural diversity," which apparently requires a lot of poster-making. And Mississippi also suffers from what seems to be part of the definition of a bad History program, which is to say that their program is organized in a thematic, rather than chronological, manner.

Also on the site, for you interested (or alarmed) parents, here are six questions to ask on the first night back at school. And don't miss the report, "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?"

Getting a head start on testing

Head Start, founded with the best of intentions, is a pre-school program that is supposed to rescue disadvantaged toddlers and help prepare them for schools. Problem is, according to the federal government, when Head Start youth enter the first grade, they still lag behind the other students, so the government wants to begin administering tests to these 4- and 5-year-olds.

Does that decision generate some controversy? Does the sun rise in the mornings?

The Head Start test is already drawing some of the same criticism as other standardized tests, such as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Critics say a more informal, year-round assessment that includes discussions with parents is a more valid way to assess preschoolers.

Others say the new test could stress out kids and pressure teachers to replace play activities with a more structured curriculum, narrowing the purpose of Head Start, established in 1965 for economically disadvantaged families.

The problem is, the efficicacy of Head Start seems to vary wildly depending on who's doing the talking, and what the speaker expects Head Start to be doing. The government seems to be concerned that Head Start is not bringing kids up to speed quickly enough on reading skills - but defenders of Head Start say that's not true:

Children who have graduated from Head Start are less likely to repeat a grade or require special education and more likely to graduate from high school, according to the Florida Children's Forum, a child advocacy group. Local Head Start directors in Florida point to the results of a broad state test that showed at least 80 percent of Head Start children having the motor, cognitive and language skills they needed to begin school, slightly more than their peers who were not in Head Start.

It seems to me that Head Start teachers and administrators don't want the government to determine how well children are progressing, which is an iffy stand to take, given that Head Start is a government program:

Head Start teachers have always charted the progress of their students, they say, but by their own methods - and without having to report their measurements to the government. Much like private preschool providers, they measure student performance by talking to parents, by observing students playing with other children and by observing their knowledge of the alphabet, shapes and numbers.

The suggested test, though, sounds rather innocuous (and is 20 minutes really too long to expect a four-year-old to concentrate? I wouldn't know). The real issue here seems to be that the government-based test measures only reading and math, while Head Start teachers believe that Head Start is designed to focus on social skills and fine motor skills.

So who's right? I don't know. It depends on what the focus of Head Start is, and whether the government is willing to incorporate research suggesting that basic standardized tests might not be the best way to assess preschoolers, or to assess whatever it is Head Start is supposed to accomplish. Perhaps some of you out there with more familiarity with this program can clue me in.

the voice of reason from northwest indiana

Grade inflation doesn't help anyone learn:

...In 1966, only 15% of college freshmen were averaging A's; In 1991, that number jumped to 24 percent. Grade inflation is very much a reality. Some believe it originated in the 1960s. As a result of the Vietnam War, college professors lowered standards to keep average or failing students out of the draft...

Many feel that colleges are no longer educational institutions, but businesses where the students are the "customers." According to John Leo, author of the 1993 U.S. News & World Report article "A for Effort. Or for Showing Up," "market forces" are to blame. "As tuition rises, so does grade inflation," he states. He makes a valid point; however, many are reluctant to make such an accusation...

Misunderstanding the meaning of test prep

Here's a well-intentioned, if slightly clueless, SAT article from Post-Standard (NY) writer Kate Perry. It seems she's convinced that the SAT is unfair because kids who pay for test prep might do better on the SAT than kids who don't:

It's no secret that the SATs are as much about knowledge of how the test works as about the questions on the exam. [By the way, this isn't true, but testing critics keep repeating it.]Students who are more acquainted with the test have an advantage over students who are unfamiliar with the strategy needed to crack it. This advantage comes at a price.

Students who can afford private tutoring sessions, books and high-tech calculators have a distinct edge over students who can't afford any of these things.

That this is stated as a serious criticism of the test amazes me. Let's take an analogous situation. You want to take a driver's license exam. You think you're naturally a bad driver, so you go to driving school, or you pay someone to teach you, or you just practice a lot. You end up passing the test, while a friend who did much less in the way of preparation failed to pass. You now have a driver's license, and she does not.

