Number 2 Pencil

Councilwoman, educate thyself

NYC Councilwoman Margarita Lopez doesn't agree with Mayor Bloomberg's policy on testing third-graders. Unfortunately, in opposing the policy, she ignored the First Rule of Making Public Criticisms, which is to use thy spellchecker and grammar checker:

A City Council member who was blasting the Bloomberg administration's social-promotion policies sent out two press releases containing spelling and grammatical errors.

"I take total responsibility . . . The member of my office who committed the mistake is going to be protected by me, the same the way that I protect the children of the City of New York," she said.

Unfortunately, Councilwoman Lopez "protects" NYC's children by insisting that these tests discriminate against minorities. How is it protective, as opposed to racist, to insist that kids of certain races just can't be expected to learn to read and answer simple multiple-choice items?

NYC kids survive math exam

Third-graders in NYC thought yesterday's math exam was a snap:

Free at last, third-graders burst out of Jamaica's PS 117 with smiles Tuesday after weeks of no play and all study for a city math exam that could hold them back from fourth grade.

Education officials said 98.3 percent of third graders took Tuesday's test, compared to 97.8 last year.

Can't wait 'til the scores come in.

Drop the snail, and step away from the aquarium

In Milwaukee, a Giant Snail Roundup:

Federal health officials have seized several dangerous pests called Giant African Land Snails from Wisconsin classrooms and have started a national search for the creatures, which reproduce rapidly, destroy plants and can transmit meningitis.

"They were very cool creatures," Joosten said.

California's battle over algebra, continued

There's a rash of school districts in California claiming ignorance of a law requiring that their graduates not be ignorant of algebra:

Since the State Board of Education granted Santa Cruz a waiver earlier this year exempting it from the law requiring high school students to complete one year of algebra, about 200 other districts statewide have scrambled to make the same request. The fate of about 13,000 students, or 4% of the state's senior class, was at stake...

"I wonder what they all would have done if Santa Cruz, a district that completely failed in its obligation to its kids, hadn't cleared the way," said state Sen. Charles Poochigian (R-Fresno), who wrote the law requiring algebra. "It's really shameful."

Nice to see that Senator Poochigian doesn't mince words (with a last name like that, he was probably forced pretty early to learn toughness). It's true the law does not exempt anyone from taking algebra, and some educators are concerned about the special education students. The lines appear to be drawn against those claiming compassion, and those claiming that high standards will help everyone do better:

Poochigian and his supporters argue that the law is vital to raising the state's educational standards, to closing performance gaps between minority students and their white peers and to preparing students for college and the workplace...

But some teachers and local school officials questioned the idea that all students are able, or need, to pass algebra.

I have an earlier post on the topic here.

HIV testing anxiety

Wisconsin is the first state to enact a new testing law, and it's just as controversial as testing of the 3 R's:

Wisconsin has enacted what appears to be the nation’s first law requiring students to be tested for HIV if teachers or other school employees can prove they were significantly exposed to the students’ blood while on the job.

The law, which critics view as an unwarranted intrusion on privacy, gives employees of Wisconsin public and private schools the same rights as emergency personnel, medical workers, correctional officers, and group-home workers to require blood tests under comparable circumstances.

Is this a "sensible protection for the men and women who are responsible for educating" young Wisconsinites, as a spokesman for Gov. James E. Doyle says? Or is it "a safety net full of holes," as the spokewoman for an AIDS education groups claims? The state's teachers' union supports the measure, which has the following requirements:

First, [the teacher] must prove that they had taken precautions to the extent possible, such as using protective gloves or eyewear, against exposure at the time of the contact. They must also produce a letter from a physician stating that they were significantly exposed, and must submit to an HIV test themselves.

I suppose the "precautions" part is so that teachers stop and think before mopping up any blood or body fluids; the one example given in the article, though, was a case in which the blood transfer was unexpected.

Put to the test again

Last week, NYC's third-graders took the much-ballyhooed reading test; today, the math test awaited them.

Thousands of third-graders in the Bronx and city were put to the test once again Tuesday, this time in math...

Students must pass both the math and reading exams in order to move onto fourth-grade. It's part of Mayor Bloomberg and the Department of Education's plan to end social promotion. The new policy has divided parents, with some threatening to keep their kids home on the day of testing.

Well, 98.2% of NYC's kids took the reading test, so I doubt any fewer than that will take the math. And what's up with the final sentence of this WABC news article?

It is estimated that 15,000 kids could fail, which is nearly one in five of the city's third graders. In fact, last January, the city's department of education issued letters putting nearly 32,000 students into the "promotions in doubt" category. That uncertainty could continue for months.

Low scoring kids can move on as long as their teachers can demonstrate that they have tried everything.

"Have tried everything"? What on earth is that supposed to mean? Students who fail both attempts at the exams can appeal the decision in the hopes of being promoted, but this comment suggests that as long as kids try everything, even if they fail, they can pass. I don't think that's what the NYC government has in mind.

Also, third-graders who were recent immigrants and thus exempt from the reading exam still have to take the math exam, which is full of word problems:

The math test will be available in Spanish, Chinese and Haitian Creole, but schools are often on their own in finding oral translators for Bengali, Urdu, Korean and dozens of other languages spoken by public school students.

Several children and immigrants groups have been discussing suing the city if they find Chancellor Joel Klein's third-grade retention policy discriminates against immigrants.

While the definition of "discriminates" is most likely being defined rather loosely here, the critics have a point. There's no reason on earth to load up a crucial math exam for third-graders with word problems, when even the smartest kids are still working on learning to read well. Word problems can be great for measuring how well an examinee knows when and how to apply mathematical rules, but the assumption is that all examinees are on a level playing field when it comes to actually reading the words in the problems. The city would have a better leg to stand on if the math exam wasn't measuring both reading and math skills.

Here's last year's grade 4 exam. As far as word problems go, these aren't too bad. They're not too wordy, and they're pretty direct. But an argument could be made for having most of the test resemble questions 1, 2, and 3, as opposed to all the word and graphical problems that follow.

Thanks for the "F"

Teaching is not a "thankless job" for ReformK12's readers, one of whom sent in a nice thank-you from a parent after handing out an "F":

I was in the middle of an activity with my students when the school's guidance counselor approached me. With a very serious face, said he had a parent who wanted to speak with me, and would I be willing to spend a few minutes with her while he watched my class?

What this failing grade had done was give her daughter a well-needed kick in the pants. She'd done a mediocre performance the first two quarters, but this failing third quarter grade gave her the sobering thought that she might fail the entire course.

The student in question had actually turned her attitude around before her mother's visit, but the teacher should be commended for giving the student the grade she deserved. Kudos also goes to the mom for worrying more about her daughter's achievements than her "self-esteem."

Update: And kudos to Jay Mathews of the WaPo (with whom N2P readers should be very familiar), who can't imagine why kids are expected to stagger under the weight of high stakes tests when kids are given grades, tests, and homework every day in school. He also cites research which suggests that students do best in the classrooms that have the toughest standards:

What was most important in the differences between hard and easy graders was the improvement shown by their students. Students in classrooms where higher standards were enforced showed significantly greater test score gains than those in classrooms where A's were handed out like candy samples at your local multi-screen theater...

Also, high-achieving students exposed to tougher grading standards showed even more improvement if the achievement level of their classroom, on average, was relatively low. The same additional improvement was seen in low-achieving students assigned to tougher grading teachers whose students had an overall achievement level that was relatively high.

Thanks to Devoted Reader Mary C. for sending this in.

Villanova officials give students the bird

You're going to think this is a joke, but it's not. The scheduled speaker for this year's commencement at Villanova University is...Big Bird:

Villanova University seniors, who spent up to $112,000 on tuition in their four years, are underwhelmed by news the actor who plays Big Bird will be this year's commencement speaker.

Spinney, who published a book last year called "The Wisdom of Big Bird," has a positive message for students – and won't show up in costume – school officials say.

Why not? That's what Spinney's fame rests upon. If Big Bird's on the cover of the book, why isn't he good enough to receive an honorary degree in costume? Gee, you'd think students like Mordini would be more welcoming of someone who helped teach them the alphabet in the first place *giggle*.

Fark's headline is great: "Cost of 4 years at Villanova: $112,000. Watching students get peeved when they hear Big Bird is their commencement speaker: Priceless"

Update: Recent Villanova graduate George H. gives me what-for and says that Carol Spinney did just fine...better than most commencement speakers, in fact:

I am a Villanova senior who graduated, Spinney did fine, he was short and sweet with no more than 8-10 minutes of talking. He was greeted with resounding applause, and I believe left with a standing ovation. He had a couple jokes and will be remembered. Thank god we had him and not some a**hole who would preach to us about what we are "required" to do with our lives because we are so lucky to have graduated.

If you really want to complain about something, at least choose something good, like the "news" of articles in the Villanovan.

Sounds like George's Villanova funds were put to good use; you wouldn't believe the number of emails and comments I get from high school and college students that are vulgar, illiterate, insulting, and just plain scary. George, I now nominate you for the official role of N2P correspondent in Villanova. If there are news reports from there I should be covering, you let me know.

Giving new meaning to the term, "Back to Basics"

Delaware is aiming for a three-tiered diploma system that is dependent on standardized test scores. The highest diploma is "distinguished," the next "standard," and "basic" takes the bronze (literally). The standard opposition immediately surfaced; as Joanne Jacobs notes, testing critics want to "kill the messenger":

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, Delaware is poised to give three-quarters of its black, Hispanic and low-income high school graduates the lowest of the state's three new diplomas.

"It sorts them to the bottom again," said Melva Ware, a specialist in urban education at the Delaware Center for Teacher Education at the University of Delaware.

I suppose it would be rude to point out to Ms. Ware that it is the student's ability, not an outside force, that "sorts them to the bottom." This Scarecrow-like belief that is is the diploma itself, and not the ability behind it, that opens doors for students is seen time and time again. When 75% of Delaware's minority students are expected to bottom out on the state standardized exam, why can't those who allegedly speak for those minorities focus on why that might be, rather than rushing to ensure that those students receive diplomas that might be meaningless?

It's all about self-esteem, I suppose:

"Eventually, with a good study, they will find it furthers the aura of separation of these kids when, ultimately, you want them to feel that they are just as good as their counterparts," said Hector Figueroa, education director for the Urban League.

As Joanne points out, "They're not just as good, of course. Not in reading, writing and math." And Delaware teacher Dave Huber has plenty to say (his comments are in bold, the article he references in italics):

Didn't you just know the 'ol self-esteem motive would be brought into this sooner or later?

The diploma disparities are stark. And they raise troubling issues for a state that imposed some of the highest academic standards in the nation on its schools but, given the numbers, has apparently failed to educate many minority and low-income students well enough to meet those standards.

What about troubling issues like poor home life? No discipline? No father around? Total apathy and disdain for education? Don't dare bring these up, of course, or be included in the crowd exemplified by Wilmington Councilman Theo Gregory:

Gregory, the Wilmington councilman, is less forgiving. He said that lingering racism in the schools has made black children victims of integration. They sense they are not wanted, and it hampers them academically, he said. Not only are steps not being taken to include them, steps are being taken to exclude them."

I cannot adequately express how utterly ridiculous and wrong-headed this sentiment is. I've been teaching in these schools for 13 years now, and was educated in the very same schools. If anything, New Castle County teachers go out of their way for minority students moreso than white students, looking to advance them into higher level classes, counseling them, and even overlooking misbehavior more often (and make no mistake -- black students are guilty of misbehavior much more often than their white counterparts -- I suppose Gregory would blame this on "lingering racism," too).

[State School Board member Claibourne D.] Smith and others criticize Delaware for not doing more to get certified math teachers in every middle school math class. They say that black, Hispanic and low-income students often get unqualified teachers, in part because of low expectations for such students.

Like Gregory, Smith is clueless. Every middle school in Delaware I know of operates on a "team" system where the four core subject area teachers share the same group of students. In this system, the math teacher (as well as each core subject teacher) teaches the honors students, the grade-level students, and the below grade-level students. There is no unqualified teacher "reserved" for the low-achieving students!

Personally, I agree with Joanne that giving some students "basic" diplomas is not unfair - but failing to give those students the skills they need, regardless of diploma status, is (and some quoted in the article, like Senator Sokola, get it right). How the critics, though, can natter over the unfairness of the color of a sticker on the diploma, while ignoring the opportunity for an honest discussion about the achievement gap, amazes me.

I mean, would you want THIS guy in charge of educating and motivating your kid?

Robert Andrzejewski, head of the Red Clay school district, said the system will not motivate students as legislators insisted it would.

"One of the worst things you can do to kids with low self-esteem, who are often of low-income anyway, is show them failure," he said. "So many of those students have experienced failure in their lives and there comes a point when they decide they have to save face for themselves, and, unfortunately, that may mean they drop out."

The only way to avoid showing kids failure is to not challenge them at all.

The testing hullaballoo in NYC

I was in a data cocoon all last week, so I missed the big story: the "make-or-break" reading exams for NYC's third-graders were given on Tuesday the 20th (the math exams will be administered tomorrow). Unsurprisingly, the New York Times ran a lengthy story that depicted every parent as worried about the exams, and practically every student as terrified to the point of physical illness. You mean there isn't a single parent out there worth quoting who supports the exam? Gee, no bias there! (The Daily News, on the other hand, led off the first post-test article with a quote from a confident student).

Interestingly, there's already a big flap about the re-use of items on the exam:

The city's test-maker yesterday defended its practice of repeating questions on its exams from year to year - making the program more susceptible to the type of security breaches that occurred on Tuesday's high-stakes reading test - because it's cheaper than designing a whole new exam...

Stirring the controversy even more, this is the first year where the third-grade test results will largely determine whether a student gets promoted.

The test developers have defended the anchor items (which are indeed common in this type of exam), but it's easy to see why the critics insist some kids might have an advantage. There are legitimate reasons to re-use test items - the anchor items allow for comparison of cohorts from year to year - but when items are re-used, it's crucial to keep the old test forms secure. So principals have been ordered to confess if they let students see copies of old exams, and in a bit of bizarre humor, the makeup exams for students who missed the test were cancelled after one TV station ran a close-up of the test at the behest of testing critics:

Close-up images of the third-grade test booklet were shown yesterday on NY1 News, the news cable station, and possibly on other local stations, as part of a news conference held by critics of standardized testing, who have been among the most vocal opponents of the mayor's tough promotion rules.

Still, officials said that showing parts of the test on television was enough of a security breach to require them to cancel makeup exams that would have been given this week or next Monday and that students would have to wait until after next Tuesday's math test for a special makeup version of the reading test.

The city might sue, claiming copyright infringement. As for those critics, Josh Plotnik of the Cornell Sun - no fan of standardized tests - is having none of their claims:

I've never been a particular fan of standardized tests of any kind. Even as a soon-to-be graduate student, I've never done exceptionally well on the SATs or the GREs -- I'm pretty confident that a NYC third grader could surpass my first GRE verbal score. Standardized exams test irrelevant information, attempt to deceive you, and force you to be so scared of never succeeding in life that you dread taking any exam at all. And yet, I find myself adamantly supporting Bloomberg's new "hold back" policy.

The NYC third grade English exam was created to test third grade reading skills, not to trick third graders into abandoning their career goals.

Plotnik then reports that City Councilman Charles Barron "claimed the reading exam favored white children, and that the entire test was racist." Because we can't expect black children to know how to read and answer test items? Why not? I can't think of anything but racism that would explain such a willingness to excuse any poor test scores on the part of minority students. Much better to continue to allow their schools to continue failing them, I suppose.

All this, and there aren't even any reading scores yet. Sheesh.

An update on TN's lottery scholarships

Tennessee's first scholarship lottery will begin this fall, but some odd arguments are being made about the scholarship's requirements:

Current law says high school students with either a 3.0 grade point average or a 19 score on the ACT college entrance exam qualify for one of the lottery scholarships, which range from $1,500 to $4,000 a year.

Sen. Steve Cohen, who fought for nearly 20 years to get the lottery approved by the voters, said last week he thinks the ACT standard should be eliminated and the scholarships awarded on the basis of GPA only.

I'm confused. The ACT score of 19 (which is, we should note, below both the national average and Tennessee's average) was made optional because it was thought to be "too high" a barrier. Yet Sen. Cohen claims that kids with ACT scores that low will struggle in college. What's going on here?

If the assumption is that anyone with a 3.0 GPA will be prepared for college, then by Sen. Cohen's arguments, we could expect those students to score higher than a 19 on the ACT. The ACT requirement would be useless, but not an impediment; the GPA/ACT requirement would produce the same scholarship pool as the GPA alone. There's no reason to use it, but by the same token, there's no reason not to use it.

That is, unless the state fears a backlash from minorities who have a 3.0 GPA but turf on the ACT, which is what I bet is at the root of both the original change to the either/or and Sen. Cohen's insistence. Sure enough, "adverse impact" gets mentioned later in the article:

Larry Miller, D-Memphis and a member of the Legislative Black Caucus, which met with Cohen over his proposal last week, said the choice puts him "between a rock and a hard place." Legislators have questioned if removing the ACT standard would have a disproportionate impact on black students. According to THEC's figures, it would not. Of the students predicted to be eligible under the current standard, 11.5 percent are black; of those predicted to be eligible without it, 12 percent are black.

"My question would be, Who do we adversely impact?" Miller said.

Is that the right question to ask, or should the question be, how does Tennessee give the money to those students who are most qualified to make good use of it? The warning bells were ringing back in December, thanks to Georgia's experience with such lotteries; will Tennessee's governor listen?

And do my Devoted Readers from Tennessee (who were pessimistic back then) have any updated information on this?

Loving that Latin (part 2)

Another newspaper articles suggesting that it's finally cool to take Latin:

In Erie and Niagara counties, more students took the Regents Latin exam in 2003 than in either of the previous two years, state data shows...

"That's a great percentage," said Fox. "It's just cool to take Latin. It seems like it's just getting bigger and bigger."

Back in January of this year, we saw a similar report (my more Devoted Readers may even remember why Latin seemed like a practical language to me). Apparently, Latin is no longer for the "elite," now that parents are starting to understand it's value (mine certainly didn't). As far as teaching jobs go, Latin teachers can barely get out of their student teaching classrooms before schools come looking for them:

That's what happened to Marissa Valetich in January. Before she had even finished her student teaching, Valetich, 23, a University at Buffalo student, got a phone call from the Sweet Home Central School District. They were desperate for a new Latin teacher to fill a vacancy.

And she confesses to being somewhat old-fashioned in her teaching methods - a bit of a drill sergeant. "This class is very structured," Valetich said with a laugh. "The kids kind of flip out when I say, "You have to have this stuff memorized.' Those old-fashioned drills? I personally like them. And my kids learn those forms."

Thank you, Miss Valeteich, for not "modernizing" your instruction of this beautiful old language.

Too broke to test all three R's in NH

Cash-strapped New Hampshire will be giving fewer standardized tests this year:

State budget cutbacks mean New Hampshire students will take only two standardized assessment tests this year - reading and math.

Officials say they are doing the bare minimum to satisfy the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Lawmakers required the Department of Education to use federal No Child Left Behind money for this year's round of tests. When it fell short, tests were dropped.

Is the fact that New Hampshire changes the test from year to year part of the funding problem?

Testing worries in Oregon

Devoted Reader John L. sent me this tale of "testing goofiness in Oregon." The state's 10th-graders are turfing on the math exam, and the test design might be to blame:

State officials are racing to answer why: Was the test too hard, or did schools fail to teach this class to write clear, mathematically sound answers to elaborate math problems?

Every version of the test gives students a choice of a probability question, a geometry question and an algebra question. This year's winter test gave students the chance to prove themselves figuring the odds in a dice game, the dimensions of a hand-made quilt or the speed and mileage of a daughter and her slow-driving dad. By comparing results from this winter's test with results from a year earlier, state officials have determined there wasn't one particularly difficult question on this year's test, they say. All three questions tripped up more students than last year.

Thanks to this, some in Oregon have become highly critical of perfomance assessment items:

Rob Kremer, a longtime critic of Oregon's test system who ran unsuccessfully for state schools superintendent in 2002, said the wild swing in results proves that the state-developed test is unreliable.

"Faddish assessments such as Oregon's math problem-solving tests are not suited for use as large-scale, high-stakes tests," he said.

I don't know if I'd call problem-solving tests in math "faddish," and such items are not automatically unsuitable for high-stakes testing. When the state's employers claim they need more citizens with solid problem-solving skills, they're right, and one way to test those skills is with this type of item.

But such items are more difficult to develop properly, and they may very well test a narrow area of the domain, making it hard to generalize the results to the overall math construct. What's more, that one item counts the same as the multiple-choice exam, so if none of the three options are appealing, an examinee is at a real disadvantage. There's research to suggest that examinees, when given a choice of topics, don't always do a good job of knowing what they're good at.

My reader wanted to know how the following could be possible:

It's fairly easy for test makers to create a new multiple-choice test that is as difficult as the previous year's test, said Edward Haertel , a Stanford professor who is past president of the National Council on Measurement in Education. But when creating tests that require long answers, it is harder to match the difficulty level from year to year...

Haertel said a statistical adjustment, such as the one Oregon testing officials are considering, may be the best step for the state to take.

Although I don't know for sure what Haertel is suggesting, one possibility is to assume the distribution of examinees this year is similar to last year's, and essentially shift the score scale up to match. That's similar to what is done on large-scale standardized tests like the LSAT, which is why a certain number right out of 101 items can translate to a different scaled score from form to form. Obviously, though, it may be unsafe it is to assume the student ability distribution is the same from year to year; if the quality of teaching declined dramatically, it won't be.

A second possibility is to "borrow information," and examine what the historical correlation is between the MCQ's and the performance-assessment items, and use that to adjust scores. If, in the past, students who did really well on the MCQ's also did well on problem-solving, then you'd expect the same to be true now. If it's not, the PA score can be adjusted. However, oftentimes MCQ's and PA items do not correlate highly (if they did, they could be measuring the same thing, and both types might not be needed).

A third option at this point is to re-weight the test sections, given more weight to the more reliable part, the MCQ's. And then there's the "scorched-earth" option:

The U.S. Department of Education would have to approve any move by the state to cancel the results, which would spare schools the consequences of the poor scores, said Ron Tomalis , counselor to the U.S. secretary of education.

Early news on NCLB

From the Sun-Times comes the news that NCLB may be working as planned in Chicago:

Kids who won highly prized transfers out of failing Chicago public schools averaged much better reading and math gains during the first year in their new schools --just as drafters of the federal No Child Left Behind Law envisioned, an exclusive analysis indicates.

"Now, he enjoys school,'' Summerville said. "I'm happy I switched.''

The "surprising" lack of math phobia

From The Education Gadfly comes a link to a report by Mass Insight on the "surprising" lack of math phobia in Massachusetts and Washington:

While the survey reported here did not (and could not) probe the public’s real capacity to do math, we found that adult residents of Massachusetts and Washington states have strong, well-formed opinions on math’s strategic importance to the health of their state economies, the rigor of the expectations we should set for high school graduates’ math skills, and the gap currently
separating American high school graduates’ math capacities from those of their counterparts in other countries.

Those opinions being that math skills are important for anyone who wants to succeed in today's technology-driven culture, and that today's public schools aren't doing a great job of teaching those skills. This will come as a surprise only to those educators who hate math and try to downplay its importance (presumably in favor of "self-esteem").

Oh, and it'll be a surprise to the pro-choice group March For Women, who apparently think math and science majors are minority groups. Their link isn't working, so I'll just quote Best of the Web on this:

Check out the very end of the description of "qualifications" for applicants to be interns at that March for Women's Lives, the group that organized a large rally for legal abortion in Washington yesterday:
----------
Undergraduate and graduate feminist women and men in all majors are encouraged to apply. Applicants must be passionate about a woman's right to choose and will have some experience in activism. The March for Women's Lives is committed to diversity and encourages applications from people of color, people from the GLBT community, people with disabilities, and math/science majors.

Won't the pro-life math and science majors be happy to find out that they're considered protected minorities?

A new kind of aversion therapy

GREAT headline on this Yahoo story:"Drink-driving speech has teens dropping 'like flies'". Sounds like speaker Marti Belluschi is really "driving" the point home:

More than a dozen boys at a Roman Catholic high school in Chicago fainted during a speech Thursday in which crash survivor Marti Belluschi described in grisly detail the injuries she suffered in the wreck and the facial reconstruction surgery she required afterwards, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday.

"They were dropping like flies in the gym," Brother Konrad Diebold, president of St. Patrick High School, told the daily. "I saw one of them throwing up in a bucket."

Well, that's one approach to scare them away from drunk driving, although I'd think it would put them off driving altogether (it certainly would me). My theory is that kids would benefit from having to watch the Cops ("Too Hot for TV!") episodes that features drunk drivers acting particular asinine (and getting slapped with huge fines and jail times). Teenagers may not be afraid of death, but they're petrified of public humilation, and if they were warned that getting pulled over while drunk might result in their being filmed and laughed at, or were made aware of how stupid and pathetic drunks appear, that might have an effect.

Bloodshot eyes and crampy hands

Apologies for the non-blogging. I've been spending my week perfecting code and wrestling with SQL data tables, and the results, while not pretty, are serviceable (much like my appearance, after a week of staring at the computer and downing more caffeine than usual). I'm not sure when I'll be able to resume blogging; possibly this afternoon, possibly this weekend.

But while I'm here, I just have to point you towards this surreal blend of zero-tolerance policies, disciplinary issues, and allergy alarms. Who knew Nutter Butters could be considered weapons of mass destruction?

And I also have to admit that not all my time has been spent writing code; some of it has been spent on the Orsinal website, which hosts a multitude of addictive Flash-based games. This one is the most addictive. I can't really enjoy this one, though; I spend too much time as it is in real life thwacking cats to make them move or sit still.

New exit exams in the Palmetto State

South Carolina is implementing a new, tougher exit exam:

An estimated 45,000 sophomores at public schools across the state will take High School Assessment Program tests over three days, beginning Tuesday...All students in their second year of high school will take the new tests. The results will go on individual transcripts and also play a key role in school ratings.

Unlike the old pass-fail exam it replaces, the new test has a four-tier grading system. A student must get a “Level 2” score or higher to satisfy a state graduation requirement.

Students will be allowed four retakes - not a crazily large number, I suppose. The new test is untimed. And hey, they got students at my alma mater to comment:

College-bound students at Lexington High School say the new test — they took practice versions of it a year ago — is more challenging, but not overwhelmingly difficult. "On the old test, you could guess and get answers right," said Robby Meldau. "Your weaknesses can be exposed by the new test"...

Burns said the old test, which his class had to take as a graduation requirement, had laughable wrong answers to multiple-choice questions that made the right answer obvious.

Here are samples of the new, presumably non-laughable items for ELA and Mathematics. I didn't look too long at the ELA items; I saw one which requires students to read and assess a poem, the very thought of which gives me hives.

The Mathematics items, though, seem clear and concise (students can use calculators). I sent this one item to my boyfriend:

13. Suppose you have one of each of the following items in your closet.

How many combinations can you make using one item from each category?
A. 9
B. 12
C. 18
D. 24

This item is funny to me because my boyfriend watches me go through many, many permutations of about 10 black sweaters/blazers, 20 black skirts, and 10 pairs of black shoes every morning. You'd think that everything being black would mean I'd get dressed quickly, but no. The expression on his face as he watches me ranges between amused and appalled.

I also have a really, really hard time accepting that a red shirt, brown pants, and plastic sandals constitute a legitimate clothing combination. But that's just me.

It's FCAT time!

FCAT scores, that is. The Miami Herald says Florida's third-graders did better than last year, perhaps as a result of the new mandatory retention policies:

Statewide, 66 percent of third-graders passed the reading FCAT, compared with 63 percent last year. In Miami-Dade, 57 percent passed, up from 53 percent; and in Broward, 65 percent passed, up from 63 percent.

''When we ended social promotion and raised standards for our high school seniors last year, many were skeptical,'' said Gov. Jeb Bush, according to a statement released by the Department of Education. "Today's results show Florida is moving in the right direction, with more students reading on grade level and significant improvement and opportunities among those who have struggled most.''

The Palm Beach Post also reports good news:

About 23 percent of St. Lucie County third-graders and 12 percent of Martin students are in danger of repeating third grade next year after failing the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, according to results released Monday.

The failure rate in both counties dropped from last year, when about 25 percent of St. Lucie students and 14 percent of Martin students failed the test. Statewide about 22 percent of third-graders failed the test.

As far as the 10th-grade FCAT goes,Governor Bush recently noted that 10% of Florida's seniors will face a barrier to their diploma based on FCAT scores. Let's find the press releases for ourselves on this. Ah, here we go. From here you can view the webcast from today or dig around for statewide and district-level results. The percent passing results from 12th grade alone aren't that informative, though, because that's just the kids who didn't take/pass the exam earlier.

Oooh, pie charts. Oh, wait, those are just telling us what students are doing after graduation (regardless of whether they passed the FCAT). Fifty-eight percent of those who failed the FCAT last year are enrolled in some kind of secondary education this year, presumably places that take a GED. The Florida DOE has a "Stay In The Loop" page for FCAT flunkers; if you know any senior who didn't pass the test this March, they might be interested in this information.

There's an interesting "FCAT Myths Vs. Facts" sheet available, too.

Encouraging Duke's students to snooze

Ah, Duke University, such a caring environment:

Duke University is eliminating 8 a.m. classes and trying to come up with other ways help its sleep-deprived students, who too often are struggling to survive on a mix of caffeine, adrenaline and ambition.

The school is also considering new orientation programs this fall that would help freshmen understand the importance of sleep.

I have an idea - stop admitting students who don't know that sleep is essential for regular functioning. Oh, you say Duke's students are smart? Then why is Duke assuming that incoming freshmen just don't know that they're supposed to, you know, sleep every once in a while?

James Clack, Duke's director of counseling and psychological services, said the latest research shows that college-age people should be getting nine hours of sleep a night...

Duke wants students to consider adequate sleep a part of overall wellness. One idea is to do individual health assessments for each student and set goals for good nutrition, exercise and plenty of shuteye.

"Individual health assessments" for each student. Mm-hmm. Because, as we all know, college students are known for being willing and eager to follow a stodgy, goal-oriented plan presented to them by their elders. And if James Clack doesn't believe that college students will consider a daily plan that includes nine hours of sleep to be "stodgy" (or boring, or ridiculous, or impossible), he needs to take a few refresher psychology courses.

And speaking of ridiculous:

...Students have shunned 8 a.m. classes to the point that many departments stopped offering them. When campus planners looked over the schedule, they realized that, over the years, most classes had been squeezed into the hours between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m...

Duke was running out of classroom space, and students were beginning to complain about the availability of courses. So administrators worked out a new schedule for the fall, spreading classes more evenly throughout the day and week. The result: no more 8 a.m. classes, but plenty starting at 8:30 a.m. That will still be a shock to some students who have never had classes before 9.

What's wrong with this plan? Where to begin? Students are complaining about classes not being available, but they don't show up for classes if they're available too early. Sounds like Duke isn't so much concerned for student health than tired of all the whining.

Now, there are classes at 8:30, but if they're hour-long classes, the next available time slot is 10 am, not 9. The whole day is essentially shifted back one hour, so students who were going to bed at 1 am before will be going to bed at 2 am now. Methinks that forcing bars to close a half-hour earlier would do more to get students into snoozeland than scheduling classes a half-hour later.

Vice Provost Judith Ruderman makes the most sensible statements:

"We're going to have a lot of grumbling next fall when the reality sets in [and students are forced to go to classes at 8:30]," Ruderman said. "But you know what? They're resourceful and they'll manage."

Ruderman's advice to her sleepwalking students? Take an afternoon nap.

Sounds like Ruderman is VERY tired of all the whining, as I would be. Bear in mind here that I am very sympathetic to people who need lots of sleep; during graduate school I was poked, prodded, monitored, psychoanalyzed, and hospitalized due to insomnia and sleep deprivation. It's not a bad idea to encourage students to beware of bizarre sleeping schedules and offer treatment for those who have really screwed-up sleeping habits. But for students to refuse 8:00 am classes and then bitch about availability is ridiculous. What are they going to do when they have to be at work at 8 am in the real world?

Best comments on Fark:

Learn to drink coffee, it's what college is for.

Went to a community college - took classes from 4 to 11 at night. Went to Purdue - took classes from 7:30AM to 4:30 - very few classes at Purdue past that - almost forces you to take 7:30AM classes at some point. Either way you mix coffee and alcohol in the right combination to get through the day and you sleep while rendering. If your project involves coding, not rendering, then you're screwed. Nothing has changed now that I'm in the real world. No difference.

When young men's fancies lightly turn to thoughts of test items

Ah, the first signs of spring have arrived. No, I don't mean the 70+ temps, bright sunshine, hyacinths, or sandaled feet. I mean the parade of "SAT as a rite of passage" articles that are sometimes informative, and often critical.

This article, in the Tri-Valley Herald, suggests that SAT "mania" is gripping students like never before:

Today, however, more students than ever before are taking the SAT. The test has taken on near mythic proportions for high school students and their parents, who view a high score on the SAT as a magical Golden Ticket that, if it doesn't guarantee access to the most prestigious colleges, will at least boost a students' application to the top of the pile.

The College Board website note the increase in examinee numbers too, although they present this increase as a good thing, rather than something that should instill anxiety into students and educators. For example, some 38% of all SAT-takers are the first generation in their family to plan for college. But, as the TVH notes, budgets aren't keeping up with the "bubble" of college hopefuls:

A massive bubble of kids are graduating from high school and pushing at the doors of the nation's colleges and universities. Competition for slots is fierce, and students, aware of the pressures, are sending applications far and wide, thus adding even more competition for already scarce slots.

In deficit-ridden California, the storm is worsened by budget cuts that are, for the first time, forcing the University of California and California State University systems to turn eligible students away. By some estimates, as many as 23,000 California freshmen who in better times would be welcomed at CSU and UC campuses won't find a slot in the fall.

The article is honest enough to note that, despite some public anxiety, college admissions are not all about SAT scores:

The truth of the matter, however, is that many colleges don't weigh SAT scores as highly as they once did. In fact, the use of SAT scores in admissions at UC has been a hot topic this year, sparked by a critical report from the chairman of UC's governing Board of Regents that slammed UC Berkeley, the system's flagship campus, for admitting 386 students who scored 1000 or below on the test and turning away 3,200 who scored 1400 or above...

SAT scores are a factor in UC's admissions decisions, but they don't carry as much weight as other factors, including a student's overall grade point average and his or her scores on the SAT IIs, the subject-specific standardized tests that students must also take in order to be considered for UC admission.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, on the other hand, is all about the pressure of the SAT:

Although the new test is nearly a year away, it's been the topic of discussion and planning among colleges and high schools, tutors and guidance counselors - as well as among some students and parents.

"The poor kids in the first class to take it will be nervous," said Carol Lunkenheimer, dean of undergraduate admissions at Northwestern University. "They'll be saying, 'Woe is me - why is my class the one taking this exam?' "

What would we do without these critics who have convinced nervous students that the College Board cares only about money? Surely, these naysayers play a large part in creating examinee anxiety with their accusations, but the Philadelphia Inquirer article (which also includes the classic, throwaway, unsupported statement that "critics have long held that the SAT contains class and cultural biases that hamper minority, poor and working-class students") would rather ignore that little detail. Funny, too, how the PI doesn't note that the same critics who are screaming about market shares following the SAT revisions would have been the first to scream about obsolescence and stubbornness if the College Board hadn't modified the test in response to criticism.

Meanwhile, the Orlando Sentinel noticed something escaped many other papers. While more students are aiming for college, fewer of them are willing to tell the College Board their race:

Last August, as it does every summer, the College Board released its national SAT report, showing that the average score on the college entrance exam had climbed slightly, as had the scores of minority students...buried in the data was a fact overlooked by researchers and journalists: A record portion of the test-takers, 25 percent, had declined to disclose their ethnicity.

That's triple what it was seven years ago. And there's no reason to assume that students who refuse to disclose their race can be left out of analyses, or that such students are similar to those who do list their race. There is research (by Dr. Dale Whittington and Dr. Howard Wainer, both of whom are quoted in the article) to suggest that such omissions undercut the ethnic-analysis conclusions that have been drawn from SAT scores in the past.

Some claim that the increase is due to students trying to avoid "stereotype threat" or AA policies. The College Board claims instead that the previous registration forms were too accommodating, and have noted a sharp drop in ethnic-group nonresponders now that students are forced to choose a race category (including, "I choose not to respond").

Hawkin's Island

John Hawkins of Right Wing News was nice enough to include me on his list of 10 bloggers he'd like to be stuck with on a deserted island. I'm flattered, even though the other four female bloggers get described as "easy on the eyes" and "hot" while I get described as "personable" and "brainy." The story of my life - despite my best efforts, I'm always The Professor, never Ginger or Mary Ann.

I mean, look at the new photo I uploaded for the site. (it's actually from last summer, but I've decided that I want it to be my main photo.) Does that look more brainy than beautiful to you? Okay, fine, it does. I'll shut up now.

Friday non-testing roundup

You know, it's Friday, sunny, and beautiful outside, and I don't feel like writing about standardized tests any more than you feel like reading about them. So the Friday roundup will be a bit more eclectic than usual.

I can't decide what's more touching about this story, the fact that the "pound puppy" defended his owner so bravely, or the fact that private donations have more than met the family's $4000 in veterinary fees.

So your kid's a vegan and doesn't want to dissect a real fetal pig in Bio? Get 'em a virtual pig. But is an 85 a virtual B?

Men are asking for "a little off the top" in Scotland. SWAP is angry, and on the case.

If you've been recieving emails about those dreaded camel spiders in Iraq, Snopes wants you to know that they're not dangerous, and really not that big. Not big enough to scare away all those reenlisters, anyway.

One of my favorite bloggers, Michele of A Small Victory, is taking a hiatus. It looks like ASV is finished; something new might pop up in it's place, though.

I donated to Spirit of America this week. Freedom of the press, indeed.

Finally, if you didn't watch the two-part Cecil B. DeMille program on Turner Classic Movies earlier this month, you really missed out. I love anything about the history of Hollywood (from the 50's on back), and it's heady to think of the days when one man could found a studio, direct silent films and Biblical blockbusters (pre-Hays code), and build his own private airfield in the middle of Los Angeles. Ah, to have made some dough in Hollywood back when land was plentiful and the federal income tax had not yet been revived.

Update: Oh, and this is an odd site. Human Descent=fun with genetic impossibilities and Photoshop. I particularly like the top photo from this page. That's how I feel most days - attitude of a tiger, body of a chipmunk.

A most dangerous couch potato

If you ever needed any evidence to support limiting your kid's access to TV, here it is:

Police in the southwestern Florida city of Fort Myers arrested...17-year-old Carlos Chereza, on Tuesday on a charge of soliciting to commit first-degree murder. Tipped by an informant that Chereza had offered to pay to have his mother killed, an undercover detective posed as someone willing to do the job, Fort Myers police said.

"Carlos stated that he didn't want anything to happen to the television," the detective wrote in the arrest report.

Yeeks.

Skipping spring break

I doubt these third-graders in Savannah (GA) had planned to spend their Spring Break in Daytona Beach, but I'm sure they'd rather be somewhere besides the classroom:

About 1,100 third-graders who need extra help to pass the reading portion of a state standardized exam in a little more than a week, were invited to give up a traditional spring break in exchange for a more educational one. Third-graders who don't pass the reading portion won't advance to fourth grade, according to a state law now in effect. So being prepared to pass is crucial.

Roughly 75 percent, or 854 kids, took the school system up on the intensive Third-Grade Reading Camp offer, and have been attending school for three hours each day this week. Educators say they believe results will be positive – more kids will pass the exam.

The test they're preparing for is indeed the same CRCT that James Hope is so unhappy with (in the previous post, below). This article provides links to sample items, none of which seem as strange as the one Hope cites.

I particularly like #5, too, because the most recent lead singer of my boyfriend's band was named "Goat."

Hope lives on in Georgia

Gwinnett County (GA) teacher James Hope is NOT happy with the state of testing in Georgia right now:

Here's the question: What change should be made to the phrase "stir it around" in the sentence below?

That's nine redundant tests in one month.

Hope then goes on to mention that he got in trouble for posting Gateway test items online before. I thought I recognized his name.

I would love to give you a specific example of a Gwinnett Gateway test question, but the last time I made some of those questions public, in an attempt to show how some test items do not measure what is taught in schools, I was visited three times by school system police, had my phone records confiscated and almost had my teaching certificate revoked.

Almost - as I reported previously, Hope was cleared of wrongdoing. I don't blame him for questioning items of the type above, and I agree that Gateway's confidentiality agreement is pretty harsh (for most tests, only live items are covered under such agreements; Hope posted sample items). And I agree with him completely on this:

These tests were supposed to be the yardstick to measure educational reform, not be the educational reform. And that's true, no matter how you "stir it" or "stir it round and round."

Rating education programs in LA

From Devoted Reader Kevin comes this article in The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA). Author Will Sentel reports that Glenny Lee Buquet, president of Louisiana's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, has claimed that the state is grading education programs far too easily:

A state review released last week said 12 of 19 public and private colleges and universities, including LSU and Southern University, earned top marks for the way they train teachers. But Glenny Lee Buquet of Houma, president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said this week that evaluators need to take a more-detailed look at how students are faring when so many schools win high marks.

"I want to see more detail," Buquet said. "I think a pass/fail on the PRAXIS doesn't give us the whole story. I want to see the actual scores."

I agree. Also, one of the other categories in which schools were rated was student satisfaction, and every school got an A or a B in that category. This could be useful, but it could also be meaningless.

The little girl who cried wolf

I don't know if any of you have been following the sad tale of University of Wisconsin-Madison student Audrey Seiler. I first encountered the story on Fark; the Farkers were suspicious because her story seemed very, very strange. As it turns out, the Farkers were right.

Long story short: Audrey faked her own kidnapping. She was missing for five days, after walking out of her apartment at 2:30 am. Ultimately, she was found in a marsh a couple of miles away. A huge force of police and volunteers mobilized to hunt for her during the entire time she was missing. After her discovery, Madison police listened to her story, and then discovered that she had previously purchased the knife, duct tape, rope and cold medicine that she claimed her assailant used. Someone had used her computer while she was "missing," and Audrey was also spotted around town during that time. The result is that she has been charged with two misdemeanor counts of obstructing officers, as the Madison police force has officially concluded that her kidnapping was a hoax.

There's no denying she has some mental problems. But I think this sends the wrong message:

A college student who staged her own disappearance last month will try to reach a plea agreement and avoid trial on charges she obstructed officers, her attorney said Thursday. Audrey Seiler, 20, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sophomore from Rockford, Minn., faces up to nine months in jail and a $10,000 fine for each of two misdemeanor charges. Her attorney, Randy Hopper, appeared on her behalf Thursday in Dane County Circuit Court...

"She obviously is dealing with a lot of trauma related to this, she's going through a very difficult time. She's having both some emotional and some physical problems to deal with as you might expect somebody who's gone through something like this," Hopper said after appearing in court.

Somebody who's "gone through something like this"?! Excuse me, but Audrey put herself through this. Her actions, while wacky, appear not only deliberate but premeditated, and she lied to the police afterwards. Why shouldn't she be charged with obstructing? Since when does "having a difficult time" absolve one of responsibility?

Oh, and the great "crisis" that allegedly triggered this?

The criminal complaint depicts Seiler as a young woman upset by a fading relationship with her boyfriend, Ryan Fisher. Friends said the two had been fighting, and Seiler's roommate, Heather Thue, told officers that Fisher did not pay as much attention to Seiler as she wanted. Seiler's mother told police her daughter had not been herself lately and was "extremely needy" of Fisher.

Three days before she disappeared, her laptop was used to log onto Fisher's e-mail account and read exchanges "with romantic overtones" between him and another woman, according to the complaint.

Audrey was getting dumped, so she snooped through her boyfriend's email. And the result was a five-day search that cost Madison about $96,000. Please explain to me why leniency should be the approach here. Plenty of college women get dumped every year. Plenty of students are under stress. But that's almost $100K of taxpayer money wasted because Audrey deliberately made all of Madison worry for several days.

She needs help, all right, and jail time may not be the best option for her, but neither is a slap on the wrist. Some local residents feel sorry for "the little lost soul," but I don't, and neither did one resident of Audrey's hometown, who put it best:

Lisa Wangstad wasn't as forgiving, and noted that police say Seiler bought duct tape and rope just before disappearing.

Wangstad, whose daughter attended high school gym class with Seiler, said the hoax would make it harder in the future for real kidnapping victims. And she predicted a difficult time for Seiler's parents.

Presumably as they begin to realize that their daughter doesn't understand that it's wrong to fake your own kidnapping after being dumped.

Not OK in Oklahoma

An unacceptable error: The teacher's manuals for the Oklahoma state standardized exams contain several wrong answers to sample questions.

The testing company, Harcourt Educational Measurement, realized April 8 that some of the answers to sample questions were wrong. The company then notified schools by e-mail and fax after 5 p.m. Friday.

"I received numerous calls from teachers who questioned the credibility of the actual tests based on the number of incorrect answers in the sample questions," said Kathy Dodd, director of student achievement for Union Public Schools.

As well they should.

Do rich kids deserve their test scores?

North County Times columnist and former administrator Richard J. Riehl gets away with a common fallacy in an column about standardized tests:

Each spring California school administrators greet the release of school rankings based on Academic Performance Index (API) scores like anxious coaches awaiting the annual NCAA Tournament match-ups....

When test scores say more about family income than about learning, it's time to examine the learning environments of our best schools: places where talented teachers are committed to helping each student succeed, where administrators have the courage and the support to make tough personnel decisions, where safe and attractive campuses have excellent learning resources, and where multiple ways to measure learning reflect the multiple ways students learn.

I don't mind Riehl's suggestion that bad schools learn from good schools. But the comment above about family income (emphasis mine) is an invitation to assume that the students from good schools did not actually earn their scores, simply because their parents have money. This is what is means to say that test scores are "more about" income than learning, and I doubt it's true. It's also highly insulting to the kids who earned those scores.

I'm not going to deny that parental income is related to test scores. I'm just tired of columnists and pundits declaring that the test scores of rich kids are due solely to money, instead of due to the hard work that these kids put into their education. No one seems willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, parents who make money have also instilled in their children the values of education and hard work; their kids would probably have high test scores even if they didn't attend schools in wealthy districts.

The assumption in these types of columns is always that income causes scores; I say parental attitude, intelligence, and value of education causes both parental income AND student test scores, and if that's true, then ignoring test results from poor schools - or pouring money into those schools - may not solve the problems.

A wider range of role models

In Thomas Sowell's "Random Thoughts" column comes this provocative comment:

The idea of providing black students with "role models" is counterproductive because it insinuates the notion that you can be inspired only by people who look like you. How in the world did the Nisei generation of Japanese American children ever learn, when their fathers were mostly farmers and these children seldom, if ever, saw a Japanese American teacher, much less Japanese American engineers, scientists or other professionals in fields in which these children went on to excel?

There's no doubt that plenty of today's black children are negatively affected by black, negative role models (like gangsta rappers). But perhaps part of the problem with finding positive role models today is, as Sowells suggest, the racial segregation theory which insists that role models of any kind must be the same race as the children they inspire. This seems like it would limit the possibility of models for children of all races.

If it's broke, why not fix it?

The Colorado Freedom Report highlights something that rarely gets mentioned in discussions of public funding for schools and the relationship between parental wealth and student performance. The context of the discussion is commentary by reader Adam Showman, who believes that a switch from the current government-run school system to a completely "free-market" system would mean that only the children of the wealthy would get a good education. What follows is columnist Ari Armstrong's response:

Showman's claim that it is market education that would damage the less wealthy would be laughable, if it weren't so sad. It is instead today's system of government education that has trapped the many poor students in ignorance, poverty, and the abuse of school-administered drugs. Or does Showman wish to argue that government schools in downtown Denver are comparable in quality to government schools in Boulder and Cherry Creek? (I can affirm they are not.)

True, under market education, the wealthy would spend more money on their children's education. News flash: that's already the case. Today, however, both the poor and the rich are taxed to subsidize grossly inefficient, bureaucrat-heavy, and less-than-optimal schools, and today mostly the rich are able to pay double for private schools. (The rich are also better able to put pressure on their government schools to perform.) So the poor are forced to pay for schools that serve them poorly.

Emphasis mine. And, as Armstrong notes, much of the money spent in today's public-schools is spent inefficiently, and a "back-to-basics" approach that is effective needn't be expensive.

Anything free is worth what you pay for it

Does anybody think there are half a million college students out there willing to get a free college education in exchange for community service?

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (search) says he would pay for his plan to give a free college education to young students who agree to public service by ending a $13 billion "windfall" that banks earn for making government-backed student loans.

Kerry contends that as many as 500,000 young men and women would be lured into public service by his plan, which he said would reinvigorate the nation's commitment to such service. His plan, to be announced Wednesday at a roundtable in New York City, is aimed at answering questions about how he would pay for his proposals.

I'm as suspicious about this as I am about Kerry's claim that 220,000 students have been "priced out" of a college education over the last three years. For starters, as of 1999, there were almost 15 million Americans enrolled in college, with enrollment expected to increase by another 1.5 million by 2009. This means that Kerry wants to restructure the student loan system so that another, oh, 1 or 2% of college hopefuls can attend.

And what exactly does it mean to be "priced out" of a college education? Does it mean that there are no scholarships, students loans, or financial assistance available for those 220,000? Are students who could go to college later if they worked for a few years now being counted? It's hard to believe that if someone wanted to get through a community college, that feat would be utterly financially impossible for their entire life.

As for this "community service," what are we talking about? Picking up trash on the side of the road? Working with kids? Working as unpaid political interns? Just how much community service does it take to justify getting a free college education?

I also find it interesting that this type of exchange of labor for education is being proposed by the same camp who believes that members of today's Armed Forces, though volunteers, were "forced" by "society" to enlist because of financial pressures. Couldn't Kerry's plan be viewed as "forcing" the unfortunate poor to work for free in order to get their college educations?

Testing as a worthy sacrifice

Students entering graduate programs say the admissions exams are worth the worry, because it gives them a taste of what the workload will be like:

Looking toward the future, after the endless test practice, essay writing and anxiety of waiting can often be difficult. But for students who have climbed the mountain and now find themselves in UCLA graduate programs, many see the sacrifices made in preparing applications for graduate school as entirely worthwhile.

The LSAT tests the processes of logical thinking that are important to completing law school. "I thought, 'Wow, I'm enjoying the LSAT – I'll probably enjoy law school,'" she said.

Bingo. It always amazes me when students planning graduate careers complain bitterly about the MCAT, the LSAT, and the GRE. They don't like having to work quickly, read a lot of material, synthesize a lot of information, and answer items that are based on rigid standards? What on earth do they think graduate school is going to be like?

A matter of life and death

What stands between convicted murderer Michael Rosales and the electric chair? The reliability evidence surrounding a standardized test:

The court in New Orleans delayed the execution based on claims by Rosales' lawyers that he is mentally retarded. The case will be sent back to a federal district court in Lubbock, where his defense attorneys will file a petition asking that the issue of his mental retardation be investigated further...

An intelligence test given to Rosales in January put his IQ at 73 and other tests determined he is mildly retarded, according to his appeal. An IQ of 70 is considered the threshold for retardation. Considering a five-point error rate on standardized intelligence scales, Rosales' appeal said the test results could put him at that threshold, and noted the Texas appeals court had halted an execution and allowed additional investigation for another inmate who had an IQ of 72.

I've written about this before. While I understand the compassion that motivates society not to want to put this kind of person to death, who among us believes that any further investigation of his intelligence will be unaffected by the fact that, if he is judged not to be mentally retarded, he's going to be put to death? It's hard to believe further investigation of his mental capacities will be unbiased, in that sense.

IQ tests were never meant to be used to save someone from the electric chair, and in these types of situations, the test is essentially a "Get Out of The Chair Free" card. Talk about high-stakes testing. What's more, it's my impression that activists who oppose testing in schools are quite in favor of using IQ tests to save murderers from a date with the executioner.

As I said before:

After all, researchers who use IQ scores to predict certain variables or who suggest that IQ scores should be used to make policy decisions (especially if their viewpoints are not particularly politically correct) often hear cries of outrage that such tests do not predict the whole person, that such tests don't tell you anything about motivation, or desire, or ambition, or potential, or "true" intelligence. So, why can't a prosecutor claim that when someone with an IQ of 65 murders another human, their actions speak louder than their test scores, and they should be judged on those actions?

New Jersey: Finally first in something

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently conducted a state-by-state survey to calculate the odds of high school freshmen eventually gaining a college degree. Best odds? New Jersey:

In New Jersey, the top-ranking state, 90 out of 100 freshmen graduate from high school. South Carolina ranked lowest in that category, with 49 out of 100 freshmen finishing high school.

Ohio was close to the national average, with 70 of 100 freshmen earning a high school degree. Of those, 40 start college right after high school, but only 29 of them make it to their sophomore year.

The NCPPHE also points out the obvious, which is that "college graduates make more money and require fewer social services."

Update: Woops! Spoke too soon. Joanne Jacobs points out in the comments that the story has it wrong. I was unable to find the survey data on the NCPPHE website yesterday, but today I found this graph. As Joanne correctly notes, New Jersey is not first when it comes to ninth-graders who ultimately graduate from college within six years. Massachusetts is first, Pennsylvania is second; NJ is eighth.

Will California's charter school teachers soon be unionized?

The California Teacher's Association has their eye on charter school employees:

With major financial backing from the National Education Association, California’s largest teachers’ union has launched an initiative to organize employees in hundreds of charter schools in the state...

Some California charter leaders are upbeat about the prospect for productive partnerships with unions, pointing to some places where such relationships have already been forged. Others are deeply suspicious of the 335,000-member CTA’s organizing effort, afraid it will bring to charter schools a rules-oriented mentality that they left regular public schools to escape.

Swinging the pendulum back towards character and tradition

Kay Hymowitz has a long and very interesting article in City Journal entitled, "It’s Morning After in America," in which she argues that the "Millenial Generation" (kids born between 1981 and 1999) are more Jimmy Stewart than James Dean:

Yet marketers who plumb people’s attitudes to predict trends are noticing something interesting about “Millennials,” the term that generation researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss invented for the cohort of kids born between 1981 and 1999: they’re looking more like Jimmy Stewart than James Dean. They adore their parents, they want to succeed, they’re optimistic, trusting, cooperative, dutiful, and civic-minded. “They’re going to ‘rebel’ by being, not worse, but better,” write Howe and Strauss...

Fed up with the fallout from the reign of “if it feels good, do it”—not only as it played out in the inner city but in troubled middle-class families across the land—Americans are looking more favorably on old-fashioned virtues like caution, self-restraint, commitment, and personal responsibility. They are in the midst of a fundamental shift in the cultural zeitgeist that is driving so many seemingly independent trends in crime, sex, drugs, and alcohol in the same positive direction.

Read the whole thing; it's very interesting. And while Hymowitz notes the changing trends in parental discipline and education in schools, she leaves out a growing trend that I think has a lot to do with producing more level-headed kids and more tightly-knit families: homeschooling. It's an odd admission, because Hymowitz does notice that parents want a more traditional and character-based education for their kids:

A 1999 Yankelovich survey found that 89 percent of Gen Xers think modern parents let kids get away with too much; 65 percent want to return to a more traditional sense of parental duty. “Character education” is hot in school districts across the country—as are the Girl Scouts, because, as official Courtney Shore told the Washington Times, “parents and communities are returning to values-based activities.” Today’s parenting magazines do a brisk trade in articles with titles like ARE YOU A PARENT OR A PUSHOVER? GET A DISCIPLINE MAKEOVER AND TEACHING YOUR CHILD RIGHT FROM WRONG.

"Character education"? "Values-based activities"? Sounds like a lot of the current motivating factors behind homeschooling to me.

"The grand exercise in wishful thinking" about test scores

Professor Amy Wax, in an absolutely phenomenal WSJ Op-Ed, says that the answers to solving test score gaps are not easy, despite recent research suggesting that minority students falter mainly because of deep-rooted stereotypes. After noting that the existing "stereotype threat" research may be fundamentally flawed, Professor Wax lists the incorrect yet popular anti-testing assumptions that are at the root of much educational research today:

Lack of evidence and grave methodological defects haven't prevented the stereotype threat industry from taking off. Distortions are now pervasive. According to a survey by Mr. Sackett and his colleagues, 10 of 11 references to the threat in scientific journals, more than half the descriptions in psychology textbooks and 14 of 16 discussions in the media incorrectly state that racial differences in academic performance disappear when stereotype threat is eliminated. In this vein, a recent New York Times article on stereotype threat and the racial test-score gap declared that "performance is psychological." A Frontline special falsely stated that blacks who believe that a standardized test was merely a research tool, rather than a gauge of their abilities, performed just as well as whites.

• The first item of faith is that any assessment that reveals group differences must be biased, inaccurate and invalid. If scores can be lifted merely by adjusting attitudes or test conditions, then poor scores don't reflect real deficiencies in knowledge and ability and tests aren't an accurate measure of academic skill.

• The second notion is that groups don't really differ in academic proficiency or learning. Stereotype threat is a temporary brain freeze that covers up what students really know. If performance across groups can be equalized just by dispelling the test-takers' fear of being judged, then current disparities reflect no real group differences in learning or skill.

• Third, stereotype threat promises a quick fix for low achievement. We resist the idea that high test scores reflect dedicated study and good learning habits, that learning builds on itself over time, and that there may come a point when past deficits can't be made up. We want to believe that anyone can always catch up and that latent potential can be instantly unleashed if only the right formula is found.

• Finally, we resist confronting the social and behavioral causes of shortfalls in academic performance. Stark differences between groups in marriage rates, family stability, paternal involvement, parenting practices and discipline, and other habits and values, are associated with children's disparate academic success. Changing these requires sustained self-scrutiny and reform from within. We'd rather believe that underachievement comes from without. If only white society would stop stereotyping minority students as inferior, or expecting them to perform poorly, stereotype threat would abate and all would be well.

Emphasis mine. I bow to Professor Wax's thorough yet concise description. There's no better way to sum up the hysterical reaction to testing, and to the ethnically-charged achievement gap, that one sees almost everywhere these days. "A grand exercise in wishful thinking" - I'm going to have to use that phrase more often.

This is not to say that there are no legitimate criticisms of testing. Tests can be used improperly. Testing content can be inappropriate. Tests can be given too often, and the stakes can be set too high or too low. But every reporter who covers an exit exam or admissions exam controversy who unthinkingly prints the line, "Critics say such tests are biased...," should be forced to read Professor Wax's explanation of why bogus test bias theories abound, and should be forced to explain why they feel it's unnecessary to let their readers in on the reams of research demonstrating that a very real achievement gap underlies the legendary test score gap.

Her summary?

People who don't know how to read and do math can't function and lead in a demanding, technological society, regardless of the cause of those shortcomings. The insight that anxiety about stereotypes may influence minority students' real learning is not without implications. It suggests that encouragement and reassurance are a vital part of education. But in urging students to prove their detractors wrong, one key message should never get lost: What matters most in the end is what you know.

And in the end, if you know it, you can show it on a test, no matter what group you belong to.

(Thanks to Devoted Reader EGF for the link.)

Elitism vs. equality in college educations

Amardeep Singh of No False Medicine comments on a very interesting NYT article on affirmative action, "Diversity's False Solace". (Discriminations doesn't yet have any commentary up on this article, but I'm sure some soon will be.)

Anyway, NYT reporter Walter Benn Michaels believes that AA policies are a "solace" to society because they suggest that racism is the real problem. But Michaels believes economic inequality is the real issue:

This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution.

Singh finds Michaels' arguments to be provocative but wonders where the solutions are:

There is no question that Benn Michaels is pointing to a real problem with affirmative action as it is currently conceptualized by left-leaning academics. But what Benn Michaels doesn't, or won't, address is how to realistically respond to the problem of economic disparity.

An obvious solution (to the larger problem) is to use multi-variable affirmative action, whereby wealthy universities would aim to achieve both economic and racial diversity, preferably not with the same students (i.e., admit wealthy students of color and poor caucasian students)...

Some might suggest a socialized university system, similar to European models, to fix this problem, but it's unreasonable to believe that this could happen in our society:

Sorry, but I don't see it happening. Call it false consciousness, but most Americans (and many people abroad) have a great deal of pride and awe about the wealthy universities, precisely because they are so powerful and elitist. Economically and politically, these universities have never been stronger and more influential -- and that includes the university where Benn Michaels himself taught for many years, the very wealthy and elitist Johns Hopkins University.

The system may be ugly, but it is surprisingly healthy.

I remember the first time I took a Canadian friend on a tour of Princeton University's campus. I thought he'd appreciate the grand buildings, historical sense, and gothic flair of the surroundings. Instead, all he did was puke and whine about "rich people" for an hour. As though everyone who ever attended Princeton (a) was filthy rich through inherited funds and (b) never gave anything back to society by, say, doing research, starting businesses, or creating jobs. As though everyone at Princeton should have given all their money to the poor, dressed in rags, and built a campus out of plywood. As though the money flowing around at Princeton didn't help stellar research organizations like the Institute for Advanced Study develop (even though it's a separate non-profit organization).

No, to him, Princeton was just the playground of the rich, and rich persons were to be hated. But to me, the university is a symbol of a healthy and truly diverse American college society that has a variety of college options for our very heterogenous population. The fact that some of our elite colleges are priced out of the range of most Americans is, to me, not bothersome, because while a college degree is important for advancement in American society, this is not a country in which the particular alma mater determines the rest of one's life.

Against the odds

A sobering article on Miami.Com notes that young black men who want to go to college aren't likely to ever get there; black men earn only 3% of all bachelors degrees nationwide:

By the time they reach high school, Census statistics show that 42 percent of all African-American boys have failed an entire grade at least once. Just 18 percent of black men ages 20-21 are enrolled in college, according to the Census. And, the U.S. Department of Education reports that only 34 percent of the black students who earn bachelor's degrees are male. Across the nation, struggling black male students...face a series of hurdles in school. They aren't taking courses that prepare them for college. Their teachers aren't prepared, emotionally or professionally, to work with them. They aren't challenged. Jobs and rap music are more appealing to them than education.

Black females are clearing most of those hurdles. The credit for any statistical data reporting improvements goes to them. The overwhelming majority of black teen-age boys trip, fall and give up. Black women enroll in college and earn bachelor's and master's degrees two times more often than black men.

This isn't news to anyone who works in my field. Black women take post-graduate exams at twice the rate of black men, which is something that vexes AA proponents; any graduate programs using race-based quotas are likely to admit black men who are underqualified, simply because so few of them make it that far.

The article goes on to describe a magnet program at DeRenne Middle School in Savannah, GA. Only 45 of the school's 302 black males are enrolled in the magnet program, but it isn't just low test scores keeping them out. There are black male students in the school who qualify for the program but turn it down because they don't want to be "nerds," which is one of the saddest things I've heard in a while:

But there are black kids with the academic qualifications who aren't enrolled, according to Assistant Principal Betty Burnette, because they don't feel welcome by the whites inside of the program. And, they are often ridiculed by the blacks on the outside.

"They're teased and called nerds," Burnette said. "And their parents let them out of the program."

With all the problems facing young black men today, I'd think their parents would be teaching them that being a "nerd" isn't so bad. The recruitment of black males into magnet programs that can help them reach their full potential won't fix the problem - schools need to do what they can to combat the racist notion that being smart/academic/nerdy is "acting white."

It's hard to determine which came first, low teacher expectations or students' refusal to do work. But according to the research of University of California Berkeley professor John Ogbu, each feeds the other...

In his research on minority education, Berkeley's Ogbu found that many black students, particularly males, allow extra curricular activities and work to take priority over class...Although some students use their income to help support their families, Ogbu found that many black males work solely to accumulate things.

I've written about Dr. Ogbu before; he's the researcher who noted that even black kids from affluent, professional families can still be sidetracked by negative societal role models.

This is a great article, but I disagree with the summary sentence:

"It's such a travesty in our schools, and it can easily be changed." [said by Mary Catherine Swanson, founder of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program]

It is a travesty, and I think the solutions are clear, but they're not easy.

Unlocking the great mysteries of the Peeps

Now THIS is science. Don't miss the "Medical Miracle" - the delicate separation of conjoined quintuplet Peeps. My, what a wonder it is when the scientific method is combined with far too much refined sugar.

And in addition to Peeps research, we have studies on how well Peeps themselves can do research. Who knew that Peeps get bored with studying and like to fool around in libraries, just like college students?

Digging up teachers' test scores in PA

In Philadelphia, local paper the Inquirer is trying to dig up state-wide teacher certification score results, and the administration is resisting:

Gov. Rendell said yesterday that although he favors making most information public, he has concerns about releasing teacher certification test results from the state's 501 school districts...

The Education Department refused a request last month from The Inquirer to provide data for every district where teachers of English, math, science and social studies took the middle school level tests in their subjects. The Inquirer has filed a request for the test data under the state's Right to Know Act. A response from the department is due next week.

Rendell is right; no need to humiliate now the middle-school teachers who can't pass the certification tests. We'll just humiliate them in 2006 when the tests become a requirement. After all, the Inquirer has already been able to report that nearly one in four teachers outside of Philadelphia failed the middle-school certification exams, while almost half of the Philadelphia teachers failed as well.

Testing information for parents in the Grand Canyon state

The Arizona Republic supplies a handy summary of testing information called, "Which Tests Matter?"

Arizona students take two types of standardized tests.

• Before they were hired, teachers once had to stand on a stage where they were grilled to make sure they knew the answers to standardized questions.

The independent state of Nebraska

Out in Nebraska, the land is wide and open, and the NCLB testing is unorthodox: Nebraska says "no" to mandatory statewide testing.

With criticism mounting over implementation of the federal accountability law and states scrambling to overhaul their testing systems to comply, Nebraska alone has succeeded in saying no to mandatory statewide tests.

"I don't give a damn what No Child Left Behind says," Christensen said. "I think education is far too complex to be reduced to a single score. We decided we were going to take No Child Left Behind and integrate it into our plan, not the other way around. If it's bad for kids, we're not going to do it."

The article then mentions that Nebraska's portfolio assessments are, like most such systems, "expensive...time-consuming for teachers and it makes comparisons among districts difficult." The only reason it works as well as it does there is because the school districts are small (only 159 of Nebraska's 517 school districts are large enough to trigger federal attention) and the populations are homogenous. True to form, though, NCLB critics are insisting that Nebraska's system can work for other districts and states.

Nebraska's 517 school districts design their own assessment systems: a portfolio of teachers' classroom assessments, district tests that measure how well children are meeting locally developed learning standards, a state writing test and at least one nationally standardized test included as a reality check.

So they haven't opted out of standardized testing altogether. That's wise.

These are submitted to state education officials and a team of outside testing experts for review, and the districts are rated not just on the proficiency of their students but on the quality and reliability of their testing portfolio.

Also wise. This is why this plan satisfies the NCLB requirements. Interesting, too, that in a time when time-crunch complaints are constantly featured in news articles, Nebraska's teachers don't mind taking the extra time for portfolio work:

Sixth-grade teacher Melissa McCain knows some of her Nebraska colleagues think their jobs would be easier with state-ordered tests. But after the year she spent teaching in Texas, where children take high-stakes tests every year, she's convinced the extra work beats the alternative.

"Everything was about the test in Texas. The pressure was great. I would have kids who got sick on test day, they were so stressed out," McCain said. "Here, we are assessing our kids every day. I have more flexibility to meet the needs of individual kids."

There's nothing wrong with that. The high-stakes tests were developed, in essence, to force schools that were doing little or no assessment to keep better track of performance, and to allow states with very heterogenous populations to compare performance across districts. In Nebraska, it seems they've found a happy medium that works for Nebraska. But it would be a mistake to assume that this sort of assessment would be feasible or affordable or valid elsewhere.

No exit exams for the disabled in Alaska

Alaska's disabled students are officially off the hook. After some legal discussions and class-action lawsuits, Alaska Education Commissioner Roger Sampson has announced that Alaska's disabled students need not pass the state exam - this year - if they've fulfilled all the other requirements for graduation:

The lawsuit was filed March 16 in U.S. District Court by Oakland, Calif.-based Disability Rights Advocates. Sid Wolinsky, an attorney with the group, said three-quarters of disabled Alaska students were flunking the graduation test, which assesses proficiency in reading, writing and math.

The Alaska plaintiffs are seeking "reasonable accommodations" for disabled students, such as a read-aloud format for students with dyslexia or judging them on grades, comments in class and performance on projects rather than on a test.

Emphasis mine. Not to pick on dyslexics, but isn't this as much as admitting that students should be allowed to get Alaskan high school diplomas while being functionally illiterate? And why weren't the lawsuit filers demanding to know what the disabled students were being taught over 12 years of schooling, if the result was a high likelihood of failing a basic skills exam?

An expletive a day keeps the teacher away

Here come the lawyers: High school teacher Elizabeth Anne Moore is tired of students telling her to go *beep* herself in class, and so she's taking it to the courts:

Elizabeth Anne Moore, a reading teacher at Trevor G. Browne High School (AZ), claims in a court petition that the 15-year-old student daily tells her in front of other students "to go (expletive) myself." Moore, 53, says the boy also uses a crude expression in telling classmates that she offers sexual favors to students.

Kotterman also said school administrators sometimes tend to brush off problems by accusing teachers of failing to control their classrooms.

What IS Ms. Moore supposed to do with a kid whose parent brushes off her concerns? Send him to the principal's office every day? Suspend him every time he opens his mouth? Apparently, she tried that, and wasn't happy with the administrative response (although a district spokesman said officials have responded properly). I hope the school district is very embarrassed by this situation, because Ms. