Number 2 Pencil

Do Glock 9mm's come in pink?

Okay, this is...strange:

MERRILLVILLE, Ind. -- Officials have banned pink clothing for the remainder of the school year out of concerns that the color has become associated with gang activity. Administrators last week told students at the city's high school and two middle schools to avoid wearing pink clothing or accessories, said Michael Berta, associate superintendent in the Northwestern Indiana district.

None of the district's 6,500 students have been disciplined for wearing pink, he said. Berta said the issue came up at a recent administrator's meeting when a principal remarked that there were more students wearing pink. "Not only were there more kids wearing pink T-shirts and pink hats, but also pink shoelaces, which was unusual," he said.

Does it make sense to be this "proactive" for something there's been absolutely no sign of, especially when the color is so fashionable among non-gangsters? Since when did gangs decide to co-opt a color that's so....fruity? And if I were a student at this school, my response would be that they'd have to pry my Coach bag from my cold, dead hands. And my pink Doc Martens, too.

Update: ZeroIntelligence has more, much more:

Gang activity? Gangs wearing pink? Does this actually happen outside of an 1980's Michael Jackson video?

Hee hee hee.

Update: Don't miss Protein Wisdom's comments:

C'mon. What kind of self-respecting band of marauding punk thugs would make pink their gang color? The 6th Street Birthday Cakes? The Highland Park Bubble Gum Chewers? The East Side Pepto Bismallers...? Can you even pull a gun out of a pair of pink pants without eliciting a chuckle and a ten-gallon bitchslap? I should think gang members would prefer "menacing" to "he looks like he's a very good dancer."

Twinkle, twinkle, little nose

Okay, this is just silly:

A middle school student has been suspended because she is wearing a small diamond stud in her nose, which the principal says is distracting.

Pippen said facial piercings distract other students and could hurt their performance on the state's standardized test.

Let it be known that I have no problem with schools enforcing dress codes and jewelry codes, but it's ridiculous to claim that one little nose bauble will cause other students to turf on the FCAT.

What matters more - lacrosse or libraries?

West Contra Costa Unified School District recently announced that it was "cutting all high school sports, eliminating all music teachers and counselors and closing down all libraries." Joan Ryan writes in the SFGate that this is a self-defeating plan:

Supporters of libraries like to say the value of libraries is immeasurable, but that's not true. Study after study has quantified their impact. In a 2000 study of Colorado schools, for example, researcher Keith Curry Lance found higher test scores in schools where library resources were maximized and librarians actively collaborated with classroom teachers. Standardized test scores ran 18 percent higher in fourth grade and 10 percent to 15 percent higher in seventh grade when compared to schools where library resources and staffing were meager. The researchers controlled for factors that people think would explain away the difference, such as per-student expenditures, teacher/student ratios, socioeconomic differences, race, ethnicity and the education level of the adult community.

I wonder if the studies cited above controlled for parental attitudes as well. Ms. Ryan notes that, in response to the West Contra announcement, "much of the angry protests centered on sports." When the parents are more likely to get angry over an endangered football team than a complete lack of books in the school, I'd say the test scores don't stand a chance.

High prices and suspicious claims

From the Seattle-Times, a peek behind the curtain of the test prep industry:

Just as aspiring actors must try out for parts, aspiring test-preparation teachers have to audition for their roles.

They hold regular auditions — but only for those who've scored at or above the 90th or 95th percentile on such tests as the SAT; Graduate Record Examination or GRE; and the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT.

Such programs aren't cheap, despite the fact that few studies exist to show a clear gain in test scores after enrolling in such programs. The test prep instructors also make a big deal out of being able to quell test anxiety. However, I've always felt that, with their high prices and their public insistence that the tests don't actually measure anything yet are too tricky for examinees to prepare for on their own, these test prep companies are part of the test anxiety problem.

You don't need to spend a thousand bucks to pass these exams, especially if you're already smart, disciplined, or accomplished (because the tests do measure aptitude and ability). If you're really not smart, or you haven't paid attention in school at all, learning the "tricks" won't help you anywhere near as much as the test prep companies claim.

A passionate argument against social promotion

Man bites dog: From the NYTimes, a pro-retention Op-Ed by a schoolteacher:

I'll never forget the little girl who sat with a book, ran her fingers across the words, turned the pages and pretended to be reading. She was in one of my first fourth-grade classes at the Beethoven Elementary School on the South Side and we quickly discovered she couldn't recognize the simplest of words, like "in," "it" and "the."

That was in 1990, when we thought holding a child back a grade would hurt his or her self-esteem. So while my pupil was noticeably behind her peers in reading, she and others like her were pushed through each grade anyway, often struggling so much that, hopeless, they dropped out of school at the first chance.

In 1995, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley began ending social promotion, but this trend might be slowed by recent changes (although Chicago insists that it is not "watering down" the fight against social promotions):

...the students who have come through my classrooms over the last 14 years offer the most convincing evidence that retention is one of the best things we can do for a child who needs that extra year to develop literacy skills. I began teaching sixth graders in 1992, and shortly after social promotion ended, I began to see students who were much better prepared...

My only regret about ending social promotion in Chicago is that it didn't come sooner. I hate to imagine what happened to the little girl who had learned only how to imitate the act of reading. I fear that for every year we allowed her and those like her to move on, we condemned her to fall further behind in school, as well as in life.

A President tells it like it is

In Baltimore, an unusual powwow; University of Maryland, Baltimore County President Freeman A. Hrabowski III met with the Maryland state board of education and proclaimed the K12 standards to be "weak:"

U.S. schools, including those in Maryland, aren't expecting enough, Hrabowski said. Algebra standards are especially weak, he said, so much so that his university and many others are forced to give remedial help to students who should have been prepared in high school...

"I realize it takes time," he said, "but you mustn't give up or lower the bar for some students."

The next part makes me want to send Hrabowski love letters:

"I realize it takes time," he said, "but you mustn't give up or lower the bar for some students."

"Stop saying the tests are biased," he told the state board. "It's racist to say blacks and Hispanics can't do well on these tests."

Hrabowski is an African-American mathematician who (a) earned his PH.D. at age 24, (b) wants black students to do well and to spread the idea that "it's cool to be smart", and (c) wants a return to strong discipline in the classroom. And there's more:

Hrabowski is unapologetic in his defense of tests. When opponents of the SAT, for example, tee off on its purported bias against minorities, Hrabowski replies that he has been writing SAT test questions for years -- and that minorities can, and many do, ace the SAT. Hrabowski is the only college or university president I know who brags about the SAT scores of individual students.

"If you went in for an operation," he asked the state board, "would you want a surgeon who hadn't passed the test?"

Yep, I'm definitely sending him a mash note or two. In addition to being smart AND right about testing, he's pretty easy on the eyes, too.

My current reading list

Here's just the stuff on education that I'm plowing through:

The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, by Maureen, Ph.D.

Losing Our Language: How Multiculturalism Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, by Sandra Stotsky

Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing, by Richard P. Phelps

Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education, by Jeffrey Peter Hart

I'm also rather obsessed with Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, and I have several books on those fine ladies awaiting me at home. But I'm going to read the education-related books first.

Revising history

The Washington Times gives flunking grades to history textbooks:

The latest editions of the most widely used social studies textbooks across the country are full of errors and politically correct bias, reviews show.

The text did not explain the raid was part of an effort to free...kidnapped women — and that warriors of other Indian tribes, also victims of Pequot terrorism, had joined British colonists in the raid.

I just got my copy of the Schoolhouse Rock DVD; my boyfriend and I watched most of them last night. We agreed that many of the "America Rock" videos could not possibly be made today, because there would be too many objections to American "imperialism" and "ethnocentrism." The Schoolhouse Rock videos made you proud to be an American. I doubt most of the history texts today have that effect.

The unbearable requirement of learning to read

The issue of the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) is "as divisive as any issue facing schools," according to the Boston Globe. But not for the reasons you might guess. The Globe saw fit to print quotes from a testing critic who does nothing but rehash the extreme-PC objections to standardized tests:

Marcella Lang, an elementary school teacher since 1975 who now teaches English as a second language in Somerville, wants the MCAS abolished...

Marcella: I think of MCAS as a classist, racist test. It is unfair, and it contributes to leaving behind the very students it claims it wants to help. It doesn't take a genius to see that children from affluent communities and with educated parents do very well on the test. And who doesn't do well? Special-education kids. Trade-school kids. Minorities and underprivileged kids.

And does Marcella believe this bias exists because of how the test is constructed, or because the items themselves are biased? In other words, does she have any substantive commentary on the quality of the test?

Nope, the MCAS is "classist and racist" simply because it's unfair to expect all children to perform well:

[Children are failing the MCAS because] the exam is worded in a way that loses a lot of kids and is designed in a way that is very difficult for a lot of kids to process. It's unfair to expect the same from kids who have been read to since they were born and children who have never seen a book, never been in a library.

Emphasis mine. It's unfair to expect kids who come from deprived backgrounds to, you know, learn anything in school (as Best of the Web put it, isn't that what schools are for?). The test is "classist" because kids who were read to at home aren't just lucky; they had an unfair advantage, and presumably should not be allowed to reap the benefits of high test scores. Why, what have all these parents who read to their kids been thinking? Don't they know how unfair their homes are?

The amusing part is that Marcella's daughter, Marina, supports the test. The irritating part is that Marcella is given both the first and the last words in the Globe article, and her daughter's responses, unsurprisingly, were much more polite and restrained than mine.

Baby diets and banned scores in Britain

News from Britain: If you thought Americans spoiled their kids, it seems that the British are just as bad.

Eight out of ten British parents admit that their children have worse diets than the parents did at their age, but few of them hold themselves responsible:

The survey showed more than half of children do not eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables each day. The average age of the children whose parents were questioned was 15 months. Just over half of the parents said their child was a "fussy eater".

However, only one in five parents blamed themselves in any way for their children's eating habits.

You'd think parents who go so far as to read parenting magazines would be smart enough to understand that the parent is the only one responsible for the diet of a 15-month-old.

With a diet this bad, British kids need exercise. But it isn't worth it for them to become proficient at any sport, because the newspapers won't print scores for fear of embarassing the losers:

The Sheffield and District Football League has forbidden its members from sending scores to the Derbyshire Times after the newspaper reported how an under-nine team was "trounced" 29-0 in a crucial match.

The league, believing this description could heap even more humiliation on children from the losing side, told the newspaper it could not cover any more junior league matches until it agreed not to publish results in which the score exceeds 14 goals...

The mother of one league player is organizing a petition against this gag order, on the sensible grounds that kids who win deserve to have mention of their accomplishments.

Couch potato

My bronchitis continues to plague me (as do the side effects of the antibiotic) and I have to travel for work this weekend, so I won't be posting much for the next few days.

I've been watching a lot DVDs lately, in part because I'm too exhausted to do anything else. We recently joined Netflix and it's superb. The deal is that you keep three (or five, if you want to pay more than $21/month) DVDs out a time, for as long as you want. If you've been plagued by late fees in the past, I'd highly recommend it. We set up a queue of 62 movies on the website; when we mail one back, Netflix logs it in the next day and mails out the next DVD in the list, which we get two days later. The queue is easy to reorder, so that you can change your mind about what you want to receive when.

Anyway, in the past two weeks I've watched Children Underground (magnificent and heartbreaking), Morvern Callar (inscrutable and kinda boring, although I liked the music), Thirteen (compelling but infuriating because I wanted to see the villian of the movie, Evie, get what she deserved, which never happened), and Donnie Darko (Huh? If anyone can explain this movie, which I enjoyed very much, please drop me an email).

With that, I'll leave you with my boyfriend's Amazon.com review of S.W.A.T, easily the worst movie we've seen in a while. Enjoy.

Even by summer action flick standards, this movie is pretty bad. Why did they even bother making this? It was so cookie-cutter generic and predictable. I kept thinking maybe they were setting us up with this paint-by-numbers plot, only to throw in some huge twist at the end, but no such luck. This was one of the few movies I've seen where I was able to predict each and every event that was going to unfold with nauseating accuracy. Even this review is generic, for cying out loud. Yes, this movie was so bland that it actually infects everything it touches and renders it disgustingly uninteresting. Case in point; I used to have a sense of humor and an active social life before the day I watched this movie. Ever since then, all I can think about are state bailment laws, APA format, Leon Uris, and fluctuating interest rate trends on home equity loans. My friends have all alienated me due to my incessant rambling about stuff nobody cares about. Even now, I ramble on. Don't you just want to shoot me? Don't let this happen to you. Stay away from this movie.

I think my boyfriend needs his own blog.

Why can't Johnny Run?

Many schools have cut back on physical education programs, the better to focus on core classes and test scores. But some experts suggest that increased physical health could result in better academic performance:

In Maryland State Assessments last year, 59 percent to 82 percent of students at Oakleigh [Elementary School] scored above the "proficient" level in third- and fifth- grade reading and math. Ironically, more, not less, physical activity may have helped raise those scores, according to a recent book by Dr. Charles Corbin.

"Studies have shown students learn better when their bodies are more active," said Kim Nawrocki, a physical education teacher at Hereford.

I'd love to see those studies. My (uninformed) guess is that schools that still have extensive PE programs are schools which already have good test scores, which would make interpretation of study results more difficult. I wonder if any true experiments were done to see whether PE programs introduced into failing schools had a positive effect.

Changes in Chicago

Chicago is "moderating" its grade retention plan:

The city's school board voted unanimously to reduce the number of elementary students forced to repeat a grade, eight years after officials vowed not to advance failing students. Among the changes, students will no longer be held back based solely on math scores, and students won't repeat a grade more than once.

So, students who are bad at math will just continue to be passed on up the line? And students who do not benefit from an extra year spent in one grade will be promoted regardless? Sounds like a recipe for success to me!

School system chief Arne Duncan said the changes will put a "laser-light focus" on reading skills and offer more and earlier help to children in danger of failing.

There's nothing wrong with concentrating on those skills, and offering kids help earlier. But it's hard not to think that Chicago is panicking after discovering how many third-graders in NYC faced being held back. Chicago doesn't want to see those numbers - but if they have a plan in place to really help students, the rule about not holding a kid back more than once would seem to be superfluous.

As in the past, children will still be forced to repeat a grade if their scores on standardized reading tests fall below a certain level or they have a failing grade in reading _ unless they successfully complete summer school and meet other requirements...

Some of the parts of the policy have already been put into practice. For instance, during the 2002-03 school year, students were allowed to offset a marginal score on standardized math tests with good grades, conduct and attendance.

I hope Chicago is monitoring the number of diligent kids with good math grades who are nonetheless failing the standardized test in math. That's very useful data that will suggest, if there are many students in this category, that either the grades or the test scores are inaccurate.

Oxford entrance exams

Entrance exams are back for Oxford University:

Oxford University is moving to reintroduce entrance tests for history and English in the latest assault on the credibility of the A-level system as a means of identifying bright pupils. The move comes just nine years after the university scrapped its entrance examinations amid concern that they favoured independent school pupils.

Though the university insists the new tests will measure aptitude and not knowledge, the change is certain to provoke renewed criticism that the system will once again favour those with a privileged education, hindering government-driven efforts to widen access to elite universities.

By "privileged education" the critics must mean "education that results in applicants being able to read college-level material:"

The new Oxford-only history test is expected to be sat by pupils in schools and colleges in November, allowing admissions tutors to whittle down applicant numbers before inviting candidates for interview. The university's English faculty is canvassing schools over a similar test in English, though this would not be introduced before the 2005 admissions round...

The university insists its proposed tests will be different from the old entrance exam, abolished in 1995, which offered candidates a long list of essay questions on a range of authors or historical periods. Instead, the tests are likely to present students with a text to analyse in order to assess whether they have the skills re quired for studying the subject.

In other words, reading comprehension skills in the area in which the student hopes to study. If only "privileged" students in the UK learn to do this, I feel sorry for the rest.

However, Oxford's decision to go it alone with bespoke history tests will underline fears that dissatisfaction with A-levels will lead to a proliferation of entrance exams required by top-level universities.

Prof Schwartz, whose report is due on April 5, warned in a speech last week against the sprouting of numerous separate exams which could prove unreliable, invalid, or put off poorer students if taking them involved travel to the university concerned.

Professor Schwartz' concern that universities might develop inadequate tests for admissions purposes is a valid one. However, I seriously doubt that's what's at the root of hostility towards testing in the UK. I suspect that, as in the US, testing critics are driven mainly by a dislike of objective standards.

*cough, cough*

Sorry for the lack of blogging. The sinus infection has turned into bronchitis and my motivation for doing anything other than sinking into a heap is rather low (I've managed to not miss any work before now, but I think tomorrow is a lost cause). I shall post again when the meds kick in.

Dissing the test in Delaware

A little bird named Daryl C. mentioned to me that Delaware's plan to develop a "tiered" high school diploma system - based on standardized tests - may be shelved:

Two state representatives from New Castle County said they will introduce legislation, perhaps as early as today, to put a moratorium on the state's controversial three-tiered high school diploma system set to take effect in June.

If adopted, the moratorium would delay implementation of the tiered system until 2006, meaning that all graduating seniors would receive the same diploma this year and next year.

The gist of things seems to be that the Delaware Student Testing Program is under review, allegedly because students are dropping out when faced with receiving diplomas based on test scores. Many eighth-graders have been retained due to test scores, and if the moratorium doesn't pass, many seniors will recieve "basic" diplomas due to their low test scores (although I find it hard to believe that students would rather drop out than receive some kind of diploma).

What's more problematic is that some of those low scores appear to be anomalies:

What may have grabbed the attention of many legislators, however, is the anomaly that some seniors did not score well enough on the standardized tests to receive distinguished diplomas but are on the honor roll, getting good scores on college entrance exams and being accepted to good colleges.

Yvonne Johnson of Wilmington, co-chair of Advocates for Children's Education, which opposes high-stakes testing, called the proposals a great victory for her group.

I certainly don't oppose high-stakes testing, but these kinds of test scores should correlate to some extent. Grade inflation could explain the honor roll standing, but I would be curious about how many students that did well on the SAT did poorly on the Delaware exams. One could argue that a low correlation between Delaware's state scores and SAT scores points to a lack of concurrent validity for Delaware's exams.

A commenter on Daryl's site claims the Delaware test was never designed for individual student rankings, only for district-level comparisons. If so, that's yet another threat to the test's validity for the purpose of a tiered diploma.

Relaxation techniques for kids

One elementary school's response to test anxiety - playing classical music and letting kids chew gum:

Students at Hazelwood Elementary were allowed to chew gum and listen to classical music as they started the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) Monday. Given statewide, the test is used to measure how students in third through eighth grades perform compared to others in the state and to students nationwide.

"We took advantage of every accommodation the State Department of Education allowed us," Hazelwood Principal Rhonda Kennedy said about students chewing gum. "Some research shows it's actually a tool to help them stay attentive."

The Tennessee DOE does indeed have a page on how teachers can help alleviate test anxiety, and a page on allowable accommodations; I didn't see anything in there about chewing gum, though. Wonder if blowing bubbles would be out of line?

More information on reducing text anxiety in children can be found at the US Dept of Education site and the United Federation of Teachers site. Interestingly, the UFT site's suggestions are all discussions between parent and child, with the "most important" tip being to remind your kids that "you will love them no matter what happens." The US DOE site, on the other hand, suggests more non-emotional action on the part of parents, from providing a good breakfast and quiet study time to making sure the kid attends school regularly.

Really getting back to basics

Even in school districts with excellent public schools, parents are choosing to homeschool:

The Los Rios subdivision in east Plano is served by some of the best public schools in Collin County. Dooley Elementary has been rated an exemplary school four of the last five years. Redbook magazine once picked Plano East Senior High, which sits in the neighborhood's northeast corner, as the best high school in Texas.

Several neighborhood families have formed a home-schooling association, and by their account, at least 16 Los Rios families are schooling their 25 school-age children at home. There are more than 1,000 families with children in the neighborhood.

It's not just about quality of education, but about teaching children what is "real." Homeschooling is one way to ward off what some parents call the "want monster" - "the relentless pursuit of more 'stuff' – clothes, cars, trips" that are so often a part of two-income households with children in public schools. Homeschoolers are often living on one income, so life gets reduced to the basics. And homeschoolers like it that way.