Is this proof that the driver's license exam is unfair? Don't be ridiculous. Test takers gain an advantage on virtually every exam under the sun (except perhaps for IQ tests) by preparing for that exam. The fact that the SAT, or any test, can be prepared for does not mean that the test is not a valid measure of acheivement or skills or knowledge. As this principal puts it, the key to better SAT scores is practice, practice, practice. That's also how you get to Carnegie Hall, should anybody ask.

What's more, this journalist buys wholesale the claim (made only by the test prep companies, not by the College Board) that she can expect a 200-point increase by taking a few practice exams - a few expensive practice exams, that is. If you refuse to grant her that assumption, and I do, then her entire argument that SAT point increases can be "purchased" falls apart.

What does it always come down to with these types of crusading journalists? Money. What this writer wants you to believe is that:

(a) it's inherently unfair that some kids grow up in richer families than others, when those kids have more options for academic practice open to them,

(b) it's possible to create any valid measure of academic achievement on which kids who are better prepared will not have an advantage, and,

(c) that no poor kid has a chance to do well on the SAT.

I believe (a) and (b) are bunkum, and it can be shown that (c) is pure poppycock. Every library in the US has practice SAT books, and these same books can be bought online, either from ETS or from booksellers, at a very reasonable price. Any kid who is discliplined enough to sit down with the tests, take many practice exams under the time limit, and ask a teacher or parent for help with the items they got wrong is going to get as much benefit from it as those rich kids whose parents can foot the bill for the test prep companies.

And that $28 test fee? Every testing company in the US allows for fee waivers from students who can't afford the bills. Some give partial waivers, some full; some high schools foot the bill as well.

Although I've written about this before, I still remain amazed that a journalist can get an article published despite the fact that they don't bother to do their research (re: cheap test prep and fee waivers), and despite the fact that they take the inflated claims made by test prep companies and restate them as criticisms of the tests themselves.

What I said to that other credulous reporter back in February still stands:

Last I checked, not only is there no solid research indicating that test prep courses work for all kids, but there's also no research showing that price is any indicator of the quality of a test prep course. Let me point out again that the test was designed as an equalizer and in fact works as one - but our society is unequal with regards to wealth, and always will be. A poor kid with great SATs will not be poor for long. A rich kid who can't pass the SATs will be dependent on familial influence and money to get into college. The kid who works the hardest and had the most ability will probably do the best. The test prep companies will charge whatever credulous customers...are willing to pay. And this is a criticism of the tests how? It isn't ETS creating that divide.

And life just keeps getting better...

Okay, so I already lost a day of work (and blogging) thanks to everything else I had to get done yesterday, and my GERD is still really, really bad, and I'm also suffering from the consequences of caffeine withdrawal. But I managed to pull it together this morning, and at 8:15 I was on my way into work, all ready to give a presentation in front of an item review committee.

At which point, I was promptly involved in a four-car accident.

My car seems to have the most damage, because my car was #3 in the lineup and the only car actually hit by another moving car (#4). I seem to be okay; my Saturn has a very sad-looking rear end at this point, but it's still driveable. My car didn't really do any damage to the other two cars that were involved, because I was at a complete stop when I was hit. I thought at first that my car was completely dead, but that was just because Saturn thoughtfully installs auto shutoffs on their newer models, and so being hit caused my car to turn off and stay off for a short period of time.

So, I'm several hours behind schedule, I'm tied to my cell phone waiting for the insurance adjuster to call me, and I need to contact one of the other accident victims tonight to let her know what's going to happen with the insurance. Oh, and the accident brought on a nice case of extra-upset stomach and general shaken-up-ed-ness.

Blogging will resume when whomever or whatever placed this curse on me decides to have pity on my poor fizzy body and scrambled brain and remove it.

Update: Upon rethinking, I suppose I should look at the silver lining here, and be grateful that I have a lot of friends with medical knowlege (so that they can lend sympathetic and informed support about my GERD), and a boyfriend who works for an auto insurance company (so he can hold my hand, take me through the steps, and figure out plans for saber-rattling against the person who hit me, if need be).

Miss fizzychest, continued

Oh, well, I suppose I should be glad that it isn't anything cardiac-related. But my case of GERD seems to be pretty bad, and the OTC stuff didn't touch it. My doctor's given me meds; hopefully they'll work so that I can avoid the whole visiting-the-hospital-for-ooky-tests thing.

And thanks to those of you who wrote (privately) that you've had your own issues with acid reflux. I don't plan to turn this blog into some kind of support group (although I suppose it is, in a way, for people who get high blood pressure over educational idiocies), but I appreciate the support nonetheless.

More homeschooling blogs

The homeschooling blogs are popping up like mushrooms; go to School @ Home and check the list on the left for even more sites.

Surely, the kids should be blogging too, as part of their lessons, right, Tenn?

Tolerating the intolerable

In an age when honor students get suspended because a steak knife or cap gun is found in their car, a group of football players at Mepham High School (NY) can get away with sexually attacking three younger teammates, and the school does virtually nothing until the press finds out about it. Michele of A Small Victory has the entire story at her site, and she has inside information on it because she's local to that area.

The three attacks took place at a football camp in Pennsylvania. There were apparently three separate attacks of sodomy, three attackers and three witnesses, all of whom threatened the victims with further violence if they told anyone. One victim, though, didn't stop bleeding for days afterward and was forced to tell his mother. I assume this was the same victim who required surgery to correct the damage.

The players at the camp knew about the attacks, but did not tell the coaches. Everyone was suffering under a code of silence meant to protect the attackers and witnesses and intimidate the victims and their families. When the story finally made the national news on Sept. 16th, the attackers had not even been suspended because a written statement from witnesses or victims had not been obtained.

Cap gun in your car? You're out, no excuses, no complaining.

Brutally sodomize younger teammates? Hey, as long as nobody signs anything, the school will sit on its hands.

This would be enough to enrage anyone, but Michele has more:

The media gets a hold of the story and all hell breaks loose. Adults become defensive. School officials feign horror. The students of the school become divided, with some saying - remaining anonymous in interviews - that the participants should be expelled, while the cheerleaders and football players rally 'round the molesters.

Oh, it wasn't all the kids. It was just the football players, the cheerleaders and a few stragglers who thought it was a good way to get out of class.

Michele is sickened by the support being shown for a corrupt group of teammates, and understands completely why canceling the football season is necessary. The team knew about brutal sexual assaults and did not tell the coaches. If the football players don't understand the concept of culpability in the eyes of the law, now's a good time for them to start.

Michele is astounded, and more than a little nauseated:

The loud protestations of those who are fuming at the school board makes you wonder who they think the victims of this whole thing are? Do they honestly think they have been wronged? What kind of homes do these people grow up in that they have the audacity and the smugness to prance around like they have been wronged when there are three boys - school mates of theirs - who have been basically raped by their fellow students?...

Do I need to tell you why those statements make me sick?

It gets worse; one of the players who is accused of participating in the sexual assaults had been warned by school officials before the camp not to "harass" any other teammates. Michele neatly outlines the various groups who are to blame:

The fault for this whole episode begins with the parents of the accused players, for raising kids who think that they have the right to do this to people; the attackers themselves; the kids who watched and said nothing; the kids who found out later, knowing who the attackers were, and still said nothing; and the school for allowing a serious discipline problem to go unchecked and permitting this previously suspended football player to go on a school-sanctioned trip.

In other words, the fact that the school might have known about the brutality of one player beforehand doesn't place the fault of this all on the school. The attackers - and the witnesses - should face severe legal consequences. Michele fears a round of "Boys will be boys" defenses in court. I fear she's right.

By the way, the press releases for Mepham High stop at September 5th. Imagine that.

"common sense surrenders"

That's the headline that Fark.com gives to this story, and I can't come up with one more concise - and appropriate:

Pupils across Lincolnshire may soon be able to sit exams without fear of failing, when new government guidelines come into effect. The guidelines, for marking key national curriculum exams, recommend that the current F grade, for 'fail', should be replaced with an N grade, for 'nearly'.

Nick Seaton, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, described the changes as "political correctness gone stark raving bonkers". He said educational managers were afraid to use the words 'right', 'wrong' and 'fail'.

I think, if this is not a joke, that Nick is right. "Stark raving bonkers" is the least-extreme term I'd use for this. Hey, Mr. "Spokesman," do you really think that a kid who gets several steps of a mathematical equation right, but gets the "uncreditworthy" answer, does in fact know what he's doing, math-wise? Do you really believe that kid should get some credit, if only psychologically, for getting to the wrong answer? What if that kid gets into engineering school with this sort of mathematical training? Would you ever drive over a bridge designed by that type of student?

Math has right answers and wrong answers, and all this PC fuddling around to hide the fact that Lincolnshire can't teach its kids to get the right answers isn't going to change that. If they follow the right steps but get the wrong answer, it's just plain WRONG, and the student's work should be corrected.

Methinks these folks need to read music teacher Bob Blount's essay on why effort isn't good enough (cached version; not sure how long it will be up). Key line:

If the results are poor but I praise the effort, here's what I'm telling them: "The quality of effort that produces poor results is not only acceptable, it is praiseworthy." I don't know about you, but I don't want MY kids getting that message from anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Bugging the educators

A student in a California high school wants to start a "Caucasian" club - but the membership rules aren't quite what you'd expect:

Lisa McClelland says she isn't a racist. She says her campaign for a Caucasian Club at her California high school is a move toward diversity, not bigotry. She says everyone is invited -- and nobody will be excluded.

McClelland's ethnic background includes American Indian, Hispanic, Dutch, German, Italian and Irish. She says she and her friends feel slighted by other clubs at Freedom High School in Oakley, such as the Black Student Union and the Asian Club.

I can understand why she feels slighted. But if everyone's included, why call it the Caucasian Club? Just to make a point? Just to get under the skin of the PC crowd? Just to give the principal fits? I mean, if you want to get creative and funny with names in ways that will make your principal break out in hives, this is the way to do it.

Did the "holistic" admissions model work?

The Tri-Valley Herald provides an update on the "innovate" college admissions policy implemented by UC President Richard Atkinson. The plan two years ago was to move away from test scores and GPAs, and towards a "comprehensive, holistic" form of judging applicants (despite their best efforts to deny it, judging applicants is exactly what they're still doing).

Has it worked? I suppose that depends on how you define "worked":

On Thursday, the effectiveness of that policy was a dominant theme of Atkinson's last board meeting before he retires on Oct. 1.

The proportion of black, Latino and American Indian students admitted to UC has also increased, and more are applying to the system -- a reflection of California's changing demographics and the increasing number of minority high school graduates, the report said.

Oh, so the racial balance hasn't been upset. Good, good. Of course, that "increasing number of minority high school graduates" might have been dependent on the recent decision to push back the high school exit exam. What happens with the UC admissions model if minority high school graduation rates drop? Will they allow their admissions model to remain the same even if minority enrollment rates then decrease?

And what kinds of students are attending UC these days?

Barbara Sawrey, chairwoman of UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, which oversees matters relating to undergraduate admissions, said the report should also allay critics' fears that the comprehensive review policy would diminish the quality of entering freshmen...

Sawrey said academic achievement is still factored heavily in the new process, although admission consideration has been broadened to also take other factors into account, such as personal achievement.

Personal achievement that isn't apparent in increased test scores or in increased GPA, that is. I'm all for personal achievement, but it's downright bizarre to see colleges downplaying academic achievements and giving heavier weight to non-academic matters, such as whether you were the first in your family to go to college:

The new comprehensive admissions process combines the current two-tiered policy into one review. The new policy allows UC admissions officers to consider all applicants' extracurricular activities, leadership skills and personal obstacles, in addition to academic achievement.

It also allows admissions officers to consider if the student had to overcome difficulties, such as being the first in the family to go to college or attending a school with limited educational resources, in making decisions to admit students.

Well, I guess that's one way to get rid of those annoying legacy students who went to good schools, made good grades, and hoped to follow in Dad's footsteps at UCLA. No need for them as part of the campus's "diversity." As one critic of the admissions model wrote in an Los Angeles Times article around the time of implementation, "It looks like they're trying to punish kids who have gone to good schools, tried their best and played by the rules...And they're really pulling the rug out from under them by doing all this at the last minute."

Have the academic standards actually remained high? I'd like to see that above-mentioned faculty report mentioned above to judge for myself.

Mistakes were made - but not just by us

The database company that was involved in the missing MEAP problem a while back admits culpability - but says that it wasn't the only one at fault:

The company that set up a student database for standardized test scores said Wednesday it made mistakes, but it isn't the only one responsible for the delayed test scores.

Enterprises said it expected to receive test scores in March, but didn't until June 12. The tests were scored by a different company, Durham, N.C.-based Measurement Inc. Officials from Measurement Inc. said they didn't receive the last batch of tests from schools until late April. Iyer and Kevin Ireland, national sales manager for Enterprises, also suggested that the state's MEAP office is understaffed.

So the schools were late in sending the tests, the scoring company was late in sending the scores, and the database company had a glitch in their problem. A cavalcade of errors, it seems.

Defending NCLB in Tennessee

Tennesseean Senator and Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R) sticks his neck out to defend the No Child Left Behind Act in front of a most-likely-skeptical audience of educators:

''I firmly believe it would be a tragedy to not hold schools accountable for all students in that school,'' Frist, R-Tenn., told about 400 people at the Education Leaders Council conference in Nashville. ''We will not turn our backs on any single child.'' Because he is the Senate majority leader, Frist's support is a strong indicator that President Bush and Education Secretary Rod Paige are not planning to back down from the tough standards imposed on schools by the law.

''The intent is to strengthen, to strengthen the public school system and to make sure all children learn,'' Frist said. ''It's as simple as that. By holding the school accountable for results, we force schools to pay attention to students that have been ignored for far too long.''

Is something screwy in East St. Louie?

Something seems to be very, very wrong with the standardized test scores for children in East St. Louis (Illinois), and an audit is being considered to further examine scores which are going up and down like a rollercoaster ride:

Something is wrong, possibly very wrong, with standardized test scores for East St. Louis school children. That's the conclusion of Richard Mark, chairman of District 189's state-appointed oversight panel, after nearly a decade of watching test scores climb and fall like a rollercoaster, often in the same school buildings and only a few years apart.

And at seven other District 189 schools, variances of 12 percentage points or more were found over a four-year period, ending with the 2001-02 school year.

Emphasis mine. A similar problem with high variability in test scores uncovered a cheating scandal in Chicago recently, and that's what's feared here in East St. Louis. The words "red flag" come to mind for everone who's examining these data.

Why does this variability suggest cheating? According to one study, classrooms that cheat with teacher participation will show unusually large score gains for one year, but these gains do not continue - scores level out or even drop the subsequent year. The key is in the size of the gain - individual students may show large fluctuations, but overall mean scores shouldn't show huge amounts of fluctuation year to year, especially fluctuations that change direction.

Of course, a school that implements a radically-new process could show a large gain one year, with gains leveling off after that. Low- or no-stakes tests can also be more unstable, because kids may not try their best. And those who want to examine the scores face charges of racism, despite the fact that cheaters, whether they be teachers or students or both, aren't doing kids of any race a favor.

In a related article, a buddy of mine, testing and test cheating expert Professor Greg Cizek, is pontificating on the subject of "test tampering" - which seems to be on the rise:

Some educators call teacher cheating the inevitable result of the nation's test score obsession. And experts agree that test tampering - and suspicion of it - is on the rise.

"It's picked up," said Gregory J. Cizek, a nationally known testing and cheating expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "I am responding all the time to school districts who say, 'We have a problem with this teacher. Can you do an analysis?' " said Cizek, author of Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It.

A great book, by the way - and reasonably priced, too! (I figure the more plugs I give his book, the more likely he'll pay for dinner next time he's in town)

But seriously folks, in an age when real estate agents are allegedly showing school report cards to prospective home buyers in an attempt to cash in on good test scores, it's not surprising that some folks are trying to take the easy road:

The most noted test scandals have occurred in New York and Texas, but smaller-scale allegations have erupted in recent years from California to Chicago to Connecticut.

Similar, but more isolated, test-tampering cases in Houston, Austin, Dallas and several other Texas districts helped lead to the formation of that state's Public Education Integrity Task Force in 1999.

Dr. Cizek's theory is that teachers who oppose testing may have decided that test-tampering is "justifiable civil disobedience." I can understand teachers not wanting their efforts to be judged wholly by test scores - but any teacher who helps children cheat is not doing them a favor, and the message being sent is not that the government is wrong, or that tests are wrong, but that children should be helped to cheat in order to protect the teacher's reputation and the school's standing. And that's very wrong.

Separating the boys from the girls in public schools

Devoted Reader Mike sent along this Brothers Judd blog link, which reveals that some public schools in the Midwest are quietly segregating classes by sex, despite the fact that this may violate federal laws - and for most students, it seems to be working out just fine:

One year ago, Clarksville (Ind.) Middle School began a quiet experiment with its seventh-graders, separating boys and girls during math, English, science and other core courses. Genders were mixed only in classes like music and art, and they could socialize in the halls and at lunch.

"I don't think you can argue with those kinds of numbers," said Tammy Haub, the English teacher who suggested the change.

Tammy may be innovative, but she's naive; the ACLU and the National Organization of Women are more than willing to argue with the numbers:

Critics from organizations such as the ACLU and the National Organization for Women contend that single-sex classes are a step backward, and probably violate current federal laws and regulations that prohibit such programs in all but the most limited situations, such as physical education classes involving body contact.

Emily Martin, a staff attorney for the ACLU's women's rights project, said single-gender classes are "pretty clearly prohibited" by current federal law.

"A step backward" - even if kids prefer it, and even if testing scores go up (which would argue against any "separate-but-unequal" theories), the ACLU is having none of it. Interestingly, the US Education Department announced last year that it may amend the regulations which govern segregation of classes by sex, which explains both why some schools are confident enough to give it a shot, and why the lobbying organizations who oppose this are having tizzies.

And some of these tizzies fly in the face of empirical evidence:

In Kentucky...where there have been single-sex classes for at least three years in a half-dozen schools, some administrators argue that the benefits are clear.

Richard Dowdy, assistant principal at Paducah Middle School, said that since the program started there three years ago discipline problems have declined, and girls are doing better in math and science classes. The school separates boys and girls for all their courses.

Oh, but NOW is still mad about it. Lord knows, we can't have girls doing better in math and science classes, not if these higher scores are achieved in a politically-incorrect, non-NOW-sanctioned manner! Sheesh.

This type of segregation hasn't worked for all schools, but I believe schools should have the freedom to try it, and the freedom to drop it if it doesn't work for them. And it's important to me that the kids seem to like, and understand that this relieves them of some of the presure that Madison Avenue places on them to be sexually appealing and socially-focused as early as seventh grade:

In single-gender classes....some girls no longer worry about "looking silly" in front of boys, and some boys aren't as tempted to show off as they might be with girls in the class. "The social pressure is off,"...and boys and girls can focus their attention on academics.

In a survey last year among seventh-graders who were in the single-sex classrooms, 65 percent said the program was helping them learn.

Fear of a cap gun

Devoted Reader and fellow vacciniumcorymbosumparthenophobe Erin (trust me, she knows what that long word means) sent along this tale of a horrible, violent student at Maple Grove (MN) High School (registration required). The student, Jake Trembath, has been suspended for an entire year, and good riddance. I mean, what was he thinking? Serving on the student council, playing lacrosse, and attending Bible class every morning - sure, those are fine things, but obviously they shouldn't outweigh having a cap gun accidently left in one's car while it was parked on school grounds:

As a result of finding a toy cap gun -- "painted to look more real," a school report said -- in Jake's car last week, Maple Grove school officials suspended the teen and have begun expulsion proceedings. Jake said the toy doesn't belong to him and he didn't know it was there.

The school officials aren't budging, because, according to the kid's father, "I think they believe that if they yield on Jake, the next kid who says 'I didn't know' will get off, too." Of course! Why, if you allow the innocent transportation of a pop gun, next thing you know, kids will be sneaking in water guns, slingshots, and those big Nerf bats. It'll be Columbine all over again.

Strangely, though, this school policy isn't doing much to create a quieter campus with more docile students - in fact, it appears to be creating the opposite situation:

Jake's friends and classmates have rallied. On Friday, Jake's sister Whitney brought home a petition signed by more than 300 students. It said: "Help Jake! We think that Jake was expelled for an unjust reason." Some are wearing "Free Jake" T-shirts to school, Whitney said...

For Jake, the anger is growing. He's been booted off the student council, his name has been removed from the banner lauding the Homecoming court. For a kid who recalls his last time in trouble as sitting in the principal's office for "flicking a staple" in the seventh grade, this is a hard lesson.

Jake should be mad. This is utterly ridiculous. These types of policies don't make kids feel safe on campus; instead, the students now walk on eggshells, fearful that Grandpa's fish knife or little Bobby's cap gun will find its way into their cars or their bookbags, and completely torch everything they've been working for so hard.

Local resident and uber-columnist James Lileks has more on the story. He has a delightfully precocious three-year-old daughter, and I believe he's starting to worry how her experiences with the public school system will develop:

Some cultural notes: We have one of those “zero tolerance” cases here, and I’m sure you can guess the details. Kid’s friends are playing around with cap gun. The gun migrates to the car in the course of weekend tomfoolery. Kid drives to school. Security guard notices gun in car while trolling the lot and peering through windows. Kid - who is a good student, and attends Bible class every morning for class - gets in trouble. And by “trouble” I mean he is suspended for the entire year.

2. “Once a year we pass them out and the class reenacts the Charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg.”

James is much more in favor of the second answer, as am I.

Welcome to the world of miss fizzychest

Well, so much for the plan of blogging this weekend. Instead, I got to discover that my body seems to having some issues. It seems quite possible that I have GERD, or Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, commonly known as acid reflux disease. You know, the disease they talk about on all those Zantac commercials? The commercials I've completely ignored in the past? Well, I'll be ignoring them no more.

The problem, of course, is that a sudden (and I do mean sudden) first attack of GIRD can mimic, especially in women, symptoms of heart disease. So, on Sunday, when I had planned to do a lot of house cleaning and blogging, I found myself instead with stabbing chest pains, nausea, headache, sweating, and clamminess. But I don't have high blood pressure, or asthma, or any history of cardiac problems, and I seem to be breathing okay, so right now the doctors have me on Zantac. Further tests should clear things up, but let's just say it put a damper on my weekend all around.

More information than you wanted, probably, but I just wanted to explain my absence this weekend. I should be back to blogging Monday (barring time out time for a doctor visit or two).

Light bloggage again...

Hi, everyone. Philly came through the hurricane relatively unscathed, although some outlying counties in PA really suffered. I'm still encountering a hurricane storm of work here at my office, though, so I won't get to blogging until later this weekend. I apologize for the delay.

And, unlike most weekends, I do intend to get quite a few posts up; I've been saving them over the last day or two, and I already have five to ten articles that must be posted, linked, critiqued, and discussed. So check back over the weekend, when stuff will be posted throughout the days (man, can't wait to get into all this FCAT challenge nonsense....)

Battening down the hatches

Hi, everyone. Work today is quite crunchingly heavy, and then there's this whole Hurricane Isabel thing. We've already lost one psychometrician (who works from home in Delaware) because her power's out, and I have to be ready to give a presentation tomorrow in case my boss doesn't make it in - of course, that presumes that I won't lose power as well, and I haven't yet decided if my loyalty to this company includes sleeping here and showering downstairs in the gym if need be.

Nope, I've decided - my loyalty definitely doesn't extend that far. :)

Anyways, I'll try to post a couple of things today but may not have time, and if nothing gets posted tomorrow it may be because we don't have power. If I get to stay home, I'll read Life Of Pi, which a Devoted Reader recently sent to me (thanks so much). Everybody stay safe.

Redefining "Advanced Placement"

The Ector County Independent School District (ECISD) in Texas decided last year to make AP courses available to all students, instead of only to those whose previous academic performance qualified them for the classes. The result? The number of students who took AP exams nearly tripled - from 624 last year to 1709 this year - but the passing rate decreased, from 34% last year to 21% this year (in absolute numbers, around 212 students passed last year, and about 358 passed this year). Statewide, the passing rate is 52%, but in some other districts, unlike ECISD, students who take the courses don't have to take the exams, so there is self-selection going on.

Nevertheless, if more students pass, but a fewer percentage of them pass, does this "open enrollment" for AP classes sound like a good idea? Is it realistic to assume that every student will gain something from AP course enrollment, or that teachers will not be overburdened with the increased need for AP course training?

In ECISD...all students who take an AP course are required to take the test for that course. ECISD also foots at least part of the bill for the test. The district pays about $50 of the $80 fee for each test, while the state pays the rest...The district receives $100 back, however, for each student who passes an AP exam regardless of the number of exams a student passes, she said. Based on those figures, that would mean ECISD spent $85,450 on AP exams last school year and brought in about $35,300.

Wow. I never knew that schools could earn money back for students passing the AP exams. The ECISD lost money this year - but is the goal ultimately to earn money this way?

Fighting the unions in California

The battles waged by former NBA star Kevin Johnson in his attempt to transform a low-performing California public school into a better charter school are documented here on the National Review website. The proposed charter school generated wide community support, millions in donations - and fury from the local union, the CTA:

Impressed by Johnson's plan and his ability to mobilize local support, the school board voted to close Sacramento High at the end of the school year and granted Johnson's group the right to reopen the campus as a charter school.

Under California's charter law, St. HOPE was also free to hire its own teachers. That explains the furious reaction of the California Teacher Association and its local affiliate. These groups wanted the new school to be staffed by the same teachers who had "led" the school to its record-setting level of low performance.

The school opened its doors on September 2nd of this year. I hope it does well. I'll be keeping an eye out for future reports on it.

I got them standardized testing blues...

The September 3rd strip of Safe Havens by Bill Holbrook:

Why don't teachers prefer merit pay?

Hmm. Can someone explain to me just why anyone should believe these arguments against merit pay for teachers? I'm serious. I just don't get it. I do understand that money doesn't solve every problem, that teachers are often motivated mainly by the love of teaching, and that the frustrations teachers go through will not be assuaged with extra take-home pay. But these specific criticisms just seem surreal to me:

1. Control. People with more power usually set the goals, establish the criteria, and generally set about trying to change the behavior of those down below. If merit pay feels manipulative and patronizing, that's probably because it is. That's funny. Like most people in the business world, I work at a job where my raises and bonuses are tied to performance. I don't see this as patronizing. Being expected to work hard when there's no chance of being paid more than the person in the next office who slacks off - now that's patronizing.

2. Strained relationships. In its most destructive form, merit pay is set up as a competition, where the point is to best one's colleagues...pay- for-performance programs don't have to be explicitly competitive in order to undermine collegial relationships. If I end up getting a bonus and you don't, our interactions are likely to be adversely affected... Are these bonuses made public? Are teachers going to go around demanding to know who got bonuses and who didn't? Are teachers expected to be so immature that they will demand to know who got bonuses, are incapable of understanding that a bonus is based on meeting a set of standards for the year, and will then sabotage the performance of other teachers to get that money? I don't see this sort of competition in my job, despite the fact that we're all hoping to get bonuses. Are teachers really expected to be that cutthroat?

3. Reasons and motives. The premise of merit pay, and indeed of all rewards, is that people could be doing a better job but for some reason have decided to wait until it's bribed out of them. This is as insulting as it is inaccurate. Funny, I don't know many people who hold back and work hard only when there are monetary incentives. I do know people who expect to make more money and receive more praise when they improve their work performance, because even though their drive comes from within, it's nice to