Mrs. Clay, for example, used to be on the corporate fast track with Texas Health Resources, where she negotiated multimillion-dollar contracts with hospitals. Her husband, James, is a hospital administrator, but with the decision to home school, their five-bedroom, three-bathroom home is on the market. The family's high-speed Internet line is a thing of the past. So, too, is cable TV.

"It's forced us to take a look at what's real in life," said Mrs. Clay, 32. "It's real simple. To me, home schooling is real. It's authentic."

Chicago's new crime wave

Teachers in Chicago are suffering from a rise in student violence:

Janet Pena-Davis is barely 5 feet tall, but the veteran English teacher doesn't scare easily. One day, though, a girl arrived 15 minutes late to class--and full of attitude. When the girl took out a snack and began to talk loudly to a friend, Pena-Davis asked the student to leave the class and try again the next day.

Pena-Davis was able to duck the can. But as the teacher went to close the classroom door, the girl dragged her into the hall and began to beat her--punching and scratching, pulling off her glasses and tugging viciously at her hair. The attack was enough to terrify Pena-Davis, 55, who walked out of Austin High School that day and never went back.

These kinds of stories are adding up to overwhelming numbers in Chicago:

Reports of verbal and physical assaults against teachers by students have risen during the last four years, the data show. From Sept. 1, 2003, through the end of February, 970 such incidents were reported in elementary and high schools--an increase of 25 percent from the 777 reported during the same period a year earlier.

These reports include battery, threats of violence, assault, vandalism, theft and sex crimes. In cases of physical assault only, the increase is about 17 percent over the previous year.

School officials claim the change reflects higher reporting, not more incidents. Teachers reply that they aren't even reporting all the incidents, so the true assault rate is even higher. For example, Ms. Pena-Davis was told not to file an assault report on the young woman who attacked her.

Teachers are being attacked for doing their jobs, and they aren't getting the support they need from school officials. Security guards, closed-circuit TV systems, and the like might help catch attackers after the fact, but it won't prevent the "cultural meltdown" that has resulted in daily abuse of teachers. Parents aren't stopping it; they say they're afraid of their own kids. Principals aren't doing enough; one violent first-grader, whose assault left a teacher unable to open her mouth for four months, was suspended for only one day, and the principal refused the teacher's request for counseling for the student.

Blaming teachers for "lack of classroom discipline" doesn't cut it when principals refuse to back teachers up, schools aren't able to apply standards, and students who assault others get a slap on the wrist. In this day of zero-tolerance for toy weapons, can't schools figure out how to implement more severe punishments for assaults?

Providing inspiration without information

Philadelphia students, if you're having a problem with standardized tests, you're not alone:

Half of the district's middle school teachers who took tests to become certified as highly qualified under the federal No Child Left Behind law failed, district results show. Math teachers did the worst: Nearly two out of every three failed that exam, while more than half flunked the science test, 43 percent the English exam, and 34 percent the social-studies test.

Philadelphia teachers failed the test at a far greater rate than those in the rest of the state...

Allegedly, this is no "wimp test," and alternate criteria for certification are being considered, but it's difficult to understand how Philly's teacher could be effective if they don't have mastery of the content material. What's more, the particular certification rules in Pennsylvania mean that elementary-certified teachers can teach middle-school classes:

In Pennsylvania, elementary teachers are certified through sixth grade and secondary teachers from seventh through 12th grades. But for schools that span both elementary and secondary grades - middle schools - the state has allowed elementary-certified teachers to teach all grades.

Most middle school principals in Philadelphia have preferred elementary-certified teachers to maximize scheduling flexibility; for instance, a math-certified teacher could teach only math, while elementary-certified teachers could teach all subjects. More than 90 percent of Philadelphia middle school teachers are elementary certified.

Needless to say, certain teachers think the certification tests are "not fair:"

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers says it is pleased that the district plans to offer a test-preparation program for teachers, but questions the fairness of the testing requirement. "We have so many middle school teachers who have been doing a terrific job all along. They've been doing it for years," said Arlene Kempin, chief personnel officer for the teachers' union.

Doing it for years doesn't mean they've been doing it well. The Philadelphia test scores would suggest that middle-school teachers haven't been doing a bang-up job.

...Nick Perry, a science teacher at Conwell Middle School, said one test was not an accurate measure of a teacher.

"Content sometimes is really overrated. A teacher is like an artist, a coach. He has to be able to inspire children," said Perry, a seventh-grade science teacher, who has a master's degree in environmental science and the necessary certification.

Isn't that who you want teaching your kids - someone who thinks that content is "overrated?" And just how inspirational can a coach be if he doesn't know the rules of the game?

Free video to a good home

For the first person (from Canada or the US) to email me at kimberly at kimberlyswygert dot com, I have a free VHS copy of "Multiplication Rock." It's in great shape; I just don't need it now that I've ordered the DVD collection that includes all 46 songs. I figured someone out there might want it for a classroom or for their kid's VCR. No charge to you for S&H; just shoot me an email with your address and I'll send it out.

Fighting the "new-new" math

Parents in Utah have been fighting an ineffective math program, Connected Mathematics, and at their website, Kids Do Count, you can read all about it. Don't miss this background page which effectively critiques the NCTM 1999 Standards (I've written about those before), and notes that former NCTM president John Dossey believes kids should get full credit for getting wrong answers in the "right" way. And, as KidsDoCount notes, a curriculum review provided on Connected Math's own website notes that the program does not put eighth-graders on track to reach calculus by 12th grade, nor does it promote a fundamental proficiency in math.

KidsDoCount linked to a CSM series from 2000 about the parental revolution against the "new-new" math, which provided this execrable example from an "exemplary" sixth-grade Connected Math program:

In Plano, Texas, parents whose children were using the "exemplary" Connected Math program questioned sixth-grade assignments like: "Choose a whole number between 10 and 100 that you especially like. In your journal, record your number, explain why you chose that number, list three or four mathematical things about your number, list three or four connections you can make between your number and the world."

Petitions began circulating to remove the program. When that failed, six parents filed suit last August alleging the district is violating their right to direct their children's education.

The KidsDoCount page doesn't seem to have been updated recently, but it's a good read nonetheless.

(Via Mathematically Correct.)

Buried under the weight

Yet another good reason to get "back to basics:"

...Students and parents across the state have complained about the high weight of textbooks and backpacks. And lawmakers are listening. A proposal making its way through the General Assembly calls for the state to study — and set — textbook weight limits in elementary, middle and high school...

Many states, including Tennessee, are monitoring what happens in California, which studied textbook weights statewide and might be the first state to require lighter volumes.

Backpacks with wheels aren't a bad idea, either, although it would be illuminating if the "progressive education" crowd asked themselves why textbooks now weigh so much more than they used to. When a seventh-grade Algebra textbook can be 882 pages yet still provide an insufficient amount of content coverage and depth, it's time to go back to the drawing board.

Soothing the self-esteem of prisoners

See where the cult of self-esteem gets us? First "child-centered" education, now "inmate-centered" prisons:

Corrections Canada won't let guards at maximum security prisons wear stab-proof vests because it sends a confrontational "signal" to prisoners. "If you have that kind of presence symbolized by (a stab-proof vest), you're sending a signal to the prisoner that you consider him to be a dangerous person," said Tim Krause.

"It interferes with what we call 'dynamic security.' We want staff to talk to prisoners, to see how they're doing."

The guards know how they're doing, and they know the inmates are dangerous. Otherwise, most of them wouldn't be there. Self-protection and open conversation are not mutually exclusive, and it takes a particularly PC-addled sort of brain to want to break down the physical barriers between inmates and guards. Does Krause want to get rid of those nasty old bars and locks too, on the basis that those might interfere with "dynamic security?"

You mean there isn't such a thing as "duck tape?"

The 100 most often mispronounced words and phrases in the English language. Amusing and informative. Glad to know I'm not the only one driven mad by "axe," forte," and "realator."

Finding the happy medium for homework

Is the solution to more "quality time" at home less homework? The article starts off with a mother who thinks her family life is suffering because of homework, but then points out that she may be the exception, rather than the rule:

Most mornings, the Shurtz kids gather around their Clearfield breakfast table for a few minutes of reading and discussion about religion, relationships, even sex. Rena Shurtz says it's the only time she and her five teenagers can study subjects she believes are just as important as the sometimes-voluminous amounts of English, math and science homework that fill their evenings...

A 2003 study by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research group, found that homework levels have remained relatively flat since the 1980s...the study also found that most students, including high-schoolers, spend less than an hour a day on homework...

Some of the more vocal complainers are students enrolled in AP classes, but one research sensibly points out that no one's twisting their arms:

"At the high school level, what you're talking about is a degree of choice," [Duke University research professor Harris Cooper] says. "The students who take five honors and AP courses ought to be doing so in full recognition that they're going to be doing five hours of homework a night."

A good rule of thumb, Cooper says, is 10 minutes of homework per day, per grade level. For example, an average third-grader should do 30 minutes a night, an average sixth-grader an hour and a 12th-grader two hours.

Students who do this much work are not only helping to boost their K12 grades, but are also learning important self-discipline for college. And one school has invited parents in to help them help their kids:

That's why third-grade teacher Jamin Burton launched a weekly homework night -- for parents.

The Spanish-speaking teacher at Beehive Elementary in Kearns recognized that parents of his non-English-speaking students struggled to help them with their reading, spelling and math assignments. So on Tuesday nights, he invites parents to his classroom for a 90-minute session to go over homework and other difficulties they may have with English.

More time on the LSAT

Abby Rothberg, who sued for more time on the LSAT to accommodate her learning disability has won her case, thanks to a federal judge in Colorado:

The LSAC refused three times to give Rothberg more time despite the recommendations of two psychologists who tested her and determined that she is smart, but slowed by her difficulty in processing visual information and performing tasks based on that information.

[Rothberg] realized she had a learning disability when she was in the second grade and her classmates could read, but she couldn't. She has had tutoring, extra time to finish tests and other assistance throughout her school years in Colorado and at Syracuse University. When she took one test for college admission without seeking extra time, she scored below average. When she took another test with extra time, her score was above average.

This portrait in the Daily Orange is pretty sympathetic to the plaintiff:

Diagnosed with a learning disability, she has a handicap that impairs her to complete the exam in the amount of time her peers would need. It in no way, however, limits her ability to perform well on the exam should she be given appropriate accommodations...

Providing Rothberg with this time does not in any way provide her with an unfair advantage to perform on the test, nor does it guarantee she will be hired as a lawyer or succeed as one.

The LSAT is intended to predict first-year law school grades, so this accommodation also doesn't guarantee Rothberg will be able to finish law school, unless she receives this accommodation for every test she takes.

At some point, Rothberg will not be given the breaks she has been afforded thus far; but that can take place when she is in law school or in the courtroom. On a standardized test, which is itself suspect in its ability to test the taker's skills, Rothberg deserves the opportunity to perform her best. Until she is applying to law firms and must perform in a real world job setting, she deserves the rights that the law has created for her.

Gee, no bias there. The LSAT is "suspect" in its ability to test skills? Really. Would you care to back that up with some data? Would you care to explain how, if the LSAT is a bad test, we can assume that an extended-time LSAT - which is by definition a modification that may fundamentally alter the nature of what's being tested, and one that has not been validated - will somehow be a good test? Rothberg will have her accommodated LSAT, but there's little evidence to support the predictive validity of her score.

And if, as this author suggests, Rothberg will find herself at a disadvantage in job interviews and in the courtroom, why should she go to law school? Does it make sense to give a would-be lawyer accommodations for something she's going to be required to do on a daily basis - process lots of dense, heavy prose - when the real world won't provide that accommodation, thus leaving her fewer opportunities to practice law?

I blogged this in January; it looks like LSAC tried to argue alternative (a) that I theorized, but failed.

Update: Commenting on an another accommodated-testing post a few days back, Devoted Reader Wacky Hermit says what I'm thinking:

A blind person in the intellectual workforce can be just as productive as a non-blind person, given the right computer software. But a person who always needs time-and-a-half to accomplish every thinking task, who cannot be asked to speed up and cannot be assisted other than giving more time? Somehow I don't think that would make a person a productive employee. Someone like that would be better off being encouraged to go into a field that shows off his or her strengths, and doesn't rely on his or her weaknesses.

Being a slow reader is a weakness in the legal field.

"Don't do them any favors"

Reform K12 has got a great post up that should be read by every teacher who is afraid to give low grades and by every administrator who thinks that being "child-centered" requires a lack of standards. He also provides the mind-bogglingly obvious (to most of us, anyway) approach for giving students honest, meaningful grades:

Here's our approach. At the beginning of the term, identify to students exactly what they'll need to do and perform to earn a certain grade. If you've got weighted categories--such as 50% for tests and projects, 25% for homework and classwork, and 25% for quizzes--tell the students what these weights are. Then, on each assignment, test, quiz, or whatever, be sure the students know exactly how they scored.

Here's the really tough part: At the end of the term, assign the children grades based upon their numerical average. In other words, give the kid the grade he or she earned.

Meanwhile our child-centered teacher readers are saying, "No, you can't do it that way!"

Traditional educators have an easy reply to this complaint by the progressives: Grades are not (and never have been) a measure of a child's worth! If Johnny's report card has a D in Mathematics, that doesn't mean Johnny the human being is worth a D, it simply means that Johnny's performance in the knowledge and skills of Mathematics is worth a D!

Insert "test scores" in place of "grades" in that last paragraph, and you also have the traditional educators' response to complaints about standardized tests. Inflated grades and standardized test scores that are ignored or downplayed are favors that students don't need.

Testing is not the enemy

Samuel J. Green Middle School (LA) is a failing school that may be taken over by the state if students perform badly on the LEAP and Iowa tests this week. Now the principal, Paulette Walker, is also in hot water for passing out prayers with the test booklets that call on God to help kids defeat the enemy - i.e., the tests:

School officials will decide whether to reprimand Principal Paulette Walker after investigating her distribution of the prayer this year and another prayer notice to teachers last year, Assistant Superintendent Matt George said Thursday...He supervises the district which includes Samuel J. Green Middle School, where the prayer was given out Monday with test booklets for two standardized tests.

The prayer, which had errors in grammar and punctuation, states: "I receive your help faith, knowing that through you I shall do valiantly, for you are the one who treads down my enemies.(LEAP, Iowa)".

Emphasis mine. Teachers at Green got a "special announcement" last year from Walker that was similarly error-ridden, and which stated that, "Education in New Orleans, is in trouble." I'll say. I can't decide which is worse - the statement that testing is the enemy, the principal's attitude that prayer was necessary for her students to pass tests, or the principal being unable to convey her religious thoughts without grammatical errors.

Well, at least they're above average in something

Is "overage student" the new politically-correct educational buzzword? Well, it must be in NYC, where they're using the term a lot; almost half of all ninth-graders are "overage," meaning they're older than 14 and most likely have repeated at least one grade:

Students are getting old in the ninth grade - 5,569 students are already 17 years of age or older, according to shocking new statistics released by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. These students - 5 percent of all ninth-graders last year - are three years "overage" for that grade. The typical entering high school freshman is 14 years old.

More than one-quarter of the city's 1 million schoolkids - 277,647 students - are overage. Nearly one in 10 students is overage in the first grade, and 15 percent in the second grade. By third grade, nearly one in five students is overage; by sixth grade, it's one in four.

Hence the new retention policy for third-graders. Some of the problem can apparently be explained by students who are recent immigrants and move up the educational ladder more slowly. But when 5% of your ninth-graders are going to be voting if their birthdays occur before November this year, there's a problem.

Where algebra fits into the economic equation

Remember my previous post about the requests to remove the algebra requirement from the California high school exit exam? Lance Izumi accuses Californian schools of dumbing down the tests and most likely depriving their high school graduates of future computer-based jobs:

In communist China, computer software colleges are being built at 35 universities around the country...Within three years, the software college at Peking University will have 3,800 students specializing in subjects such as integrated-circuit design and information security. Much of the instruction will be in English. In China, 58 percent of the degrees awarded in 2002 were in the physical sciences and engineering, compared to just 17 percent in the U.S...

And our response to China's threat to overtake us in technology development?

So how is California, home of Silicon Valley, meeting this foreign challenge? The latest trend has been for school districts to plead with the state to waive the algebra requirement for high-school seniors to graduate this year. Judy Pinegar, manager of waivers at the state Department of Education, says that the number of districts asking the state for waivers “is increasing algebraically” and that the Department is “getting tons of calls.” State lawmakers will likely introduce legislation to postpone the algebra requirement for at least one year.

Isn't it rude of Ms. Pinegar to use the term "algebraically" when so many California high schools have admitted that they cannot teach those concepts within four years? Isn't it a given that many of their students won't understand that term?

Mr. Uzumi's conclusion?

The global economic race will be won in part by the quality of education of countries’ workforces. Too many of our educators whine about diverse student populations and racially biased tests, while our foreign competitors focus on high expectations and merit. If our educators fail to see the bigger economic picture, they are consigning our nation to a very scary future.

Gives new meaning to the phrase "Fairy Tale"

A book on gay marriage - suitable for school libraries and kids age 6 and up?

The parents of a first-grader are fuming over the book their daughter brought home from the school library: a children's story about a prince whose true love turns out to be another prince. Michael Hartsell said he and his wife, Tonya, couldn't believe it when Prince Bertie, the leading character in "King & King," waves off a bevy of eligible princes before falling for Prince Lee.

"What might be inappropriate for one family, in another family is a totally acceptable thing," said Elizabeth Miars, Freeman's principal.

Way to espouse moral equivalence, Ms. Miars! But by that reckoning, shouldn't there be books in the library which state unequivocally that marriage should be forbidden to gays, because some families - like the Hartsells - consider that "totally acceptable"? And why haven't we heard this type of defense from schools when it comes to Christmas songs and decorations?

I should note here that I don't have an opinion one way or another on the legality of gay marriage. I just find it ridiculous when the double standard of "open-mindedness" is displayed in the defense of politically-correct ideas; we all know that sort of excuse wouldn't fly with children's books espousing politically-incorrect ideas.

Dadgum, Joanne Jacobs came up with a snappier post title again! I keep trying, but she always beats me at that game.

Big changes in Washington State

A "hotly contested measure" allowing charter schools and overhauls of the state' standardized tests were among the education bills signed by Washington Governor Gary Locke this week:

Perhaps of most interest to schoolchildren and parents will be the changes to the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. Before House Bill 2195 passed, the class of 2008 faced the prospect of having just one chance to pass the 10th-grade WASL to graduate. The law now allows as many as four more chances to take the test, as well as alternative tests.

"Not everybody performs at their best in a traditional, No. 2 pencil, sweaty-palms testing scenario," said Rep. Joe McDermott, (D-Seattle), who sponsored the measure.

Well, they'd better learn to perform their best in that scenario, at least within five tries. And I want to hear more about these "alternative" tests.

The bill also dumps the listening portion of the test for fourth-, 7th- and 10th-graders, and cancels the planned tests in social studies, arts and physical education. That leaves the existing tests for reading, writing and math, along with an upcoming science exam.

The charter school bill allows for as many as 45 charter schools over the next six years. It also allows districts to convert failing schools into charter schools, and, in extreme cases, would authorize the state superintendent of public instruction to force a failing school to convert.

Sharkblog has been all over the charter school story in Washington.

When do English learners become "fluent"?

Recent results from the California English Language Development Test show that 43% of the English Language Learners in the state are performing at an early or fully advanced level in English, up from 25 percent two years ago. But officials are in no hurry to reclassify these students as "fluent" in English:

Yet even as nearly half the state's English learners tested at advanced levels, districts across the state were less than eager to officially reclassify them as fluent. Last year, just 7.7 percent of English language learners were re-labeled as "fluent English proficient"...

Districts do have some incentive to keep kids classified as English learners. There are pots of money -- public and private -- available for districts with large numbers of English learners. And districts with a significant percentage of English learners are not expected to score as high on standardized tests.

The "best black" syndrome

Earlier this year, USA Today ran a feature honoring the 32 college student finalists in the American Advertising Federation's annual "Most Promising Minority Students Program." Jeff Jacoby wonders why the AAF, and USA Today, weren't honest about the true message this sends, which is, "For a minority, you're pretty smart":

William F. Buckley once remarked, upon being told that Lillian Hellman was America's finest female playwright, that this was on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita. Perhaps the 32 students hailed in the ad really are gifted whiz kids with a genius for advertising — but when the competition excludes more than 70 percent of the field, how would one know?...

Once upon time it was racists who insisted that "nonwhite" was a synonym for "intellectually deficient." Today that attitude is promoted most emphatically by the defenders of affirmative action, a system rooted in the belief that blacks and certain other minorities can't hope to win if they have to compete on a level playing field.

Horrifying news in Montana

Three boys - one fifth-grader and two second-graders - brought a loaded handgun to school as part of a plot to shoot and stab a third-grade girl to death. The Billings Gazette article names the three boys (I thought juvenile offenders could not be named in news article), who hid the gun in a sandbox:

Sheriff Tim Fulton said the boys told investigators they intended to harm the young girl because she had teased two of them. The plot was uncovered late Wednesday morning, about a half-hour before recess, when another student alerted school officials...

"From the interviews (with investigators) I don't believe that they fully comprehended the full significance of their actions," Hayworth said. "But they understood that this was going to bring harm to her … and they intended that."

Sickening. I rarely sympathize with criminals, but second-graders? It's hard not to feel compassion for them (and anger at their parents). If the kids are this misguided now, what's a stint in juvenile detention going to do to them?

GrrrRRR

THIS is the most retarded thing I've ever heard. I'm giving a "celebrate the Spring Equinox" party on Saturday, people! And now, this.

I'm going home. And I have to be here tomorrow, so the weather better not suck.

Grpmh.

Protesting the PSSA

A minor student revolt in Pennsylvania:

Mennies was one of 25 students who traveled to Harrisburg Wednesday to lobby state legislators about the need to de-emphasize the importance of standardized tests. The group of students, known as Students for Legislative Accountability...included students of various academic achievement levels from each high school grade.

The students, who met with 10 legislators or members of their staffs, were well-prepared. They offered the lawmakers their voices in face-to-face meetings. They presented them with a packet of information that included written personal opinions, statistics and various newspaper articles about their concerns.

And we all know how balanced newspaper articles are when it come to testing, right? This article is typical; I noted that one student quoted has dyslexia, another student said that the 3 to 7 days needed for testing makes a huge impact on students, and yet another complained that tests are just a "glimpse" of learning. True, but the best possible glimpse for the purpose.

One students complained about the effect that tests have on the curriculum, but if their teachers can't teach basic math without teaching only what's on the test, isn't there a problem with the quality of teaching as well? These students sound genuinely concerned that their curriculum has been dumbed down, but the test doesn't require that.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire?

One of the problems with tests that assess students at the state-, school- or district-level only is that if individual scores are low-stakes for the students, motivation is low. But this is not the solution to that problem:

Kentucky students might soon find their statewide test scores on their school transcripts — there for everyone from colleges to potential employers to see.

In the past the panel has said the scores shouldn't be included on transcripts because subjects are not tested in each grade level, making it difficult to get a complete picture of each student's performance, state officials said.

At the very least, students who took the CATS under low-stakes rules shouldn't now see those scores on their transcripts. Parts of the CATS include writing portfolios graded by school and district personnel, which is pretty subjective and unlikely to be reliable at the student level. And if colleges or employers are unfamiliar with the test and there's no proof that CATS predicts either college or job performance, the scores are useless to them.

Reforms working in NYC?

More students are taking and passing the Regents Exams:

Regents exams, which until then had been required only of college-bound students, now are taken by almost all high-schoolers.

The numbers of students across the state taking the Regents English test, for example, rose from 114,000 in 1996 to 183,000 last year, according to data released by the Education Department on Wednesday. The number passing with at least a 65 increased from 91,000 to 140,000.

Supporters of reform say this shows tougher standards don't necessarily mean more dropouts. And while Hispanic and black students are more likely to drop out, those who stay in pass the Regents exams at almost the same rate as other students.

Sing it with me if you know the words

One Virginia teacher is helping students cram for the Standards of Learning by writing musicals:

...Rockhill music teacher Anna Ames said Stafford's large military population means new students often find themselves facing a test on material they've had just weeks or months to learn. A Georgia native herself, Ames decided to write a musical, "Discover Virginia," to help the school's fourth-graders prepare for the history exam by setting facts to upbeat melodies.

So far, it seems to be working. Classroom teachers have overhead students humming and murmuring the educational tunes. "Teachers have told me the kids will be singing during the test," Ames said, laughing.

I remember in sixth grade we all had to memorize and individually recite the Preamble to the Constitution. The only tough part was managing to say it, rather than singing it to the Schoolhouse Rock tune.

Do failing ninth-graders justify retaining more third-graders?

That's the question at the heart of this controversy:

Thirty-seven percent of the city's ninth-graders last year are repeating the grade, a failing rate that outstrips the state average of 15 percent, according to education data released yesterday.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the figure proves that he was right to push a contentious policy for holding back failing third-graders, a plan the Panel for Educational Policy passed on Monday, hours after three of its members were suddenly replaced.

Is the solution just to offer ninth-graders more summer-school course options, or does this suggest that educators in the earlier grades aren't doing what's necessary to prepare kids for high school?

More trouble with exit exams

Just yesterday I posted about some issues surrounding legal challenges to Alaska's high school exit exam. This morning on Fark I see the source item being discussed, and a Farker noted that:

A group of parents are suing in Ontario 'cause their kids failed the standardized literacy test. One parent on the ol' CBC admitted his daughter was illiterate... but he's still suing.

Premier Dalton McGuinty says he's open to changes that would make the test more "sensible," whatever that means.

The desperate need for psychometricians

"Hire Ed," an article in the March 2004 issue of Washington Monthly, does a great job of presenting both the pros and cons of NCLB in an unbiased manner. What's more, this is the first article I've seen that emphasizes both the importance of psychometricians and the scarcity of them:

You might expect...that California would have been in a good position to handle a key NCLB provision, that each state rank the proficiency of each of its schools. Instead, when that provision kicked in last year, California stumbled..."It was chaos," says Bill Padia, who heads the [DOE's] policy and evaluation division.

The problem, it turned out, was that the law required the policy and evaluation division to make the calculations much faster than it had ever done before, using an assessment formula many times more complex than it was used to...And because the NCLB law has begun to create intense demand for a limited pool of experienced and knowledgeable testing experts, some of Padia's best people had been poached by testing companies and affluent school systems that could offer higher salaries. Once two-thirds of his 31 staffers had held doctorates, but by the time of the NCLB debacle last summer, only two did, one of whom was Padia himself...

At the end of the article, in the midst of the suggestions for helping NCLB work comes this stunning paragraph:

It is almost impossible to exaggerate just how unprepared these departments are for the task, or how vital the federal government's role in preparing them will be. To take just one example, each state will need teams of specially trained statisticians to oversee the development and administration of state tests. This is crucial not just to improve the very low quality of many tests currently in use, but also to avoid the kind of errors that have befallen California and other states in the last six months. Right now, however, the nation's education schools produce just 36 graduates with these skills each year. These testing experts are the equivalent of Arabic-speaking U.S. soldiers and spies in Iraq: We simply don't have enough of them, and the lack of such talent is costing us dearly. Washington needs to mount a crash effort to create that talent.

Emphasis mine. I've been saying this for a while; psychometric organizations have been addressing it as well. Efforts have been made to recruit more people to the field of psychometrics, but it's slow going. We desperately need more people in the field, and we need ones who are willing to put up with the (relatively) high stress and low pay that accompanies jobs in state-level education departments.

The paragraph above is stunning in part because the media description of tests tend to be so thoughtlessly and thoroughly negative that readers could be forgiven for deciding that psychometricians are hateful, bigoted people who deliberately create baffling, biased items that are guaranteed to be too hard for minority students. And who would want to be one of those? In order to see a rise in the number of psychometricians, there needs to be a change in their public image; this article is a start.

Nora learns a lesson

From DallasNews comes this review of a new children's book:

"Think globally, act locally" is a slogan that could apply to The Report Card, by Andrew Clements (Simon and Schuster, $15.95). Mr. Clements is an author and former teacher... His latest tale questions the importance of grades and standardized tests.

Nora carefully calculates ways to earn straight "D's" on her report card so she can remain with her friends. That draws a lot of attention to her, and she tries to use that attention to prove how arbitrary grades are.

Except for the fact that, you know, Nora's friends presumably aren't capable of making the A's they would need to be in her class (this is similar to the "we were able to make perfect score with test prep so that proves the tests measure nothing" argument). Nora may be smart, but not smart enough to realize that it's a whole lot easier to fake dumb than to fake smart.

When she encourages half the fifth grade to fail a standardized test, action must be taken. One of the surprising lessons she learns is that many teachers are as frustrated with standardized tests as she is.

Really? Nora must not read newspapers, which at times seem to be endless streams of teachers complaining about tests. And isn't a bit, I don't know, condescending for a smart kid to suggest deliberately failing to other kids, some of whom presumably struggled to understand the material?

The reviews on Amazon, though, suggest that the book is better than this review would indicate; for one thing, Clements doesn't pretend to have all the answers to the controversy surrounding testing in schools.

When are exams discriminatory?

A federal class-action lawsuit against Alaska's exit exam was filed yesterday:

The lawsuit charges that Alaska's exit exam discriminates against students with disabilities, making it difficult -- or impossible -- for them to receive a diploma. The complaint said the state has created widespread confusion by repeatedly changing its regulations for disabled students and what modifications in testing conditions they can receive.

Under the current rules, the lawsuit argues, more than two-thirds of the state's disabled high school seniors will not graduate in June.

I agree that the accommodations issue needs to be resolved. If I were a parent whose child had to have items read to them all through their schooling, I'd be upset if that accommodation was not included on the exit exam. But one key point being left out here is whether accommodations change the nature of what's being tested.

A student who is visually disabled cannot read printed material no matter how smart she is, and it's not changing the nature of a reading test to have someone read the items to her. But when the disabilities become more amorphous, like ADD and learning disabilities, I no longer have confidence that the accommodated form of the test, such as a test read aloud, is measuring the same thing as it would be in its unaccommodated format. Thus, one can argue that student with non-physical disabilities are not being held to the same standards as non-disabled students; this makes me wonder how on earth we can claim that a high school diploma is meaningful if we're willing to different set of standards for it for different students.

And I'm very suspicious about such lawsuits when I read things like this:

But many parents and advocacy groups say such exams illegally discriminate against special education students, immigrants and minorities, who have disproportionately low passing rates.

This tendency to lump together special education students (who presumably cannot learn more than a certain amount), immigrants (who presumably have just not had enough time to show what they can learn), and minorities (who tend to have problems learning, but there's no consensus as to why), and then present these charges in an article about disabled students, is a real problem. The issue of accommodations can, and should, be discussed without random charges of discriminations being introduced; the fact that special ed students, immigrants, and minorities may do worse on these exams has nothing to do with the accommodations issue.

A printed test would discriminate against a blind student, because no matter how smart that student is, she can't read the material. But a test does not "discriminate" against test takers who have not mastered the material but have the physical capability of doing so.

An apple a day (and high intelligence) keeps the doctor away

One social phenomenon that is hard to ignore is that wealth and health tend to go hand in hand. Those with more money often enjoy better health, and conventional wisdom says that this is mainly, or only, because in our society, those with more money have better access to healthcare. But one researcher is suggesting that intelligence is the third factor that is connected to both wealth and health:

In two recent scientific papers, researcher Linda Gottfredson proposes that rather than poverty causing ill health (and, generally, lower IQ scores) among lower social classes, intelligence disparities may underlie class differences both in wealth and health.

Regarding health, general intelligence may be a major cause of that difference, she contends. While so far it's unproven, "I think it's a stronger candidate than anything else that's been produced so far."

Her theories about this are fascinating:

Dr. Gottfredson, however, sees abundant evidence suggesting that intelligence differences may explain the puzzling gap – which exists, she notes, across different time periods, nations, health-care systems and even diseases. For instance, she says, the higher people are on the socioeconomic ladder, the higher they tend to score on tests of general intelligence, or g – a mental agility that includes skills such as reasoning and learning in all sorts of situations.

Dr. Gottfredson argues that taking care of one's health can be viewed as an increasingly complex, lifelong job...Even if all patients had the same medical care and resources, some would exploit them better than others to guard their health, she says. "The reason is that people differ in their ability to learn information, to understand the information that's provided to them, and their inclination and ability to go seek out information, understand what's relevant," she says.

In other words, even if people with little money had unlimited access to healthcare, they would still be limited to the degree that low intelligence lowered their ability to navigate the health-care system, decide how to best care for themselves, make judgments about health-care issues, and create a lifelong plan for good health. Those with higher intelligence may be more likely to work at less-risky jobs, but they're also more likely to quit smoking. And regular observers of shows like Cops have always known there's a link between intelligence and accident prevention. (Joanne Jacobs provides a link to a prime example of bad health being directly attibutable to stupid decisions. Money may cover healthcare costs in this case, but it certainly won't stop someone from making this kind of decision in the future.)

Throwing more money at the problem isn't necessarily the solution. And when one study has shown that forty-two percent of patients surveyed didn't understand the directions for taking medication on an empty stomach, the suggestion that "health literacy" is as connected to intelligence as "reading literacy" makes sense.

Read the entire article - there's more data to suggest a link between intelligence and health, an explanation of the "correlation does not mean causation" concept (hoorah!), and a few suggestions, included changing the health care structure so that doctors would have more information about patient intelligence before giving medications and creating healthcare plans.

The fine line between cheating and "helping"

Two Florida teachers are under fire; both have allegedly helped students too much on the FCAT. One teacher has been dismissed, but parents are rallying around the other.

A Gator Run Elementary teacher is losing his job because officials believe he gave students answers when they took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test last spring. But a popular teacher at Virginia Shuman Young Elementary in Fort Lauderdale -- also accused of giving students too much help on the FCAT -- was the object of a support march by outraged parents who want her back in the classroom...

Prosser originally told a testing official that he had allowed students to change wrong answers, and even ''guided'' them to the right answers. But he later denied the charges, saying some kids were just angry about the amount of homework he gave them and some parents were ''out to get'' him.

Changing your story - never a good plan. And parents certainly don't seem "out to get" the other teacher who's been accused:

Parents from Virginia Shuman Young Elementary marched several blocks from their campus to the board's administrative offices to protest teacher Terina Bruening's reassignment to the book depository.

''Mrs. Bruening is the epitome of teaching students honesty and respect,'' said parent Rosa Santana, who also told board members that Bruening transformed her daughter into an Ivy League-hopeful.

So what does that mean? They don't believe their own kids? Bruening may play dodge ball during recess and communicate with the kids a great deal, but that doesn't mean that misguided compassion didn't drive her to give kids extra chances on the FCAT.

Dumbing down the tests

The Sacramento Bee notes that, due to "confusion among some school districts," the algebra graduation requirement will be waived for California's high school student this year:

Thursday's decision by the state board was welcomed by some educators and attacked by others, including students, who said it sends the wrong message to young people who worked hard to meet the requirement.

"High schools have known for four years that the class of 2004 had to pass an algebra proficiency test or algebra altogether," she said. "The administration should have been looking out for them. And students knew they had to buckle down."

Yes, they did. Despite all the concern shown in this article for students "caught in the middle," bear in mind that those are students who completed four years of high school without ever managing to finish this basic course. Did no one notice that these students weren't moving forward in math at all?

Some districts said they were unaware of the Algebra 1 requirement even though state officials had notified local districts more than once. Others said that when the state postponed the exit exam requirement, they thought algebra also was included.

So this cluelessness is being "rewarded," by pushing kids out of high school with a diploma that will be pretty useless if they plan to pursue higher education or hold a job that requires understanding of math above the eighth-grade level. Way to go, districts.

Even districts that knew the score plan to apply for waivers, presumably because their algebra courses are ineffective enough to require two to three go-rounds:

In San Juan Unified, 4,000 seniors already have passed Algebra 1. Nearly all the seniors currently enrolled in the class are taking the course for the second or third time, school officials said.

Currently, 629 San Juan seniors in 14 comprehensive, continuation and charter schools are enrolled in Algebra 1 or 1B to meet the requirement. Of those seniors, about 150 are special education students.

In other words, 76% of those who didn't manage to master algebra in four years are not special education students. There's no rationale for giving them a pass; the San Juan director's comments about the lack of "extensive tutoring" is ridiculous. And why is everyone bending over backwards to be "fair" to the 13% of San Juan seniors who haven't passed the course, when the other 87% did their work? Is it "fair" to those who succeeded to give everyone the same diploma?

Many educators and students have stressed that most students can pass Algebra 1. "I don't understand people who are still taking algebra their senior year," Sac High's Anderson said. "They have had four years to pass it. That is four years to understand the concept of balancing equations and solving for X."

And the legislators are already trying to get involved, in hopes of making things worse:

Meanwhile, two state legislators are considering introducing legislation to postpone the algebra graduation requirement for at least one year. Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he wants to make sure that no student is deprived of a diploma without ample notification of the algebra standard and adequate opportunity to pass the class. He said he has been discussing the matter with Sen. Charles Poochigian, R-Fresno.

Yeah, we can't have students who don't understand high-school math being "deprived" of that piece of paper that will be of such service to them. This confusion of the diploma itself with the skills behind it - as though the diploma, and not the coursework, confers understanding and mastery - never fails to astonish me.

Back on the East Coast, a Florida legislator wants to know if the FCAT was dumbed down:

Senate Minority Leader Ron Klein of Boca Raton said he has fielded many calls from teachers who believe this year's FCAT is considerably easier than last year's when thousands of third-graders failed and were retained.

States contract with testing companies, which create questions that are tested to determine their validity. Tests use new and repeat questions, so that they have a similar degree of difficulty each year, said Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute, which has studied standardized testing.

Anyone got any inside information on this? Certainly, a heavy reliance on repeat items jeopardizes test security; copies of old tests can be used to study for the new test, and that sort of cheating would explain the testing behavior.

Why are students nervous about this exam?

Los Angeles sophomores are tackling the California High School Exit Exam for the first time:

Thousands of Los Angeles Unified 10th-graders will spend today and Wednesday taking the California High School Exit Exam -- a test they must pass before they can earn their diplomas in 2006...

The exam debuted in 2001, replacing a basic-skills test. But when the first round of scores turned out lower than expected, the state Board of Education postponed using it as a graduation requirement until 2006. For most of the state's 500,000 sophomores -- representing the Class of 2006 -- today will be their first try at passing the test, which includes both math and language-arts sections.

I'll be eagerly awaiting the results, especially because of this line:

While most of the questions are based on eighth-grade material, only 59 percent of last year's sophomores passed the math portion and 78 percent of students passed the language arts section in sample tests.

Emphasis mine. I've been reporting pretty consistently that this exam is at the 10th-grade level, but further investigation shows that while the English portion is geared towards concepts that can appear in classes up to 10th grade, the math portion is sixth- and seventh-grade math, and Algebra I (I should have paid closer attention to the CA high school student who commented on this post.) The math portion has the lower passing score (55% of 90 items) and is made up of multiple-choice items only. Study guides can be seen here; only 12 items relate to Algebra I, and those items are quite simple.

(And don't even get me started on their statistics items, which have the least-distracting incorrect options I've ever seen. The only way they could help the students along more would be to include bright red arrows that point to the correct answers.)

How does mastery of middle-school math material provide useful information about whether a student deserves a high school diploma? And why are superintendents like Bob Collins saying things like this?

"We've spent a tremendous amount of time building their confidence," he said. "A lot of kids are intimidated by this test."

Why? They're 10th-graders. The passing scores are set between 55 and 60%, depending on the section. The math questions don't go above Algebra I. Students have five chances to pass, one of which is during the summer after their senior year. If these students are intimidated, something is seriously wrong.

What's worse, some principals foresee a future with special diplomas for those students who can't pass:

At Cleveland High School, 42 percent of students passed the math test and 64 passed the English test in 2002-03, before it was a graduation requirement. If that trend continues, Principal Allan Jay Weiner said the state may have to start offering different types of diplomas for students unable to pass the exam.

"We have so many different kids that come here that speak different languages," he said. "It's kind of weird that you come into a country, and you have to take a test, and you can't even read it."

That's why they get five shots at it before graduation time. And if they can't read an eighth-grade level exam, how will they pass higher-level material that is presumably taught in English? Will their special diplomas need to be printed in their native languages so they can read them?

Hurdling the ninth grade barrier

The hurdle appears to be set at the ninth-grade level, as the rate of ninth-graders who don't make it to 10th grade on time (or ever) has tripled in the last 10 years:

The rise in retention and dropout rates has revived and retooled a controversy over whether schools retain students for the right reasons, and whether the shame and frustration of retention is prompting more teenagers to quit school.

Part of retention, say experts, is a growing emphasis on state testing. But racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors figure in, too: Among black, tribal American, and Hispanic students statewide, 1 in 4 now repeats freshman year.

Why is ninth grade key? Because it's usually the first year of high school, when all the issues - cliques, puberty, dating, partying, tougher coursework, etc - that can trip up mediocre students are in full force. Also, students who sit through ninth grade at least twice are often old enough to drop out by that point, and the lure of jobs and the military begins to grow.

In respose, schools are using various methods to smooth the transition:

Many districts are now taking action. Some are starting "academies" that segregate freshmen and give them special attention. In Chicago, the country's third-largest district is discouraging would-be dropouts through waiver forms warning them of the dangers of quitting school. The city is also planning longer classes for kids having trouble in core subjects.

And many school systems are pondering a revamp of the junior high concept to better prepare incoming freshmen. In New York, up to two-thirds of the city's middle schools may be eliminated, making high schools 6th through 12th grades - an effort, in part, to smooth the middle years. In a huge educational overhaul, Indiana will track students more carefully during the high school transition and raise the minimum age that a student can drop out...

New York's plan seems like it could be hell on sixth-graders. And raising the minimum dropout age only masks the problem, I think. What good does it do to make a kid wait until age 17 if school is doing nothing for them?

Rural teachers now have more time to demonstrate expertise

More wiggle room for rural teachers in the NCLB Act:

Under the law, all public school teachers must prove they are "highly qualified" by the end of the 2005-06 school year. That means they must have a bachelor's degree, hold a state teaching license and demonstrate mastery of the subject they teach.

"These policies will help address the unique challenges faced by teachers in rural districts and schools," Education Secretary Rod Paige said Monday. "We know that effective teachers are one of the most crucial factors in student achievement and are needed in every school in America."

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Fighting an uphill battle in San Fran

Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco is surrounded by such a dangerous neighborhood that the school has applied for the funding to pay a full-time grief counselor:

Ask an average class how many students have been affected by shootings near their homes, and half the hands go up. One student talks about a cousin recently shot to death. Another speaks of a family member on life support after a drive-by shooting.

...After a series of shootings in the Bayview district that claimed the lives of eight young people, Dierke became convinced the school needed more counseling help. In January he asked students to practice for a standardized test by writing an essay on safety. The students overwhelmingly told him that they felt safe at school but feared violence outside.

Despite this, Dierke has helped work some magic at the school, which was ordered "reconstituted" under new management in 1991 due to miserable academic ratings. Unconventional tactics were used, such as outside programs to provide social services for the 8% of students who have family members in jail:

Since then, scores have gone up significantly. Truancy is down, with average daily attendance growing to 98.5 percent from 92 percent. The number of students going to Lowell High School, the district's academically selective campus, rose to 26 last year, more than a threefold increase.

Instead, asked what they would do to make their community safer, students pledged to pick up trash, help out at home and not fight. They wrote on the hearts that they would "stop flattening people's car tires" and "not use weapons to kill people in my community" or "not use guns, knives, etc., to kill people."

Given this, I'm amazed to hear that the school manages to help students prepare for the standardized tests. How difficult must it be to get these kids to focus on those tasks?

Chemical test prep

Cornell's student health center conducted a survey on alcohol and drug use. In addition to asking about the many recreational drugs that college students might be expected to use, the surveyors also inquired about the use of popular prescription stimulants to enhance classroom performance:

"Try Adderall‚ it may make a difference," states Richwood Pharmaceuticals, the company that markets and manufactures the prescription drug Adderall. This slogan reigns true for those college students that use Adderall to maintain an alert state during long periods of studying. At Cornell, students claim that not only does the drug alleviate the anxiety felt before a prelim or standardized test, but that it also helps them focus during a long day of studying at the library...

"Just ask around, someone has it [Adderall]," said one student.

Students interviewed for this article referred to it as the "study drug."

Mayor Bloomberg's Risky Business

NYC mayor Bloomberg has pushed the retention proposal through - and, say some, has signed his "death warrant" as well:

The proposal — one of the key components of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to reform the nation's largest school system — became particularly contentious during the past several days as parent groups and political leaders came out to oppose the idea. It was approved by an 8-5 vote Monday.

"A few of the members didn't agree or were afraid they would be pressured by outsiders, politicized, so I replaced them with people who agreed with my views," Bloomberg said after he ordered two of his appointees removed. "This is what mayoral control (of the schools) is all about."

I suppose that's one way to look at it, although some critics say that his methods seem fit for a "Sopranos" episode. Bloomberg's made his challenge to the voters as well:

The Republican mayor has made improving the foundering 1.1 million-student system the focus of his first term and has said repeatedly that if he fails, voters should not cast ballots for him when he runs for re-election in 2005...

"You've turned this into something political," Anthony Sarnikoff, the father of a third-grader, told the panel. "Now we parents are going to make this something political. Parents are a powerful voting bloc, and the mayor has signed his (political) death warrant tonight."

For a man who's courting death, Bloomberg seems surprisingly relaxed; he's surrounding himself with clowns instead of bodyguards.

Update: More from the NYTimes here:

Facing almost certain defeat in his effort to end automatic promotion for third graders, Mr. Bloomberg resorted to firing two of his hand-picked appointees to an educational advisory board to ensure that a new policy preventing the promotion of failing third graders passed.

Whether last night's episode becomes a victory for the mayor with parents and voters depends partly on how his tactics are perceived and at least as much on whether the new policy is a success. The end of social promotion in the third grade is greeted with skepticism from most education experts and has had mixed results in other cities. However, it will be years before this program can be judged in New York, and Mr. Bloomberg faces re-election in 2005.

On a related note, the New York Post gave victims of social promotion some ink:

High-school dropouts now enrolled in GED and job-training programs said they're victims of social promotion. Many of the 17-to-21-year-old students at the second-chance Brooklyn Job Corps Academy said they were promoted to high school unprepared - and now they're paying the price...

"The tests were too hard for me," she said.

Want to bet someone will read this and think, man, those Regents exams have got to go?

Let It Snow - Just kidding! Kidding, I say - oh, heck

It is snowing. Heavily. This is NOT an acceptable weather pattern for almost-Saint-Patrick's Day. Whoever left the snow-generating machine on overnight, please turn it OFF.

And those of you who are dieting, or who have given chocolate up for Lent, have another option for Easter goodies this year. Yummy mozzarella bunnies. Found via Tim Blair, who thought of a great headline for this story.

The littlest critic of the CSAP

Wow, they're really piling on the CSAP today. I'm trying to think of another context in which a 10-year-old refusing to do something is considered newsworthy, and I can't think of one:

Anthony Cummings, 10, said the Colorado Student Assessment Program, or CSAP, has many problems and should be eliminated altogether. With permission from his parents and to the dismay of his principal, he sat and read a book about individual rights under the U.S. Constitution while all of his classmates took the exam last week.

So, he can read, presumably well. Can all of his classmates say the same?

Although the gifted and talented student could easily pass the test, he said he has a problem with how the tests are being administered, how it's being taught at school, and how the schools are unfairly judged by its results...

Cummings said it takes too long to get exam results -- it should be a month instead of a year...He also said it's unfair when the zeros of those who don't take the exam are factored in the school's overall grade...

Smart though he may be, it's really hard to believe that a 10-year-old came up with these arguments - and the idea to sit out the test and call in the reporters - on his own. It's also hard to understand why the reporter simply reprinted Cummings' charges without verifying or rebutting them. If the kid's that smart, why not ask him to back up his arguments?

Simple Google research reveals, for example, that the scores for tests administered during February - April of 2004 will be available to districts in August of 2004, a lag of only three to five months. The article about the 2003 report cards came out in December of 2003, or seven months after the last set of tests. As for the "unfairness" of giving zeros for missing test-takers, why didn't Cummings - or the reporter - suggest an alternative method for holding schools responsible for every student on testing days? Asking the kid to elaborate wouldn't have necessarily made the article more balanced, but it certainly would have been more informative.

Cummings said he knows he's David fighting Goliath...

Really? It's hard to see him as David when he being portrayed so sympethically, and at length, in this newspaper article. After all, the article mentions not only Cummings' concerns, but also the standard boilerplate anti-testing cliches:

Critics of the exam say the tests just show that the schools with a majority of poor children don't perform as well as the schools attended by middle class or wealthy children. They also say teachers in underperforming schools are pressured to teach to the test instead of teaching skills and critical thinking.

Well, supporters of the exam say that the tests show that poor children are getting shortchanged by their schools, and that teachers in underperforming schools have managed to define critical thinking in a way that leaves out mastery of basic skills. Leaders of high-poverty, high-performing schools say rigorous testing is an essential component for keeping kids on track. But the article doesn't mention any evidence contradicting these unnamed critics.

His parents, a theater teacher and a university political science teacher, are supporting him every step of the way.

I know you're all very surprised to hear this.

Update: More gullible publicity for Cummings and Perl here. It's a two-fer of anti-testing cliches!

(A slightly extended version of this was cross-posted to Oh, That Liberal Media.)

Doing his part in the defense of tests

Richard Phelps, an acquaintance of mine who was very supportive when I began this blog, has finally brought his book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing, to fruition. It's been in the works for a few years, and I'm very happy to see that it's now out there for the general public.

Here's a review from Enter Stage Right:

A week doesn't go by, without a mainstream media story on the "horrors" of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.

Or how testing prevents teachers from actually teaching, or prevents students from actually learning, or from having any fun...but I digress.

The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that journalists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.

For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers' unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing...

Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized, high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children's academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. "Objective" is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. "External" means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. "Standardized" means that a test "is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way." And "high stakes" means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful motivational tool. Alternatives such as classroom grades and "portfolios" of work lack the advantages of standardized testing, while being much more vulnerable to manipulation and cheating.

Go forth and purchase. I've already ordered my copy. The book's already gotten 5 reviews on Amazon. Don't miss the comments from the reviewer who gave it only 1 star; she says virtually nothing about the book, choosing instead to relate her personal tale of woe because she didn't receive accommodated tests from some Texas universities:

Confusing rote obedience with intelligence, the authors selectively ignore cases (I and many others) that could not pass our state's standardized exams (now the political vogue) yet maintain a 4.0 average, ironically the mark of excellence. This is not an accident or misprint, but reflects a calculated war against anybody labeled different...

Unlike components for the general degree plan, the 'accommodations' option (regardless of how simple the provision such as a four function calculator, colored overlays etc...) for Texas's higher education testing program is not available at every state institution, wrongfully implying that disability is an 'extra', and reinforcing the idea students with disabilities are not 'real' members of the academic community. Once we are devalued, it is easier to justify overall discrimination against people with disabilities.

What does this have to do with Phelps' book, again?

Update: An archived version of Linda Seebach's review of the book for the Rocky Mountain Times can be found here. She neatly summarizes the motive behind the anti-testing bias so often seen in the media:

The unspoken difficulty with the SAT is not educational, it is political: namely, Asians and whites consistently score on average a couple of hundred points higher than blacks and Hispanics. And it isn't because the tests are biased, any more than scales are biased because they consistently show that men, on average, are heavier than women. Tests predict almost equally well for all races.

Nobody wants testing to reveal these differences, but nobody has any idea how to change them, either, so the only way out is to look for other excuses to lessen the importance of the SAT and other similar tests.

The really tough job

Love these comments by Roy Romer, superintendent of Los Angeles city schools - a job, he claims, is harder than being governor of Colorado or Democratic Party chairman:

Too many Los Angeles high and middle schools are too big. Many have more than 5,000 students. Romer wants schools configured in more manageable units — say, 500 pupils — so teachers can know students for four years "and everybody owns the results." In the Army, Romer says, "if someone can't march, the unit's response is, 'Hey, you're embarrassing us.' " He wants schools to feel similarly implicated in each student's performance.

To those who criticize "teaching to the test," Romer responds: That is what flight schools do. Because we take flying seriously.

Heh.

Managing the classroom with a wink and a smile

Is the real answer to our educational woes hiring only hotties for teaching jobs? Hey, if it would make the students buckle down more and complain less...

Via Joanne Jacobs and Michael Friedman, whose amusingly and aptly named site, Fried Man, goes into more detail about the relationship between beauty and perceived teaching skill. He even has a graph!

According to a recent NBER paper, Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity", by Daniel S. Hamermesh and Amy M. Parker, she was also probably one of my better teachers.

Hamermesh and Parker examined the correlation between faculty members' beauty rankings and their student ratings at University of Austin. As you can see from the graph, the results were striking.

Still, my advice to ugly men considering the field of education is to get plastic surgery or to forget about teaching and go into research.

The study was done only with college professors; wonder if the same effect would appear if high school students were surveyed as well? Does beauty cause students to like professors, or do well-loved professors simply seem more attractive? (Let's have students rate their professor's looks on the first and last days of class, with separate ratings of satisfaction at the end as well, to figure out the answer to that.)

I'd love to know what six independent measures of beauty they used; probably one was a biometric rating of facial feature symmetry, or something like that. There have been plenty of books that have explored this topic; Survival of the Prettiest is one of the most entertaining (yet scientific) choices on this topic. It avoids the tired themes that we're all conditioned by the patriarchy to reward beauty and ignore the ugly by presenting research suggesting that even babies pay more attention to adult faces that have been rated as attractive.

When "friendly numbers" aren't so friendly

Suzy Ronfeldt is avoiding the standard complaint that NCLB and standardized tests remove all creativity and enjoyment from the reading and writing process. She claims, instead, that standardized tests are the reason so many children are bad at math:

In addition to days and days of testing, No Child Left Behind advances the idea of teaching through textbooks and workbooks -- not discussion and discovery. It emphasizes a curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep...Educators must speak up about the value of a different sort of curriculum, one that honors children's wonderful ideas and builds a dynamic dialogue between teacher and child, and between child and child -- especially in mathematics....

If there were no evidence that those days of dynamic dialogue have been producing kids whose knowledge of basic mathematical skills is pretty shaky, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Let me explain. In my math class, we take time for children to write their own story problems as they make sense of 38 minus 19. One child writes a take-away problem: "There are 38 birds in a tree, and 19 flew away. How many are left?" Another writes a comparison subtraction problem: "There are 38 books on the shelf and 19 on the table. How many more books are on the shelf?"

No problem there - I don't know that it necessarily contributes anything to the concept of subtraction of two-digit numbers, but it might.

First, the children share their problems, and we discuss whether they make sense for 38 minus 19. Then the children share their various strategies for solving these problems. One child breaks 19 into "friendly numbers" such as 10 and 9 before she begins subtracting. Another "counts up" from 19 to 38, and another decides to "round" the numbers, subtract them and then compensate for the rounding. All the while, the children are sharing their thinking and reasoning with one another. You won't find this kind of "math talk" in a workbook or a standardized test.

Probably because the "friendly number" and "counting" concepts, while amusing, are the kinds of things that (a) are not required for mastery of the subject, and (b) should be left behind as the child masters ever more sophisticated mathematical skills. And why should kids be required to decide, as a group, whether they've come up with something that makes sense for 38-19? I'm all for creative teaching techniques with younger kids, but after a certain point, you're just reinventing the wheel.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in its landmark 2000 book, "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics," writes: "When students are challenged to think and reason, they learn to be clear and convincing. ... But if their learning becomes a process of simply mimicking and memorizing, they soon begin to lose interest."

Ahhh, the real basis for this complaint; Ms. Ronfeldt is upset that memorization has once again been made a part of the mathematics curriculum, as she is convinced that memorization is incompatible with the "real" learning of mathematics. To her, group discussion and creative reasoning are more important, although she might not want to discuss the students who have avoided memorization entirely and view mathematical rules as matters of opinion, rather than fact.

As for that "landmark" book, I'll let someone with more knowledge on the topic have the final say:

On April 12, 2000, The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) released Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (PSSM), a 402 page revision of the NCTM Standards....

We conclude this introductory section by noting that there is evidence of a battle within the NCTM, with some voices crying out for genuine arithmetic. These voices were heard in the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics: Discussion Draft (PSSM Draft), published in October, 1998. At later points in this document you will find quotes from both PSSM and PSSM Draft. The quotes from PSSM Draft do not appear in PSSM, the final version published in April, 2000. The voices of reason have been largely silenced!

More information here. Other voices of reason - Bill, Bas, Mike - feel free to fill up the comments with more information, in case I've missed something.

Fighting the test in Colorado

A retired Colorado teacher is spending his time trying to "defeat" the state standardized test (warning: annoying subscription process required):

If Don Perl gets his wish, the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests won't exist anymore. Perl, an opponent of CSAP, wants to kill the standardized test through the ballot box.

"The threat is that if those schools don't do well, they will be taken over by the government and turned into a charter school," Perl said. "Who knows what chaos that will bring."

So Perl's only opposition to the tests is that if the scores indicate schools aren't doing well, the public system might be forced to give parents a choice? Why is "chaos" the only option that Perl can see?

The state uses the CSAP scores as part of the School Accountability Reports. If a school receives an unsatisfactory score three consecutive years on the reports, the state can turn that school into a charter.

Interesting. I wasn't aware that this was part of the NCLB; this must be Colorado's decision. Given that the tests are required as part of the federal act, though, I think it's unlikely the tests will be removed even if voters come out against the CSAP. Information on the CSAP can be found here. Colorado had pre-2001 laws on the books requiring the testing of kids from kindergartern to 10th-grade, but there's no indication that, before NCLB, schools doing poorly would be taken over.

And here's at least one person who will sign Perl's petition, if she hasn't done so already - Angela Engel, guest commentator for the Denver Post:

...Under the guise of accountability, policymakers have made test scores the complete indicator of what children will learn in Colorado. Instead of questioning that reasoning or examining the research around standardized tests, the public has blindly followed...

Um, it's not so much that the public doesn't "question" the research supporting standardized tests (which is substantial) as the public doesn't often see very solid information about the pros and cons of using these types of tests for this purpose. Even when journalists and commentators have operated with a solidly anti-test bias, rarely have they provided the solid research that would allow their readers to question the testing policy decisions.

Test scores have become the Holy Grail in education. By the time Colorado students graduate from high school, they will have spent, on average, a full 52 weeks being tested. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing reports that students will take 36 to 60 standardized tests during their K-12 careers.

"National Center for Fair and Open Testing" - yep, there's an unbiased opinion. As for 52 weeks being tested, I'm skeptical. Here's a breakdown, assuming the following - schools meet for 275 days per year for 7 hours per day:

1st through 12th grade = 12 (275) = 3300 days total, at 7 hours each = 23100 hours total for education

52 weeks = 260 days (five per week) = 1820 hours (assuming 7 hours count as a day)

1820/23100= 7.8% of total hours spent in school, or a little less than 1/12th.

For a 180-day school year, which is probably more realistic, this works out to be around 12%.

Assuming equal distribution of testing time per year (at 1925 hours per year for the 275-day model, and 1260 hours per year for the 180-day model), we arrive at a figure of between 21 and 22 days of standardized testing time per year (regardless of model). But according to this information, the four CSAPs are administered in each grade once a year, and testing sessions last only three hours each. That's 12 hours, or less than two days - where are the other 19 days of testing? Even with the ACT/SAT and NAEP in there, I don't see how this could be.

(Update: Kudos to Devoted Reader Zach, who noticed that the article doesn't say students spend 52 weeks taking standardized tests, but just tests. By following it immediately with the alarmist statement from FairTest, someone who's not reading closely - like me - doesn't notice that the qualifier "standardized" isn't there for the "52 weeks" number.

If the 52 weeks include every type of test, 7.8% of the total hours is hardly an issue. I should have done further math and noted that, if students take 60 standardized tests over 12 years - using the most outside estimate - they spend, at 4 hours per test, 240 hours, or only 1% of their time on these tests that educators like Perl and Engel hate so much. If we stipulate a 180-day school year, we see that less than 2% of the time is spent on standardized tests.

One might argue that it's not the amount of time spent on the tests, but the effect that the tests have on curriculum, that is the issue here. But then, why throw in these unsupported statistics?)

I wonder what kind of readers our children will be when they graduate, having taken dozens of tests instead of having read dozens of novels. What kind of writers will our schools generate when students have spent all of their time answering short-answer questions instead of articulating their ideas? I want more from my child's education than "proficient" test scores. Our children require more than a factory approach to schooling.

I agree entirely. But if my child's teacher were to forgo novels and creative writing entirely in order to do nothing but test prep, I'd have more complaints about the teaching style and the curriculum than the tests. Nothing about CSAP requires that teachers stop assigning novels and essay assignments, and I find it hard to believe that students who master tough novels would have a hard time on the exam.

A Colorado school district recently determined that dinosaurs would no longer be part of the first-grade curriculum. What could possibly be wrong with 6-year-olds learning about Tyrannosaurus Rex, you ask? Isn't the excitement of dinosaurs the reason we didn't drop out in the first grade?

I think I was more excited about ghosts, but still, what does this have to do with the tests? And that's one school district out of...how many in the state?

Jefferson County schools and the majority of districts throughout Colorado are implementing a new curriculum modeled after the CSAP - which also is used to rate schools - and pushing out things like dinosaurs.

Did I miss the memo about dinosaurs being essential in order to teach reading skills to first-graders? And while concern about classrooms changing to test prep curriculum is warranted, again - why is the test being held responsible when schools have decided that they cannot teaching reading, writing, and math effectively without help from McGraw-Hill?

Supporters argue that the CSAP tests students on important skills. Fifty short-answer, computer- scored multiple-choice questions cannot accurately reflect a year's worth of learning...

Define "accurately", and then show me an an alternate assessment that is this short (if it's 50 items, where are those 21 days of testing coming from?), has high reliability, and can be given this easily to every student in the state at the same time. There isn't one. Other forms of standardized tests (non-multiple-choice items) would be more expensive, more time-consuming, and less reliable. And non-standardized tests, which include teacher grades, means that student results cannot be compared between schools and between districts. Standardized testing is the least worst method of assessing every kid for comparison purposes.

The first time I wanted to become a scientist was in the sandbox during an palentological dig for dinosaur fossils (which I later discovered were chicken bones). My kindergartner will not find this same joy next year when she enters the first grade. She will miss the lessons on herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. Her instruction will not include ecosystems or the food chain. She will not come running home with questions about volcanoes or giant meteors. Shoeboxes filled with dirt mounds, dead plants and plastic dinosaurs will be replaced with worksheets crammed into notebooks.

Worksheets about what? Did Colorado decide that lessons must be topic-free and that any discussion of science is illegal? The kids will be learning about something; otherwise, how will they learn to read?

I'm not trying to be mean; Ms. Engel is described as someone who has worked a great deal with Denver's inner-city students, and I'm sure she's as concerned as all get-out about their education. And if Colorado has indeed removed all interesting content from lesson plans, she has reason to be concerned. But I doubt that's what Colorado has done; even if they did, would removing the tests mean that the curriculum would automatically revert to something interesting and effective, for every kid, at every school?

Update: Someone in the know in Colorado sent more information on recent Colorado testing results (here and here). My reader also points out that only one school, Cole Middle School in Denver, faces conversion to a charter this year if scores don't improve, and if so, it'll be the first school to have done so. Hardly the "chaos" that Perl envisions.

Speaking of Perl, my reader also pointed out this article, which says that three years ago, Perl was suspended for refusing to give the tests:

A teacher in Greeley was suspended for six days for refusing to give the tests to his students. Donald Perl said the tests violate Colorado's constitution and put non-English-speaking students at a disadvantage because most of the tests are in English.

TGIF, but I still have little time to blog

Since I'm still trying to catch up on work while recovering from The Sinus Infection That Ate My Brain, I'll post some links to other bloggers who, unlike me, have actually posted something worth reading recently:

Jim over at ZeroIntelligence has done a fine reporting job on a truly horrendous example of zero tolerance. Another example of insane rules being applied in a truly unfair fashion by a completely brain-dead administrator. I hope this story gets wider coverage in the press.

The Washington State Charter School Bill has passed and is expected to be signed by Governor Locke. Go say congrats to SharkBlog.

Reform K12 explains the power of standardized tests to sample knowledge domains in order to help a reader to understand that such tests aren't perfect - but they are the "least worst" way to get a feel for how every kid is doing in school.

Dean Esmay is appalled that people are the least bit "confused" about whether McDonald's food is healthy or not, and A Nickel's Worth of Free Advice wonders why lawsuits seem imminent when the free market is working just fine.

Discriminations has been all over the recent Duke symposium on political diversity in academia, where Duke concluded "they can be plenty diverse with almost no Republicans, thank you."

Jane Galt is confused. On the one hand, she gets press for being a successful female blogger; on the other hand, the Columbia Journalism Review sees her as a victim of discrimination in the blogosphere. The CJR article's whininess is not to be believed, as author Brian Montopoli does his best to convince us that women only blog when men allow them to. Guess I was lucky there weren't any men determined to control the flow of educational measurement information over the web.

Daryl Cobranchi has been busy lately - bashing insipid articles about homeschooling, pointing out a new blog by a former homeschooler, and reporting on the education understatement of the year.

Finally, I'm not the only one who wants to own, and fondle, one of those mini iPods. They come in pink!

Non-bloggage and non-comments

Sorry for the non-bloggage; work and health issues were pretty demanding this week.

Also, thanks to the recent influx of new spam that seems to be trying to outwit MT-Blacklist, I have decided to close the comments on posts that are more than a few months old. If you read an old post and absolutely must comment, email me at kimberly at kimberlyswygert dot com and speak your mind. I can always post the information anew with an update.

Hysteria over the Iowa retention bill

CedarPundit wrote me to say that Iowa is considering legislation to help end social promotion for third-graders - and the hysterical editorials have already begun.

CP links to the actual bill (ain't the blogosphere wonderful?), which makes it clear that the idea is to assess and correct students as early as possible, the better to avoid having to promote to fourth-grade those third-graders who are reading a year or more below grade level. If I read it correctly, separate standards may be set for Limited English Proficiency and special education students, and multiple assessments will be used to decide whether students should be held back.

All of which makes the Des Moines editorial appear even sillier:

Here's an idea that looks good on paper but would be devastating in the real world: a state law mandating Iowa third-graders reading more than one year below grade level be forced to repeat the third grade.

And why would this be devastating? Because what's been done all along in Iowa - where, as the author admits, only 77% of high school students read at grade level - is working just fine:

Iowa has trusted local school districts - principals, parents and teachers - to decide what's best for a particular student. That's worked well for Iowa over the years, as evidenced by the fact that this state has some of the best public schools in the country...

"You want to look at the maturity of a child, and what's gone on in the previous year. Some kids go through things at home that throw them off-kilter for a year. Right now, the decision [to hold a child back] is made with the parents and teacher. For the state to make that decision based on a single test score is not right," said Stilwill.

The legislation says nothing about basing the decision on a single test score. The legislation does suggest that decisions about whether to promote should be based on assessments that are much less slippery than judgements about "maturity" and the teacher understanding "what's gone on in the previous year."

He also said research on this issue is clear: "Holding back a kid because he's not being successful leads to those kids tending to be less successful."

Emphasis mine. Research on the issue is not clear, because any correlation between being held back early on and poor performance later on doesn't necessarily mean that being held back causes poor later performance. An underlying lack of aptitude could very easily cause both. Without an experimental design in which kids are randomly assigned to being held back or promoted - and this will never happen - there's no way to prove that being held back causes later problems to occur.

If no changes are made to the third-grade curriculum - which is not what's being suggested in this bill - then repeating a grade may not help a kid. But promoting them to the fourth grade won't help, either.

Especially troubling is just how many Iowa students could be affected by the proposal. The Iowa Department of Education estimates about 4,400 third-graders could be forced to repeat third grade if the legislation becomes law. That's about 13 percent of Iowa third-graders...

Can anyone tell me why the standard reaction to this kind of news is to rush to condemn the retention policy? Yes, it's troubling that 13% of non-disabled, non-LEP third-graders in Iowa might be held back, because it means that by third grade, 13% of them are already that far behind. Isn't that something you'd think the Des Moines Register editorial staff might want to, you know, address?

Everyone wants children to become good readers. It's the foundation of learning. The best way to do that is to provide the resources schools need to offer enough help to children. It's having well-funded Reading Recovery programs. It's not burdening teachers with so much mandatory testing that they don't have any time to work one on one with students who need assistance. It's doing more to encourage reading at home and having well-stocked school and community libraries.

Other than the bogus burdening line, nothing in here is incompatible with what's in the bill. How is more and earlier assessment for reading difficulties incompatible with encouraging students to read at home? Or is the assumption that testing destroys all love of reading?

The answer is not automatically forcing a third-grader - an 8- or 9-year-old child who has formed friendships with classmates and may have other problems that need to be addressed - to return to the same classroom the next year. A decision that drastic must be left to parents and educators who know the child.

Oh, I get it. The most important thing is not whether Johnny can read, but whether Johnny should be separated from Jack and Jill. Because ultimately those friendships are what will help Johnny get the most from his high school, college, and employment experience.

And you have to love that part about leaving the decision to the parents and educators - isn't the assumption there that the test scores will always disagree with what the parents and teachers decide? The idea that objective test scores might help teachers and parents to make better, more informed decisions is not considered within the realm of possibility, apparently.

Sadly, the Cedar Rapids Gazette folks rushed to find critics of the bill as well, to which CP can attest. Their site requires a subscription, so I'll quote what CP quoted, which is pretty much all opposition speech, and incredibly hyperbolic at that:

"This is a medieval, punitive approach that could damage children," said Sen. Mike Connolly, D-Dubuque.

I'm reading a book on the Middle Ages right now, and I could swear there's nothing in there about retaining third-graders who don't read very well....

Iowa City Superintendent Lane Plugge said the proposal is not in the best interest of students.

Third graders can be as much as 24 months apart in age and still have very different rates for academic growth, he said. He considers mandatory retention, a process seldom used in the district, as having harmful social and academic implications.

Um, if this is true, wouldn't mandatory promotion have the ability to do as much harm? If third-graders vary that much, then by definition aren't some of them not ready for fourth grade?

"A high-stakes requirement is not going to help kids learn," said Plugge.

It's not supposed to. You see, the tests identify which kids need extra help, in a way that is fair and objective. The teachers are still responsible for the "helping kids learn" part.

Department of Education spokesman Jeff Berger said the department opposes the measure because research indicates "retention has nothing to do with performance" and creating a no-promotion requirement likely would "do more harm than good."

Wait, I thought research was "clear" that retention definitely, absolutely, in and of itself caused later academic problems. And now we're hearing that retention has nothing to do with performance.

As I said, I couldn't read the article without a subscription, so I have to go by what CP quoted. And what he listed were quotes from two superintendents, a Democratic senator, and a DOE spokesman. If, as the Des Moines Register claims, the decision to retain or promote should be left solely up to the parents and teachers, why weren't any parents or teachers asked for their opinions on this bill?

CP, by the way, is infuriated:

Where's the proof?

Allowing children to advance to another grade level without the ability or skills to do the work is nothing short of child abuse.

Fill in the bubbles, win some money

Hmm, when does motivation become bribery?

Frankly, Deering High School junior Samantha Webster felt bribed. Just showing up to take the state's standardized assessment tests was enough to get her into a raffle with a top prize of $100.

Since the federal government last year began to use test results to measure school quality, many Maine schools have decided to go beyond serving orange juice and muffins to test-takers. Now they're copying schools in other states and offering rewards ranging from raffle prizes to pizza parties - even a day off from school.

I don't think this is an indication that schools are "test-obsessed." Motivations like free food and free leisure time work as well on high-schoolers (if not better) than they do on adults, and these are pretty low-key. Sure, some kids will come to win a chance for pizza and still draw a Batman logo on the bubble sheet, but the kids who would have been willing to show up anyway will probably appreciate the possibility of an extra reward:

Even though Deering met "adequate yearly progress" under the federal law last year, Roy said there is always room for improvement. To draw the best performances from the 260 or so juniors taking the test this year, she moved testing out of the school gym and into classrooms. She also authorized two raffles using proceeds from the soda machine in the faculty lounge as prize money.

"We felt it was appropriate to use that money as a marketing ploy to help our students give us their very best effort," Roy said of the drawings, each of which will feature one $100 prize and probably eight $50 prizes. "I guess we feel it's a worthy investment if we truly get results that reflect what the kids can do."

The schools are under pressure to get as many kids as possible to take the exam, and the kids know the exams don't affect their grades. And if individual scores aren't returned to students, then there's not even the incentive of useful feedback. So why not a little external motivation? The idea of paying people to take tests isn't unheard of; post-K12 pilot exams often involve financial reward for those examinees willing to show up and take the pilot tests seriously.

Taking the right turn in Albuquerque

Normally, I'm suspicious of a high school environment that is described as "messy, creative, and open" - too often those buzzwords are euphemisms for "no discipline, no standards, and no objectivity." But not, apparently, in the case of High Tech High charter school in San Diego. That's one of a handful of charter schools funded by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation that are devoted to innovation:

A humanities teacher at the High Tech High charter school in San Diego answered my questions about student achievements there this way: "People always ask how come our students score so high. We don't prep for those tests. We think it's because of what we do every day as a project-based school," Mark Aguirre said.

High Tech High's standardized test scores are in the top 10th of California schools. Its Hispanic and low-income students score in the top 1 percent for those groups statewide. In 2002-2003, High Tech High students scored, on average, 132 points higher on the SAT than the state average. The San Diego charter school opened in 2000, and its entire first graduating class of 48 went to college.

Here's the school handbook, which is refreshingly free of smarmy "mission statements;" the stated rules - behave yourself, treat everyone with respect, don't plagiarize, turn your cellphones off, wear something more substantial than shorts and flipflops, and show up every day - reflect a admirable lack of willingness to let students "express themselves" through obnoxious clothing and behavior.

So how do the students express themselves?

...I recently visited High Tech High to get a sense for how the original school runs. I found the atmosphere to be warm. Students call their teachers by their first names. It has a messy, hard-working, creative, brainstorming feel. Artwork hangs everywhere. Project materials are stacked on file cabinets, tables and beside computers.

Freshmen at the school invent a product, write a business plan with a cost analysis and a projected market share, and explain the math and science behind the product. Last year, students who came up with the school's five best inventions gave pitches to venture capitalists. One student received a patent and is engaged in manufacturing negotiations.

Mighty impressive. The author of this article, by the way, is Robin Trout, the founder of Albuquerque's proposed MAST charter high school, which was unanimously voted down by Albuquerque's Board of Education members last December:

The mayor has been working since last January on plans for the school to open with its first class of 90 students in August. At capacity, it would serve 360. The mayor intends to appeal the board's rejection to the state education authorities by the Jan. 17 deadline. If his appeal is successful, the Albuquerque board will have to grant a charter and allow the school to open...

"We had a conversation," he said, referring to his policy committee's review of the charter application and the board meeting at which it was rejected.

Yep, and those who wanted the school appealed - and won.

State Secretary of Education Veronica Garcia on Friday allowed the MAST High School charter proposal to move forward, overruling a decision by the Albuquerque Board of Education in December.

Garcia ruled MAST High should be allowed to open in August 2005 and predicted it could become Albuquerque's "crown jewel."

Indeed.

Testing results "too good to be true"?

Hope this isn't injuriuous to their self-esteem; Minnesota's youngsters aren't quite as good as they thought:

Because of "an error in judgment," the Department of Education inflated the percentage of elementary school students who passed the 2003 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments in math and reading, Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke said Monday.

Although Yecke said she was first alerted to the mistake in November and immediately began the process to correct it, the error apparently was brought to the attention of the state's testing director months earlier -- and before the state released the inaccurate results.

Mmm, not good. Errors can happen to anyone; psychometricians are people, too. That doesn't justify the deliberate release of bad data, although the issue here isn't with the tests themselves, but with how the standards were set:

There is no problem with the actual tests...[and] the students' raw scores are accurate. But the "cut score" -- the number of questions students must get right to pass -- was set too low. The reason: A committee of teachers formed last May to try to align the test results with proposed new standards in reading and math lowered the bar too far, Yecke and Olson said.

That committee never should have been called, Yecke said, because the tests didn't cover material in the new standards. When committee members saw how low the scores would be under the new standards, Olson said, they lowered the "passing" definition. The result was dramatically higher proficiency marks in 2003 than what kids had scored in 2002.

Okay, that's a pretty bad mistake. Why on earth would a standard-setting group have been assembled to judge test scores based on standards that weren't congruent with the tests? Yecke is right to say that group should never have been assembled, and their standard should not have been the one used.

The real scores, arrived at by using the previous standards, showed improvement -- just not the knock-your-socks-off type of improvement. For instance, the number of third-graders scoring proficient in math rose from 65 percent to 72 percent -- but not to 75 percent as was reported last July.

Yecke said that as many as 50 additional schools would have joined the list of 143 schools that were deemed "not making adequate yearly progress" if the correct scores were used. The mistake didn't put any schools on the list, Yecke, Olson and Davison said.

So the schools that would have otherwise been deemed inadequate receive a "Get Off the List Free" card this year. And the revised lower proficiency rates will be used for comparison next year, which means that any future improvements will help schools even more. Also, a completely new test will be developed to cover the new standards, so that the old test will not have to be aligned to the new standards.

Minnesota's DOE is reacting to this appropriately, but this is a pretty big horse to let out of the barn. The standard-setting protocol should have been one of the more rigidly-defined and QC'ed part of the process, and the news that the now-former state testing director Reg Allen released the scores after the problem was discovered should give further pause:

Although Yecke said she was first alerted to the mistake in November and immediately began the process to correct it, the error apparently was brought to the attention of the state's testing director months earlier -- and before the state released the inaccurate results.

He added: "The commissioner also saw that. Whether the commissioner actually realized whether this process would have yielded scores that different from prior years? Probably not."

The press release is here. The language is exquisitely euphemistic - the tests are fine, but "changes do need to be made in how the scores are interpreted." I'll say.

Go directly to class, do not pass ed school

A proposed plan in Texas would put teachers in the classroom for two years without any special "teacher training:"

A new alternative-certification plan for teachers will likely go into effect this spring in Texas, even though it was rejected by the state legislature, barely passed the state Board of Educator Certification, and was voted down by a majority of state school board members. If the educator-certification board approves it again next month, anyone with a bachelor's degree who passes both a subject-matter and a pedagogy exam would receive a two-year teaching certificate.

"If the medical profession tried to license doctors this way, or the legal profession tried to license lawyers this way, they would be run out of town," said Donna New Hashke, the president of the Texas State Teachers Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association.

I suppose it would be rude to mention that would-be doctors have to pass multiple school-level and national exams to demonstrate their knowledge of specific facts before they're ever allowed near a patient? If the schools of education required would-be teachers to demonstrate solid skills in a content area before they were given lessons about "how to teach," there wouldn't be such a massive dissatisfaction with teachers as we have these days.

Some members of the state school board were particularly outspoken in their opposition to the new rule. Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat who voted against the measure, called it a "slap in the face" to Texas teachers.

I fail to see how alternate routes of certification pose any sort of threat to existing teachers, much less such a violent threat, unless Ms. Berlanga is convinced that teachers who went the traditional route will suffer by comparison.

Others were convinced that the proposed route would greatly benefit schools having difficulties filling teaching slots.

He also noted that the plan resembles existing alternative-certification programs that have not attracted much criticism.

Improve the lot of students by improving the teachers

Common Sense and Wonder has linked to the latest Walter Williams essay, "Educational Ineptitude," at Townhall.

Williams begins by recounting the decision by Nashville schools to do away with posting honor rolls, lest it damage the "self-esteem" of kids who didn't make the cut. He then wonders where and how this terrified, anti-competitive mindscheme develops in the minds of so many "educators:"

This is a vision all too common among today's educationists, but there's a good reason for it: too large a percentage of teachers represent the very bottom of the academic achievement barrel and as such fall easy prey to mindless and destructive fads.

Retired Indiana University (of Pennsylvania) physics professor Donald E. Simanek has assembled considerable data on just who becomes a teacher. Freshman college students who choose education as a major "are on the average, one of the academically weakest groups. Those choosing non-teaching physics and math are one of the academically strongest groups. Some of the more capable who initially chose teaching will find the teacher-preparation curriculum to be boring and intellectually empty, and shift to curricula that are academically more challenging and rewarding." Simanek adds...

I think the teacher-preparation curriculum is much more likely to drive over-qualified applicants from the field than, say, certification tests.

There are other causes for the sorry state of today's primary and secondary education. There's been the politicizing of education...Very often, good teachers and principals are faced with the impossible task of having to deal with administrators and school boards who are intellectual inferiors and motivated by political considerations rather than what's best for children.

To improve teaching, we must attract people of higher intellectual ability and we must make teacher salaries related to ability and effectiveness...

For CS&W, this is personal:

My wife has been considering a second career in teaching. Although she has a PhD in chemistry and an MBA, she cannot teach high school chemistry unless she gets a teachers certificate. The material she has been forced to read to accomplish this task is not only horrendously boring but it is filled with numerous inaccuracies, unstated assumptions and unsupported theories posited as fact. Her reading list is filled with peans to diversity, multiculturalism, sensitivity training, but with very little about actually teaching facts and ideas and critical thinking skills to students. It is any wonder that education results get worse every year?

"The nuttiest idea I've ever heard"

I know from my reader mail that many of you (who are of, shall we say, a certain age) believe that "kids today" aren't well-educated and lack the skills to adequately prepare for the future or cope with complex issues. Others of you believe that, of all the problems with the public school system, the worst ideologies and practices are in California.

If you believe one or both of the two abovementioned theories, this should scare the heck out of you.

If I follow Vasconcellos correctly, he believes his (harebrained) proposal is no different from allowing (adult) women to vote and (adult) minorities to vote. He thinks he's praising the kids; he's really insulting the adults. And his comments about cell phones and the Internet are non sequiturs; a new mode of communication does not in and of itself raise the level of discussion conducted via that mode. Vasconcellos needs to hang out in a few chat rooms and read a few text messages to get this nonsensical idea out of his head.

Update: Commenter and Devoted Reader Mike D. reminds us that "Sen. Vasconcellos is the creator of CA's infamously 'successful' self esteem program." Oh, and he's the sponsor of two bills to "celebrate" the "success" of the self-esteem program as well. One bill is intended to force foster parents to receive training "in the importance of self-esteem;" the other bill is a plan to force UC and CSU students to complete 30 hours of community service work each year.

The senator's homepage is here; be sure to drop him a line and tell him what you think of his ideas! I should have previously provided the link to this notorious shirt from Urban Outfitters as well. What say we order Vasconcellos one while they're still available?

Always Low Prices! Always whacko employees!

Hoo boy. The weather has changed and another sinus infection has me in its massive grip. This one's a doozy, not least because I have a busy workweek ahead of me. So it's 7:32 pm, and I'm going to bed.

Not before I post this, though. I thought it was hilarious, although that may be only because of the fever, chills, and Nyquil:

Daniel A. Lorenz regularly wore a collared shirt to work, but it clearly wasn't the type expected in the Wal-Mart Supercenter's dress code. He says he was fired last week upon reporting for duty in his priest's shirt with Roman collar, an Arab headdress and six crosses.

Co-workers had varying views of Lorenz, who was a cashier and then a bakery staffer before becoming an overnight stocker for $8.30 an hour. One called him "whacko"; another said he was "a great guy."

What, are those two things supposed to be mutually exclusive?

In a year at the store, Lorenz said no one complained to him about his Muslim-Christian hybrid image, which he says reflects his nondiscriminatory philosophy about world religions.

Shouldn't that be "Muslim-Christian-Vampire-Ninja" image?

"I don't believe in any one religion," Lorenz said in his EEOC complaint. "I do believe in God, but I don't attend any one church. There is no title to my religion other than a universal belief system." Lorenz's ponytail and fuzzy chin reflect his belief that hair should not be cut because he is only "borrowing" his body. He won't date or marry, because all humans are family, he said, and that would make it incest.

My guess is that his female coworkers would use even stronger negative terminology if he asked to "borrow" their bodies for an evening. And it gets better. His mother and sister are current and ex-Walmart employees. His mother converted to his "religion," and his sister is suing Wal-Mart as well for wrongful termination.

Ahhh, Vampire Ninja Muslim Christians - whole families of 'em - working at Wal-Mart. In Texas. What grist for my Nyquil-induced dreams.

And on that note, goodnight.

Parents vs. teachers in NY

The parents speak out about the impending plan in NY to hold back third-graders who flunk the state reading test:

Dedicated Harlem dad Matt McCoy thinks kids should be held back if they don't make the grade.

"I would want her held back if she didn't pass the standard requirements," said McCoy. "That's why we supplement her learning after school."

Meanwhile, teacher Carmen Barber tosses out every cliche in the book:

[She] believes that if you keep kids back until they make their grade they may never move up - because many factors cause them to fail in the first place.

Technically, one factor will cause them to fail - how well they can demonstrate their academic abilities on a test. That's all Ms. Barber needs to focus on.

"If they are not ready to move along they are never going to be," said the veteran teacher. "But eventually you have to move them. What are you going to do, have a 16-year-old in the third grade?"

Quite frankly, I'm all for abolishing social promotions if it results in 16-year-old third-graders, because that's about as stunning an indictment of the ineffectiveness of public schooling as I can imagine. It would be pretty hard for teachers to insist that the test, or the promotion rule, is the problem, if they can't teach kids to read at a third-grade level within 11 years of schooling. "Eventually you have to move them" - yes, by teaching them to master the material. Is Ms. Barber suggesting that a 16-year-old who reads at a third-grade level is somehow better off because he or she is sitting in an 11th-grade classroom?

Barber, who teaches in PS 175 in Harlem, says her pupils' tough home environment is often the cause of their academic difficulties.

"A lot of the parents work nights," she said. "The problem is that what we teach in school needs to be practiced at home and if they can't do that they will never be ready to move on."

I sympathize. It must suck to see kids fall behind because their home lives are so impoverished. But is moving them up the ladder really helpful?

Barber also blames a lack of school funding, which means there are not enough resources to deal with challenged kids.

"They can't be put in special ed because it costs a lot for the smaller classes and more teachers are required. Instead, those kids are thrown into the main system. It is all these combinations of things that keeps the kids down," she said.

At least one recent study has found no relationship between school funding and student performance:

No one has found a more statistically reliable benchmark for student performance across state lines than nationally standardized tests – the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the ACT Assessment Test (ACT), and the mathematics and reading tests administered by the congressionally-chartered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The results of these tests prove this year, as before, that bigger school budgets do not correlate with higher student performance...

Washington, Iowa, and Wisconsin achieved among the highest standardized test scores in the nation, yet Iowa and Wisconsin ranked near the bottom on percentage of funds received from the federal government, Washington and Iowa ranked in the lower half of states with respect to per pupil expenditures, and Iowa was ranked in the lower half of states with respect to average teacher salaries.

Granted, this is at the state level. But I rarely see anyone who claims that "funding is the problem" present any numbers to show that funding really is the problem.

Ms. Barber concludes with a generic anti-testing sop:

She also believes standardized exams aren't a good indicator of success because "some kids are just better at test taking. "The patterns are different for each individual kid."

What patterns? How they fill in the test bubbles? And for the record, I fully believe that some kids are better at "test taking" than others, but I'm also certain that these test taking skills correlate highly with academic skills. Despite what anti-testing educators would have you believe, bright kids aren't flunking standardized tests in big numbers; neither are unaccomplished kids acing the tests solely through test taking "strategies."

When anti-drug rules give you a headache

ZeroIntelligence.net (love the new design, btw) reports that a Louisiana 10th-grader has been expelled for a year from Parkway High School for having OTC ibuprofen in her purse. This apparently violated the school's "tough-antidrug rules."

What I particularly enjoy about this article is that it segues directly from the student's common-sense defense...

Amanda, 14, said she carried the tablets to treat headaches.

“I think we’re old enough to know how many we can take without overdosing or being in danger,” she said.

...to this summary of the horrific drug raid at Goose Creek High School:

Last month armed police stormed a high school in South Carolina and ordered children to the floor at gunpoint so they could conduct a drugs search. Officers ran into Stratford High School in Goose Creek, screaming at pupils to lie face down, before rifling through their bags.

No drugs were found in the raid.

The obvious conclusion for the reader is to draw a connection between McCrackin's insane police action and Parkway High School’s insane anti-drug rules. The two occurences differ only in degree, not in kind.

Oh, those testing critics

There's a new blog in town - and I'm one of the contributors.

The legendary Sharkman has organized a blog entitled, Oh, That Liberal Media, and graciously invited me to contribute. My contributions will most likely be based on the unconscious media bias against testing that is cloaked in the disguise of unbiased reporting about education reform. This howler from last year is a prime, if minor, example of the attitude of "Testing is always bad" sneaking through in a basic news report.

Update: My first post is up. It's very similar (but not exactly the same) as this one from a few days ago.

Protecting those delicate college students

The cult of "emotional well-being" explains why universities have become such a hotbed of permanently-offended students. Joshua Elder recounts the tale of his alma mater's reaction to an "affirmative action" bake sale.

The Northwestern University affirmative-action bake sale, held on October 31 and sponsored by members of the College Republicans and the Objectivist Club, lasted only two-and-a-half hours before its message was silenced in response to complaints from a few offended students. There was no threat of violence. No "hostile environment" was available to use as an excuse. But thanks to the "bias incident" clause recently added to the Northwestern Student Handbook, there need not have been. According to the handbook, "any action that threatens or endangers the emotional well-being, health or safety of any person" is enough to warrant intervention by campus authorities. Of course no university wants to come across as being against free speech and expression, so the officials who shut the event down claimed that they had procedural reasons for doing so.

Emphasis mine. Northwestern has made it illegal to injure anyone else's emotional well-being. For some reason, this doesn't stop anti-war protests, hunger strikes, and distribution of pro-Socialist literature from taking place in the same area where the bake sale was held; I suppose those capitalists and war supporters have much stronger emotional health.

Elder follows this ridiculous coddling to its logical conclusion:

Thrust out of their liberal cocoon and into the real world, post-graduate leftists find themselves lost and alone in a frightening and foreign land where their genius goes unrecognized by an uneducated populace filled with evolution-denying Bible Belt fundamentalists, confederate-flag-waving southern bigots, and profit-obsessed big businessmen. Pushed to the fringes of the liberal mainstream by their own radical beliefs and unable to compete successfully in the marketplace of ideas due to their inability to argue or articulate those beliefs, the post-graduates soon grow embittered to the point of irrationality. They see enemies on all sides and label whoever fails fully to support their agenda a racist, sexist, or fascist. Their political positions are no longer defined by what they want to accomplish, but rather by whom they want to destroy. They become the Angry Left.

For those college students who believe that emotional health is paramount, and for whom the feeling of being offended is a blunt object with which to trample the constitutional rights of others, the "real world" must be a scary place indeed.

Depressing news from the front lines

This guest commentary by Elise Vogler at the Irascible Professor (found via Joanne Jacobs) is just stunning - and not in a good way. I don't often side with teachers who place all the blame for poor academic skills on parents - but this teacher makes her point pretty forcefully:

The vast majority of Americans would be shocked to learn of one potent force that keeps the quality of public education low. Budget problems, you ask? No. I'm talking about parents.

What's frightening...is that in my experience, Mark's father is the norm, not the exception.

Ms. Vogler also notes that she was "accused of demanding 'college-level' work" from students enrolled in her history class who were taking open-book multiple-choice exams that had extensive study guides. Three-quarters of her students would fail these most basic of exams, and Ms. Vogler is right to point out that college-level work is much more demanding.

Her conclusion?

They never told me in education school that my biggest battle wouldn't be over funding or discipline, but over the simple issue of whether teachers should actually expect students to learn.

When parents expect this little from their students, discipline is impossible to impose, and funding is moot. How can discipline be imposed when parents refuse to believe that copying and plagiarism both constitute "cheating?" And what's the point of spending money on students when kids in the top percentiles get moved to remedial classes?

Honoring Dr. Seuss and slamming tests

Here's an interesting article about the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Seuss, and the NEA's Read Across America program in his honor:

Since 1998, the National Education Association has sponsored a nationwide yearly campaign to promote reading among children. Read Across America, as it is called, invokes the memory of the marvelous and beloved author, Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel, to encourage adults to motivate children to read by reading to and with them.

The campaign takes on special significance this year because 2004 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Geisel on March 4, 1904, in nearby Springfield, Mass. In tribute to his extraordinary contributions to childhood reading - 48 books that by the time of his death in 1991 had sold more than 200 million copies and that continue to enchant new generations of youngsters - this entire year has been declared a "Seussentennial" and will feature numerous events focusing on children's literacy. As in previous years, teachers throughout Connecticut will take the lead in promoting community reading events for children.

What's most interesting about this article is that the author, Rosemary Coyle, who is president of the Connecticut Education Association, isn't content to focus only on children's literacy. Oh no - there has to be a gratuitous slam against high-stakes testing as well:

This year's Seussentennial provides a particularly important opportunity to recall what Dr. Seuss taught us about education because much of what is driving educational discussions today runs counter to the proven effectiveness of his work. Imagination, creativity and making reading fun are words seldom heard any more. They have been replaced with terms like mandatory yearly annual progress and with lists of hundreds of schools and districts that are considered under-performers by bureaucrats in Washington.

As we engage in this year's Read Across America, we would do well also to ponder Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel's belief that true education is less about rote memorization, rigid testing and insistence on conformity than about encouraging children to imagine, create and explore their own talents and their world.

Really? Since when is learning to read only about "rote memorization?" Since when is being a good reader being a slave to "conformity?" Since when do children need help from schoolteachers to be imaginative and creative, rather than good readers? Since when do raising literacy rates demand a higher emphasis on fun and creativity rather than imparting effective reading skills? Since when did Dr. Seuss plan for kids to have fun with his books without being able to decipher the words in them? And I must have missed the memo on the federal government's banning of Dr. Seuss books in all Head Start programs, as well as the use of "imagination" or "fun" with regards to small children.

Dr. Seuss was, I believe, a literary genius, but anyone who thinks that it's more important to make schooling "fun" rather than effective isn't very smart at all.

Update As Devoted Reader Zach noted, this didn't even run in the "Opinion" section of the Branford Review, but in the "Top Stories" section, despite the fact that it is nothing but opinion.

Third-graders running the gauntlet in Wisconsin

Wisconsin's third-graders are getting ready to sharpen, read, and bubble:

Sometime in the next three weeks, nearly every public school third-grader in Wisconsin will be sharpening his or her No. 2 pencils. Elementary schools are giving the Wisconsin Reading and Comprehension Test to determine if students are reading at the third-grade level.

"What happens is, of course, you're compared to everybody else in the world," Zanotelli said. "This one day is a reflection on supposedly everything we do all year long."

Well, yes. I see this sort of complaint often, and the erroneous assumption behind it is that, even in a good school, every single kid could have a bad testing day on the same day. Test scores do contain error, but that error goes in both directions, and chances are that on any one day, some kids will score worse than expected, and some kids better. A school that's doing a good job is, even with testing error, more likely to have a high mean than a school that's doing a poor job.

Like schools, parents pay attention to the tests.

"I think our parents here in Marshfield are very astute in the fact (that) reading is very important to schooling and lifetime employment," said Bernice Lansing, director of curriculum and instruction for Marshfield School District.

Wow. Not much gets by those Marshfield parents, does it?

Often parents will ask teachers and counselors how they can help their child prepare for testing.

Even so, students should get a full night of sleep and then eat a good breakfast in the morning the days of the exam, Stone said. Greenwood, and many other districts, are making sure students have a snack either before or just after the test to keep their energy levels up.

That's pretty good advice, and this scenario - an untimed test that results in public data but no sanctions - is a pretty good scenario for third-graders. Best to catch those problem readers early.

The good, the bad, and the FCAT

The Lee County (FL) League of Women Voters hosted a seminar for discussion about the good and bad aspects of the FCAT:

The FCAT is a needed accountability tool but has become “sensationalized” and “politicized,” Lee County School Board Vice Chair Elinor Scricca told the Lee County League of Women Voters. She joined Richard Itzen, director of the district’s Department of Evaluation, and Florida Gulf Coast University assistant professor Diane Schmidt in discussing the merits and flaws of Florida’s state-mandated standardized test...

“I never gave my students a dollar for an A. They were expected to get that,” she said. “We have put money in the place of motivation.”

I find it hard to believe that her students are working hard to earn more money for the school district, rather than to benefit themselves. On the other hand, if students interpret more money as more classes, more extracurriculars, and more opportunity for them to get a leg up on college, what would be wrong with them being aware of the financial situation?

League leaders invited the educators to their meeting because the group is preparing to take a statewide stance on the FCAT this spring. Itzen acknowledged there are flaws in the system but argued the FCAT has had a positive effect on public schools: Teachers know what skills they should be teaching, and the test-makers know what is on the schools’ curriculum...

But Schmidt worries the pressure put on teachers and students to score well has taken the focus away from the test’s purpose. Instead of encouraging integration of basic skills in all lessons, teachers are replacing creative, thought-provoking lessons with FCAT practice tests, she said.

It sounds to me like those teachers have been brainwashed to believe that mastering basic skills and being creative are mutually exclusive, and it's helpful that the test is revealing that.

Kids are being kept out of art, music and gym classes for remedial reading — and the pressure follows them home, she said.

I'm sorry they have to miss out on art, and I myself would have quit school if I'd have had to quit band in high school. Then again, I already knew how to read. It's not a legitimate criticism of the test to blame schools for focusing on low-performing students by requiring those students to spend more time on basic skills, and less time on extracurriculars.

Itzen recognizes pressure — especially on third-graders. The state’s requirement to hold back those who do not score high enough is difficult, but schools cannot just pass kids through the system, he said.

“Retention is not a fun thing ... (but) being promoted without having the skills to succeed out in the real world is worse,” he said.

Be interesting to see what "official position" the League of Women Voters takes on the FCAT.

Testing teachers, estimating quality

Michael Friedman tackles the topic of whether testing produces better teachers:

It seems obvious - impose qualification tests on teachers and you will improve teacher quality, thereby improving teaching. Unfortunately, however, according to an NBER report last year, it doesn't work.

Does Teacher Testing Raise Teacher Quality? Evidence from State Certification Requirements by Joshua Angrist and Jonathan Guryan. [Note - I don't have a subscription, so I'm going off the summary and Friedman's comments.]

Angrist and Guryan look at teacher quality and compensation in states and districts that require and do not require certification testing.

Obviously (although not examined by this study), certification testing eliminates some of the very worst teachers. Logically, by reducing the supply of possible teachers, certification testing increases salaries for teachers. The effect for teachers with BAs by an average of 3.3%. Disturbingly, certification testing, by increasing the costs of being a teacher, disproportionately discourages the very best teachers who have other options besides teaching.

Angrist and Guryan believe this type of impact is "ambiguous," and I agree. I find it hard to believe that certification tests would be more likely to discourage the best, rather than the worst, teachers from going into the profession, but I suppose it all depends on how one defines "best" and "worst."

In the Angrist and Guryan paper, teacher quality was estimated by average SAT score of the undergraduate institution from which each teacher graduated. I find this a very odd estimate of teacher quality, unless one is willing to assume two things. One, that a teacher's competence in the classroom is very strongly correlated with the average SAT score of their institution, and two, that the SAT scores of students in education programs are comparable to the SAT scores of their instituations as a whole. But students who enter education programs tend to have the lowest SAT scores of any students; only those planning to major in Public Affairs or Home Economics have lower averages. Thus, the second assumption isn't valid. It might still be the case that teacher quality is correlated with institutional SAT mean, but I've never seen any research to support this assumption.

When using this estimate of teacher quality, what Angrist and Guryan apparently found is that state-mandated certification testing didn't necessarily identify the teachers who came from the schools with the highest SAT means. Again, this doesn't really mean anything unless we believe in this definition of teacher quality, and I'm skeptical about that.

Friedman has this to say:

Angrist and Guryan recognize that this result is not very helpful. One possibility is to set a floor on teachers' SAT scores. I can hear Kimberly Swygert reacting already... The SAT score has never been validated to confirm whether teachers with higher SAT scores teach students better.

True, but my reaction to this idea isn't as negative as Friedman assumes. Yes, the SAT has not been validated as a measure of overall teacher quality, but it's certainly a measure of academic aptitude. It would be expected (if as yet unverified) that potential teachers with higher SAT scores would have a stronger grasp of academic concepts and core subject matter. While the grasp of the subject matter is not the only element that goes into creating a competent teacher, it would not be unreasonable to perform a study that calculates a different measure of teacher compentency, and then correlates it with SAT scores. I'd be very surprised if those teachers who had SAT scores below a certain level were found to be competent by any measure, no matter where they got their degrees or how much they loved dealing with kids.

Another possibility is to increase the rewards for the best teachers by offering higher salaries in their first few years to teachers who do particularly well on certification tests. That could reduce the incentive for the best teaching candidates to find other occupations.

True, but I still believe that it's the worst, not the best, teachers who are the most likely to be scared off by the idea of a certfication test. And by "worst" here I mean both those teachers who performed very poorly on the SAT, and those who graduated from ideology-heavy, anti-testing, "progressive" education programs in which fostering self-esteem is more important than fostering academic progress.

Whatever the answers are, however, this study is very disconcerting to people like me who instinctively look to standards based initiatives to improve the quality of schools and students. I have no problem if testing raises teachers' salaries if it also improves the quality of teachers. If it just raises salaries then what is the point?

Again, I didn't reach the same conclusion, because I disagree with this study's estimate of teacher quality. I believe that standards-based certification tests can and should be used, and that teachers should be required to demonstrate skills in the subject area they teach, in addition to their classroom-management and "theory of education" knowledge.

Report card for Philadelphia

The 2004 Report Card on Schools for Pennsylvania and New Jersey is up. This link lets you search the two states or just the Philadelphia metro region (which includes parts of New Jersey). Some tidbits:

The highest public school mean SAT-V in the metro region is 637 (at Masterman High), while the highest mean SAT-M is 649 (also Masterman). It should be noted that 100% of the student body at Masterman takes the SAT. It should also be noted that the school has some mighty inspiring pillars.

The five charter high schools aren't performing quite as well yet on the SAT.

The private high school that tops the SAT-V scale is Germantown Academy at 669 (tuition $17,200), and the SAT-M winner is St Agnes Academy with a mean of 655 (tuition $19,150).

The Philadelphia school district has 627 kids listed as being homeschooled.

Don't run from scissors

ZeroIntelligence and MyShortPencil are all over this one - there's not much I can add.

The only saving grace is that this particular tale of zero-tolerance idiocy is featured in an article entitled, "Have Zero Tolerance Policies Gone Too Far?" The fact that the mainstream media are just now asking this question is a reminder of how far behind they curve they are from the bloggers who have been highlighting such idiocies for quite some time.

The story:

Jacob Finklea, 12, was expelled for bringing scissors to his sewing class at Lincoln Middle School in Pike Township.

"They were making pillows and the scissors he had hurt his hands. So when he went back to school he took my sewing scissors to school so he could finish making his pillow," Finklea said. "It's been a complete nightmare, It's been a nightmare for both of us."

From ZeroIntelligence:

Scissors, in Home Economics class, are a weapon and possession of them requires expulsion? We've gone from "Don't run with scissors in your hand" to "You can't come to school if you use scissors". Scissors are not a weapon. They are a tool, just like a chair or a pencil or a pointer or the cord from the window blinds. All of them have proper uses and all of them can be used to hurt another person. In fact, can you think of any common scholastic item that can't be used to hurt somebody?

And MyShortPencil chimed in with:

Ohh! Yess! Any student who brings scissors to sewing class is making a desperate plea for help. His life must be in such turmoil from all the planning, reasoning and logical thinking done to smuggle scissors into sewing class! It's a warning sign of another Columbine massacre.

To expel a student for having scissors in sewing class is nothing less than bullying.

The teacher should be disciplined, at the very least, for "freaking out" at the image of a pair of sewing scissors in a sewing class. Regardless of whether she was following school rules by reporting Jacob, she obviously doesn't have the intelligence to understand the context in which the scissors were introduced, and I wouldn't trust her to teach anything, even sewing skills.

Oh, and MyShortPencil links to some nifty things, like this "Students Right to Remain Silent" card.

Connecticut wants out of NCLB

News reports from Connecticut indicate that the state senate is asking for exclusion from the NCLB Act altogether:

The state senate is asking that Connecticut be excluded from the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Officials unanimously approved a resolution exempting Connecticut from the federal education mandate. The resolution asks Congress to grant waivers to states with high education standards and strong standardized test scores.

The Senate resolution is now awaiting action by the House.

I couldn't find anything about this on the Connecticut DOE website. If any of you who are residents there know more, drop me a line. The chances of Connecticut succeeding at this are slim at best, I think.

The battle over social promotion in NY

At the same time that some educators are scathingly critical of Chancellor Joel I. Klein's plans to retain New York third-graders who flunk the state tests, a group of impassioned teachers at a Brooklyn High School sent a letter begging Klein to put an end to social promotions once and for all.

Those who oppose Klein's plan claim it is "short-sighted," "abusive," and "contrary to the collective wisdom of the research community." The teachers' union in NY opposes Klein, and wants third-graders who flunk the exam to be enrolled in a "cushion program" that helps them without holding them back a grade.

But here's what the teachers at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn had to say:

"As New York City high school teachers, we are wholeheartedly opposed to the practice of social promotion," the letter said. "It is not a solution. It is a lie that is eroded year by year as students realize they have been given flattery rather than the basic skills they need to survive in a classroom, and even more, in life.

"We don't want to do a disservice to students," she said. "They can't survive high school if they can't read and write. It is a political ploy to call students fourth-graders if they haven't met the requirements."

Klein has also released a study showing that third-graders who are retained aren't necessarily set up to fail later on:

The study tracked low- performing students who were third-graders in 1999 and 2000. Of the 1999 group of students held back once, 31.7 percent advanced from Level 1 to Level 2 on math and reading exams by sixth grade. By comparison, only 25.4 percent of kids who were promoted despite failing improved their scores.

The results were similar for the students who were third-graders in 2000. Of those held back, 33.5 percent advanced from Level 1 to Level 2. Of those students promoted, only 23.4 percent moved up.

And speaking of social promotion controversies in NY, the state Board of Regents is investigating the impact of its own policy that requires students to pass five Regents exams in order to earn a high school diploma:

One burning issue confronting state education officials is what to do about complaints from students who pass four Regents tests and flunk one.

The state review will also examine the impact of the policy on immigrants just learning English. Students taking vocational and technical courses, who also must pass the exams to get a diploma, will also be monitored.

Fighting (and preparing) to be Number One

In New Jersey, the battle rages on between local rivals Montgomery High School and Princeton High School for - a basketball championship? A football trophy? Nope, the battle is for the best combined SAT average in the state:

Montgomery High School has overtaken perennial local powerhouse Princeton High School in SAT performance to become No. 2 in New Jersey. And by this time next year, Montgomery school officials say, they're all but assured of capturing a state title that they covet with the same passion that some schools confer on football and basketball championships.

There's no denying the success of Montgomery's SAT preparation machinery after a 36-point climb for a combined average math-verbal score of 1220 for 2002-03. That's nine points behind two-time state leader Millburn High of Essex County.

What preceded that 36-point climb? Test prep programs in which juniors and seniors practiced one hour a day, five days a week after school for a month, and then increased to three hours of practice a day right before the test administration.

Only 70 high school students got perfect scores on the SAT last year, but 4 of them came from Montgomery High: Kevin Chen, Shinn Chen, Xiaojing Huang, and Amy Chen (none of the Chens are related).

What's more astounding that the fact that the program works is that students seem to be enjoying it:

Mike Laskey, a senior who scored a 1560 and wants to go to Boston College, said the program works because it is fun. "You could pay much more for the Princeton Review or another SAT program, but this one is free and improves your ability more," Laskey said...

"You ever heard the saying, `Sugar helps the medicine go down easier'? Well, this class is just that," Blitzer said. "Pop culture is a tool to learning and identifying some of the hard vocabulary."

And speaking of New Jersey, their DOE released school report cards yesterday. Here's a summary of related articles:

"Standardized test scores encouraging for region" - Philly Inquirer
"Educators upbeat on test scores" - Courier Post Online
"Milville highest on SATs" - NJ.Com
"Report cards: Average marks" - NJ.Com
"Several districts show improved SAT scores" - Courier Post Online

You can view all the report cards for NJ here.

Getting parents involved in cyberspace

Administrators at the Roseville Joint Union High School (CA) hope to increase parental involvement by putting grades online:

The school district is looking to update its student information system because of requirements for tracking student performance in the federal No Child Left Behind law...The system the district recommends purchasing, called Aeries, meets government requirements for school administration duties to track students and offers additional amenities for parents...

Other, more costly, software packages allow students to practice standardized tests, engage in online tutoring sessions with teachers and classmates, and enroll in distance learning courses at other schools...

The school district reports that 92 percent of students have an Internet connection at home, and that parents want to be able to view their childrens' coursework, grades, and attendance online. Teachers will also be able to view their students' test scores across years.

I like the idea of students being able to practice standardized tests from home (although that feature won't be in the software this school district plans to purchase). If sample tests can be downloaded, they can be printed out anywhere - home, library, a parental workplace - and students can more easily prepare for the tests outside of the classroom.

Dr. Mike Adams is here to stay

Dr. Mike Adams, conservative professor and gadfly of the UNC-Greensboro administration, finally has his own website that contains links to all his online articles. Don't miss his discussion of UNC-Greensboro's sponsorship of a porn star speaker - excuse me, "sexual health expert" - here and here.

Haven't bought his new book yet, but it's going on the wishlist.

How long before someone claims the "White King" is President Bush?

Devoted chess player Bill Ware supports the idea of black students learning chess and becoming proficient in algebra. That's good. But Bill Ware also believes that chess, as it's currently played, is "racist" because it pits white pieces against black pieces, and the white pieces always move first. That's....surreal.

Bill Ware, a devoted chess player, is one of these people and has come up with a new form of chess. "By saying that white automatically is offensive, it states that white is better than black," Ware said.

Just like Moses, Ware said he wants the students he helps to teach the skills they learned to others. He also wants to eliminate the stereotype that if you’re white you’re right and if you’re black, step back.

Am I crazy, or is this very similar to Chris Rock's "Nat X" skit on Saturday Night Live, in which he plays a black militant who goes to any length to see racism in every aspect of life, and rails against pool as a racist game because the object is for the white ball to knock all the colored balls off the table?

Minority youth in this country face a lot of obstacles today, but the colors of chess pieces are not one of them. I find it very hard to believe that any black student learning chess has taken away the lesson, "If you're black, you have to step back" in doing so. And as Best of the Web puts it:

This is a good opening move, but it's not nearly enough. Chess is not only racist but sexist, classist and homophobic. How come you can sacrifice your queen, but if you lose your king, the game is over? Why is there an underclass of "pawns"? Oh sure, they're promised they can be upwardly mobile if they only play by the rules, but how often does a pawn actually become a queen? And why are rooks only allowed to move straight? The time has come to demand equality for all chess-Americans and free the game from its checkered history!

Honest educators

Sharkblog posted an article about a "rare school official" in Seattle who is honest about the problems facing public education. Hint: He doesn't want more funding.

If the Education Trust Fund initiative makes the November ballot and passes, the state sales tax would grow to almost 10 percent. In return, there'd be new money for preschool, full-day kindergarten, at-risk students, smaller class sizes, greater college enrollment and more. But before public-school parents and K-12 school districts jump on board, they'll need to ask, "What could we already be doing better?"

"We have shrunk the learning time, but we're asking for more knowledge. This equation doesn't balance. Parents will be shocked" when they see the dismaying outcomes, says Hoff.

This is a refreshing change from the constant refrain of "We have no time to do anything but prepare for tests!" that one often hears from educators. If the focus is on character, diet, and athletics, well, no, there's not going to be a lot of time for solid academics.

Tougher grading is also necessary, according to Hoff. One mother of a seventh-grade honor-roll student e-mailed Hoff, distraught because her child couldn't pass the crucial Washington Assessment of Student Learning. Grades are often awarded with "no connection" to ability, says Hoff...

That's why standardized tests are useful. The disconnect between testing and grades is often startling, but the point of hammering home this disconnect is not to punish kids. It's to force teachers to examine their grading schemes. Awarding "A"s for effort isn't a good idea if a student really hasn't learned much.

The charter-like Federal Way Public Academy [that Hoff oversees] is part of the blueprint for success, Hoff says. This junior high follows a rigorous college-prep model. Forty percent of the 280 students are non-white; entrance is by lottery. Core subjects are limited to English, math, science and social studies. Then come computers and foreign language. Athletics are non-existent.

There's no drama, either, in more ways than one. "The peer pressure is about academic achievement, not whose party everyone is going to, who made cheerleader and who's going out with whom," says Principal Judy Kraft.

It's gratifying to see the reporter describe this situation as a positive "laser-like focus on core subjects," instead of bemoaning (as this Time reporter did) all the extracurriculars that schools must "give up" in order to teach students essential academic skills.

Hoff wants to see additional schools like the Federal Way Public Academy, but that's not all: social promotion ends; social engineering and athletics are curtailed; savings are funneled to existing and new programs that help low-achievers; 10th-graders get a coveted driver's license only if they pass the WASL, and then just for one year. Passage of additional WASLs for juniors and seniors would be required for annual driver's license renewals and high-school graduation.

Woohah. Tying the WASL to a driver's license? I can't support that, because the test isn't a valid measure of one's driving capabilities - but man would it be fun to see the fur fly if that were implemented.

Anyway, on a related note, I'd like to address a comment that Devoted Reader Lawrence K. left on an earlier post of mine:

You've made the point now, dozens of times, that tests don't need to be used to restrict activities in the schools. But how many educators are listening to you? You have to admit there is an irony in the fact that you are often critical of "educrats" but then you expect them to be reasonable in their use of tests? Which raises the issue, do you trust them or don't you? If you don't trust "educrats" then surely you admit they may misuse tests?

Good point. I support testing because I believe tests are useful when properly used. But even though I know that many educators dislike or misuse tests, I don't think that's a good reason not to support testing. It would be nice, though, if there were more administrators like Mr. Hoff, who understand that making room for tests doesn't mean a decline in education.

I don't know the school system as well as you do. I don't work on education issues. I don't keep in touch with developments in education policy. But I do know what my friends are doing, those with kids. Those friends of mine who are parents are desperate to get their kids out of the public schools at least in part because of the way the testing has narrowed what gets taught in the schools.

See above comments by Mr. Hoff. What, exactly, is missing from the school days of the children of your friends? Extra recesses? Athletics? Arts & music? Were your friends satisfied with their childrens' academic performances before? If their children are gifted, and now they've been put in classes with subpar performers, then yes, perhaps private/charter/home schools are better for them. But I also agree with Hoff's criticism that much of the "curriculum" being cut from schools now is chaff, and that all students would benefit more if schools focused on core skills and held all students to high standards.

One often reads of gifted children being denied special services because of funding issues. There are the usual cries that cutting funds to gifted-student programs "threatens the nation's future by stunting the intellectual growth of the next generation of innovators." But when so many students in US public schools perform so far below the level of "mediocrity" that critics despise, is it really that bad to shoot for bringing everyone up to par for now?

Surely you can admit that teachers are now teaching to the tests? I'm in Virginia, where education has been pretty thoroughly wrapped around the SOLs (standards of learning). Those friends of mine who are teachers say they must teach to the test now. Those friends of mine who are parents say they hate what they percieve as the limits put on the children's education by the tests.

What were those teachers teaching before, if not basic reading, math, and science? I'm not saying the SOLs are perfect - no test is. But there's not a state standardized test being used anywhere in the country that is not a test of basic skills. What gave these teachers the idea that teaching basic skills was not the foundation of their job? Why is teaching a child to read quickly and correctly considered "teaching to the test"? Is it because teachers really weren't assessing those skills before?

More so, my friends with kids hate the way the SOLs limit the reach of education, its potential excitement, and what that means for the reach and even the identity of their children.

Again, I've yet to understand how a basic-skills test can "limit the reach of education." For kids who haven't mastered those skills, any remediation that follows the test is absolutely essential. Is it really the tests themselves that are having this impact? Or is it the attitude of the teachers, overtly or covertly transmitted to kids, that tests are awful, tests are meaningless, or tests prevent students from learning "higher-order" skills because teachers don't want to cut out lessons on "character education" to make room for more advanced academics?

I don't mean to sounds unsympathetic, and I'm glad Lawrence raised these points. But if a child's reach and identity are impacted by anything in a school, it's by the quality of teaching, not by the method of assessment.

Update: Captain Yips has his say in the matter.

The bigger, the better?

What's correlated with FCAT scores? Library size:

Allie Henderson has a full plate this week. "We'll be taking FCAT math, FCAT science and FCAT writing," said Henderson. Like thousands of other Lee County students, she's tackling the FCAT, Florida's standardized test. The good news - science is on her side.

Fort Myers High School has the only A grade on its state report card based on FCAT and it also has one of the biggest libraries. Only two other high schools in the district got a B grade -Cypress Lake High School and Estero High School. Both schools have at least three full-time librarians on staff and more than 18,000 books...

And it's not just books; libraries often have valuable tech resources for kids who don't have computers at home.

Florida isn't the only state to do this kind of study. At least six other states have also looked at the subject and found a strong link between libraries and test scores.

Not surprising.

Testing the kids, but not in English

This is a very bad idea:

[Recent Iranian immigrant and high school student] Hibodi was among several New Haven students who testified before the legislature’s education committee Monday in favor of a bill that would require the state to offer standardized tests like the CAPT and Connecticut Mastery Test in languages other than English. The tests are used to determine which schools are labeled "in need of improvement" under the federal law.

But she worries about the cost and legal questions in a state where more than 140 different languages are spoken in the public schools.

As well she should be. How many languages should be chosen, and how should they be chosen? At what point does proficiency in English rather than these other languages become mandatory? What does a high school diploma in the U.S. mean if a student doesn't need to be fluent in English to earn it? Does this mean colleges must be required to admit students who do not speak English, simply because their high schools didn't require it for graduation?

On top of these concerns, there are the psychometric issues:

Sternberg explained that creating an alternative test is not simply a matter of translating English words into Spanish. She said pilot test would have to be created and the content must be the same as the English version.

Tranlating (or adapting, as it's often called) tests is not easy, it's not cheap, and it's often not done correctly. The new test - in whatever language - would have to be extensively field-tested in order to ensure that its psychometric properties would be the same as with the English tests. Adaptation is not a simple matter of translating words; there are cultural issues to be considered. Should English test items that contain some cultural context be greatly modified to try to fit the culture of the new language?

It's not hard to find good solid psychometric information on why adapted tests aren't necessarily right for every situation and shouldn't be undertaken lightly. For example, here's one article, by Ronald Hambleton and Liane Patsula in the Association of Test Publishers journal, that begins by debunking five myths about adapting (translating) tests.

Selected quotes:

Sometimes, too, it may be desirable not to adapt a test but rather to require all examinees to take a test in a single language. For example, in the United States, there has been interest in some states in making high school graduation tests available in both English and Spanish. Technically this is possible, but the question of whether or not to make two language versions of a test available depends on many factors including the definition of the construct being measured. Is the language in which performance is to be demonstrated a part of the construct definition or not? In the case of reading, reading in the language of English is almost always part of the construct of interest. Producing a Spanish equivalent version of a reading test in English makes very little sense because inferences of English reading proficiency cannot be made from a test administered in Spanish.

In summary, all of the myths can seriously compromise the validity of a test in a second language or cultural group, or negatively influence the validity of adapted tests for use in cross-language comparison studies.

Emphases mine. The article also includes suggestions for making adapted/translated tests work, but are states following these suggestions for high-school exit exams? Are the administrators even aware that such research exists?

Validating adapted tests is very difficult. A high school exit exam is useful if it's a good indication of how well a student has mastered the curriculum, and one validation of those scores might involve a correlation of exit exam performance with some measure of job performance or college performance. If a student is not fluent in English, what's the likelihood that, in the U.S., they'll be fine in the job market, or in college?

The U.S. has always had immigrants in its schools. The U.S. has, traditionally, always impressed upon students in its public schools that, if they manage to accomplish nothing else, they should learn English, or they won't succeed in our society. Giving tests in other languages seems to be a very slippery slope towards setting immigrants up for failure.

Israel Chacaltana, a fourth-grader at New Haven’s Truman School, told lawmakers in his native Spanish that he was a very good student in Peru, but he struggled with the Connecticut Mastery Test and he started to think he was nobody.

"Try as they may, these students are not able to demonstrate on this test the full range of their academic knowledge," said Marlene de Naclerio, who runs New Haven’s bilingual education program. "Why subject our students to practices that can only harm their self-esteem and their love of learning?"

Why subject these students to a teacher who believes that having to learn English is harmful to, or somehow incompatible with, self-esteem and love of learning? What kind of teacher wouldn't explain to this student that he is smart, he just has to learn English in order to be able to use his "full range of academic knowledge" in this country?

PA educators petition for change

Superintendents in Eastern PA are petitioning the state capital for changes in NCLB:

On Monday, 138 superintendents from several eastern Pennsylvania counties gathered at Norristown High School in Montgomery County to sign a petition to support changes to the No Child Left Behind Act.

[Changes requested in the petition are]:

Altering the punitive-testing requirements so schools and children aren’t judged on a single test score.

Requiring Congress to fully fund the act before punishing cash-strapped school districts that don’t meet the mandates of the new law.

Well, when one test score is defined as "punitive," I can tell we're dealing with people who find objective testing punitive in and of itself. What would the alternatives be? More test scores? Or more subjective measures?

I found this quote telling:

Tammy Manko, a parent with two children in the Freeport Area School District, and Dominic Duso, vice president of Apollo-Ridge Education Association, share many of the same reservations.

Duso said No Child Left Behind holds schools accountable for things that are hard for them to control.

So it's more important to "feel" for kids than to understand why they're doing so poorly on objective tests? That's more important than trying to figure out what teachers were teaching previously other than basic skills? And I'd be willing to cut schools slack on the attendance thing if they were to accept that it is the schools' responsibility to teach reading and math, no matter what their students' home lives are like.

Can fresh ideas close the achievement gap?

Abigail Thernstrom writes in the Portland Tribune about some new ideas that can help close the minority achievement gap:

Our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students is the central civil rights issue of our time. This is not a story about lower IQs. It is a story of kids who have the ability to learn, but who have been tragically -- and needlessly -- left behind. Some argue that this is not primarily a story about race, but about social class. Parental income, education and place of residence do make some difference in school achievement. However, my research and that of others finds that these factors account for only about one-third of the gap in racial achievement.

In other words, it's not just SES that determines a kid's rank on the test score scale, or on the grade scale. There is a correlation, but that doesn't explain everything.

Some think test scores are unimportant. But studies clearly demonstrate that students -- whatever their color -- who have equal skills and knowledge, as measured by reliable tests, will have roughly equal earnings later in life.

Improving test scores requires better teachers. But the literature shows that neither graduate degrees in education nor years of experience in the classroom have a significant impact on student achievement. The best teachers have strong academic skills, as demonstrated on standardized tests.

Thus, her suggestions are to allow several routes into the teaching profession (thus bypassing the stranglehold of overwhelmingly-test-negative education programs) and to pay more money to those teachers with good skills in desperately-needed areas like math and science.

She also suggests schools should ensure a safe learning environment, not in the prison sense but in the discipline-and-respect sense. The KIPP schools are mentioned as prime examples of how to make schools work.

And speaking of KIPPs schools, a co-founder of a KIPP school in the Bronx is featured in a New York Post editorial as an example of what NYC needs:

HERE'S hoping Gov. Pataki's Commission on Education Reform uses its two-week extension to listen to David Levin. Levin, one of the panel's 22 members, is the co-founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program Academy charter school in the South Bronx, the borough's highest-performing middle school for six years running.

[But] Levin notes that greater autonomy for principals must come with greater responsibility. KIPP has its own rigorous system for holding principals accountable. An outside inspection agency, which reports to the national organization, inspects each KIPP school for a week each at the start and end of its second year of operation. Each principal gets evaluated on the basis of those inspections, plus student test scores and parent surveys.

Accountability from the very top down. I like it.

The real impact of testing on the classroom

The Education Gadfly isn't much interested in the "sob stories" about teachers who don't have time to teach the "interesting" stuff because they're having to raise basic literacy rates. One recent sob story comes from Time magazine's Amanda Ripley, who reports on "Beating the Bubble Test".

First, the Time article:

Here are some of the things kids at Garfield/Franklin elementary in Muscatine, Iowa, no longer do: eagle watch on the Mississippi River, go on field trips to the University of Iowa's Museum of Natural History and have two daily recesses. A sensible bargain has been struck: literacy first, canoe trips later. But there are more substantive losses too. Creative writing, social studies and computer work have all become occasional indulgences. Now that the standardized fill-in-the-bubble test is the foundation upon which public schools rest...there is little time for anything else.

It has also become a very different place. The kids are better readers, mathematicians and test takers. But while Democratic presidential candidates have been lambasting the law's funding levels, Franklin's teachers talk of other things. They bemoan a loss of spontaneity, breadth and play — problems money won't fix. The trade-off may be worth it, but it is important to acknowledge the costs. This is the story of an elementary school — once an uneven patchwork of lessons and projects — that has been rationalized.

The Gadfly's response:

Until recently, Garfield/Franklin elementary in Muscatine, Iowa was a bastion of progressive learning—students went "eagle watching on the Mississippi River, to the University of Iowa's Museum of Natural History, and have two daily recesses." But apparently, many students couldn't actually read the exhibits at the museum. Until the school redoubled its efforts to prepare students for the state's accountability test (i.e., to teach them basic computation skills and reading), barely half achieved minimal proficiency in reading and math on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now, according to Ripley, "the percentage of fourth-graders who passed the reading test rose from 58 percent to 74 percent; in math, proficiency went from 58 percent to 86 percent." But Franklin elementary "has become a very different place. The kids are better readers and mathematicians and test takers" but teachers "bemoan a loss of spontaneity, breadth, and play—problems money won't fix." Spontaneous illiteracy: now there's an educational outcome for you.

Emphasis mine. I'm just amazed. I'm amazed that there is such a resistance to spending class time to make sure every child can read, write, and do math. I'm amazed by the fact that teachers are upset that children are reading and writing better in school but have less time to play in school. I'm amazed that anyone thought two recesses was more important than creating better readers. And I'm amazed that teachers complain about having to bring everyone up to speed, yet the school thought this was a good idea:

Activities for the gifted and talented have not been cut, but high-achieving kids aren't grouped in accelerated clusters in regular classes anymore. They are spread out so they can help the lower-scoring students.

Why should they be expected to do this? They're not in school to help other kids - that's the teacher's job. Is the implication here that students can't be expected to improve unless they see other students doing better? If teachers are overworked, putting kids of wildly-differing ability levels in the same classroom is only going to make instruction harder.

When too much homework is actually too little

David Skinner reports on "the homework delusion", or the belief that American kids are swamped with homework. Previous research has suggested that American teenagers do relatively little homework, but some still claim that not only do American kids do too much homework, but homework is in itself unfair:

What gave this story [of too much homework] credibility were its academic sponsors, Etta Kralovec and John Buell, authors of "The End of Homework." What robs their oft-cited work of its credibility, however, are their half-cocked research and political fervor...Homework, they argue, is anti-democratic and "pits students who can against students who can't."

"Anti-democratic"? Who knows what that means? Who is being discriminated against? The kids who get assigned too much homework? And how are student being pit against one another? And how else are teachers supposed to tell who is understanding the class material and who is missing it entirely? If homework is "undemocratic," so are quizzes and any form of assessment.

Yes, there's a kernel of truth to the anti-homework argument. The evidence that homework provides children with an important educational advantage is inconsistent. University of Missouri professor Harris Cooper, a widely recognized expert on the effects of homework, describes only a modest advantage for students who are given homework as compared to students who aren't assigned any...

This is particularly interesting since a stock element of the homework-horror stories in the popular press is the complicated interdisciplinary "project" that takes many hours, days even, to finish and reduces many children, and their parents, to tears. But as it turns out, American elementary, middle, and high school students aren't spending hours on their homework. Minutes is more like it.

Studies which suggested an increase in homework may have done so only because kids were included who were young enough not to have had any homework before:

Even the increase among the youngest students is being blown out of proportion...The amount of time that 3- to 5-year-olds spend on homework per week has risen by 11 minutes since 1981, raising the total homework burden to 7 minutes per night. The per-night increase for 6- to 8-year-olds stands at 15 minutes. Bringing the total number of minutes surrendered to homework to a hardly-shocking 25 per night.

And for the older kids, NAEP reports that 16 years ago, 17% of 13-year-olds said they had no homework due the day before filling out the survey; in 1999, that number was 24%. It appears some kids might be doing too much homework - most of which is probably busywork - but the overall numbers are nowhere near what the media would have us believe. And why are readers so credulous?

Why then, with such empirical shortcomings, have homework horror stories been treated as sociologically significant? Clearly, American parents want to believe their little angels are so hard-working and such good students, they may be too good. Indeed, too good to be true.

One ring to annoy them all

The "progressive" school board of Nyack, NY, has decided that class rings with the image of the Nyack Indian on them are offensive to actual Indians and create a "hostile" environment to the Nyack Indians, none of whom attend the schools or sit on the faculty. Their guideline was this sanctimonious USCCR statement which says that Native American references in school logos or symbols are by definition "disturbing," un-diverse, and a perpetuation of negative stereotyping.

So the school board met with ringmakers Jostens, which had a contract with the school board, to ensure that no students could obtain rings with the "offensive" image - one that's been used by the school for 75 years - on them. Unfortunately for the school board, the Nyack Indian Foundation got a competing ring company, Artcarved, to make the images available on rings for students who want them.

One can reasonably argue that people don't buy $400 rings that contain images of people they don't respect. One can also argue that a historical image that represents an historical fact of the town is not demeaning, no matter what the USCCR says. And David Yeagley, himself a member of a Comanchi tribe, asks, who's the lord of the rings?

After the Nyack boards tyrannical decision to ban the Nyack Indian, the ring company contracting with the Nyack high school refused to offer any more rings with the Nyack Indian engraved on them. The Jostens ring company issued a letter to the protesting student body that there would be no more Indian rings available for purchase. (Word has it, however, that some offended students were so vociferous about it that they were able to obtain the coveted, traditional ring of the Nyack Indians.) Then Jostens declared they would sell no more Indian rings, on or off campus.

It takes a village, indeed. Only in a small idyllic community could such oppression be pawned off as “caring” and “compassionate.”

I couldn't find the specific Nyack Indian image on the website, but Artcarved offers "Braves" and "Chiefs," neither of whom look like they're being mocked in the designs. And Frontpage Magazine has several more articles on the Nyack Logo flap, including one article about a public forum in which 194 of 200 local attendees argued in favor of keeping the Indian logo.

Malfunction Junction

I've received one email telling me that my comment section appears to be malfunctioning and "dropping" comments. If you've had that happen (and you're not Mike), please email me and let me know.

I have no idea what I can do to fix it, but since I haven't seen the problem myself, I'd like to have a better idea of how much it's been happening.

Cellphones or Medicaid?

I normally don't comment on issues related to welfare and Medicare. But whenever I read that parents can't be expected to pay the smallest amounts, or make the smallest efforts, to ensure their health, or the health of their children, I am just stunned:

Many Washington residents easily part with $5 a day at their local coffee shop. For others, $5 means they'll be able to buy groceries, pay the electricity bill, or get school supplies for their children. In the next 10 days, legislators will decide whether poor families can afford $5 a month in Medicaid premiums for their kids. Both sides of the debate agree it's a question of responsibility.

Annette Hensley, 43, says that if the Legislature imposes premiums she will do whatever it takes to pay them and keep her 14-year-old on Medicaid. "It would put a big strain on us," said Hensley, whose family income is about $25,000 a year. "Something would have to go. I don't have cable, so probably the Internet. Maybe my cellphone."

I assume the reporter, limited by space, thought this one quote was the one that would generate the most sympathy from readers. But I'm just left wondering why someone who has a computer and an Internet connection and a cellphone considers it a "big strain" to pay $5.00 a month for Medicaid for her child. Does she consider the need to surf the web more important than medication?

Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield, the Senate's chief budget writer, says taxpayers can't afford to give Medicaid families a free ride. He noted that premiums wouldn't cost more than 1 percent of Medicaid families' income. He and other Republicans said they believe parents will be able to pay.

Her comments prompted an "oooh" of disapproval from the Democratic side of the Senate.

"Disapproval" because someone said that poor parents aren't stupid and would be willing to spend the five bucks on something this crucial? Are we to assume that the Democrats really do think poor parents are stupid?

The problem with premiums isn't just the expense, it's the hassle, said Jon Gould, deputy director of the Children's Alliance, a statewide child-advocacy organization. The state Department of Social and Health Service does most business by mail. Many poor families lack checking accounts and would have to pay by money order each month. There are no credit-card payments, online bill-paying or direct-withdrawal plans.

Money orders cost 85 cents at the post office, which even poor people have in their towns. And if most poor people don't have checking accounts, then it makes sense that the system is not set up for online bill paying or credit card payments. The system is set up to accomodate people who can mail in money orders. That's 85 cents plus a stamp. Is the assumption that poor parents are by definition too lazy or stupid to do that? Or is the assumption that poor parents cannot be expected to endure any sort of hassle whatsoever, even for something as crucial as health insurance?

Must be something in the water of the Northwest; last year I posted about how people in Oregon aren't expected to be able to mail in six bucks for their own health coverage. And now parents in Washington are not expected to give up their cellphones in order to afford a $5 Medicaid premium.

To me, this isn't about money. It's about removing entirely the responsibility that parents have to ensure the health of their children, and removing entirely the assumption that even the poor must get their act together in order to safeguard their health. And that seems to me to be very similar to the "soft bigotry of low expectations," where poor kids are considered to be entirely a product of their income, and can't be expected to perform up to the same level as other children in school.

(Via Best of the Web and their "World's Smallest Violin" feature.)

Update: Sharkblog has more:

Would spending $5 a month on health coverage prevent a lower income family from buying food for their children? The most recent USDA survey of American food intake reveals that the average child (6-11) in a family with income below 130% of the poverty level consumes each month 13.5 cans of carbonated beverages, 2 pounds of "cakes, cookies pastries, pies" and 12 oz. of "crackers, popcorn, pretzels, corn chips". [look at the numbers for average daily intake in grams and do the math] At my local Safeway that costs $8.12 assuming store brand cookies and a 2-for-1 special on Doritos. I imagine that even most poor families can afford $5 a month for their children's health care if they manage their budget responsibly.

A passle of tests in Alabama

No mas, cry survey respondents in Alabama, who think there's too much standardized testing:

Two-thirds of respondents to a new statewide poll favor reducing the number of standardized tests that public school students must take. A slight majority, meanwhile, said they believe that such tests gauge teachers' test-preparation abilities rather than students' actual knowledge, according to the results of the Mobile Register-University of South Alabama poll...

Jo Ann Webb, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, said the argument faulting educators for "teaching to the test" is invalid. "If you teach a child, then test a child on that information, then I don't understand the criticism," Webb said. "You're still teaching the child."

The majority of those polled still support the high school graduation exam, though, because they believe that really does hold schools accountable for what students learn. And I can understand their frustration with the long list of tests facing Alabama's students:

Depending on their grade level, elementary and middle school students must take some or all of the following tests: Stanford Achievement Test, Alabama Direct Assessment of Writing, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) test.

To graduate, high school students must pass all five portions of the graduation exam: math, language, reading, science and social studies. Special education students take the Alabama Alternate Assessment to get a diploma. College-bound students also take the ACT anor SAT admissions exams.

One Mobile County spokeswoman insists the tests are necessary:

"How else can we find out what our children know?" said Nancy Pierce, spokeswoman for the Mobile County Public School System. Pierce said testing allows teachers and schools to evaluate their progress in preparing students for the next grade level.

"If you don't know what subjects and verbs are, how can you go into more elaborate sentence construction? If you can't do addition, how can you go into multiplication and division?" Pierce said. "If students don't have certain concepts, they can't go on."

To me, this statement implies that the sort of objective assessment needed to decide whether a students is ready to progress to the next level isn't being done by teachers in the classroom. Is Pierce wrong in assuming that, or are the teachers' classroom assessments so subjective and/or inflated that Alabama needs a slew of standardized tests in order to tell what's going on?

Something's fishy in Maine

Well, this is a new twist on the exit exam scenario:

Florida's education chief does not like what he sees as a growing loophole in the state´s standardized graduation exam, allowing failing students to obtain diplomas from a private school in Lewiston, Maine. North Atlantic Regional High, a private school designed to assist home schoolers, is issuing diplomas to seniors who flunk the Florida test.

For a $255 fee, North Atlantic Regional offered to accept her course credits and issue a diploma _ even though she has never attended classes there. Within weeks, Fourron was able to begin classes at Miami Dade College.

And will Fourron graduate from Miami Dade, when she's already demonstrated the inability to read English and do math at a 10th-grade level?

The school sounds mighty fishy, not least because its diplomas are allegedly legit in Florida - but not in Maine, where the "school" is based:

...a spokesman for the Maine Department of Education said the high school may be misleading students when it claims on its Internet site to "have the authority and privilege to grant high school diplomas in the State of Maine."

"The state of Maine does not recognize their grades, credits, transcripts or diplomas," said spokesman Edwin "Buzz" Kastuck. "If you´re home-schooling your children, you can issue them a diploma from your kitchen table _ we look at it the same way."

The school's administrators, Steve and Carol Moitozo, supposedly screens each student's academic accomplishments and converts them to a numerical scale, which is then compared against Maine's graduation requirements. If their total score is over that limit, the school issues a Maine high school diploma, despite the fact that the majority of the school's students live outside Maine. And it's supposed to be a place that provides assistance to homeschoolers, yet it appears to be issuing diplomas to kids in Florida's public school system who can't cut the mustard on the FCAT. Fishy, indeed.

So much for schools being gun-free zones

Armed officers from Washington, DC's, police force will now patrol the halls of Ballou High School, and Wendy McElroy has had it with the idea that public schools are by definition safer than homeschooling:

Parents who wish to explore educational alternatives at their own expense should be encouraged to do so, yet the opposite is occurring...Two of the most viable [alternatives] are homeschooling and apprenticeships. Neither prevents anyone from choosing public schools; each merely offers a choice at no public expense. How could anyone reasonably object to that?

There are plenty of objections, but like Wendy, I find few of them "reasonable:"

In the ‘80s, when homeschooling appeared on the social radar, it was closely associated with the Religious Right. Homeschoolers were viewed as extremists and unqualified amateurs...

Malkin concluded, "God forbid children be taught by their own parents without oversight from the all-knowing, all-caring, infallible … child welfare-public school monopoly!"

Wendy concludes:

My purpose is not to dispute with parents who send their children to public schools. I believe the system is a brutal failure, but parents must decide for themselves. I advocate extending alternatives far beyond the typical private versus public school debate, and even beyond homeschooling.

I agree that almost anything sounds better than what's being installed at Ballou High:

D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams has approved a security plan for Ballou High School that would include armed police officers patrolling inside the building, X-ray machines to inspect all bags and packages, and secure doors that would remain locked except in an emergency.

Students will enter the school through one main doorway, and barricades will be erected to prevent them from going around security equipment. Most of the school's 120 entry points will be outfitted with delay-egress doors, which were approved by the fire department and will be locked at all times except in the event of an emergency.

That's no longer a school. That's a prison. "Joint Operations Command Center?" Barricades around security equipment? Fixed and roving patrols? And how can a school possibly have 120 entry points, unless they're counting windows?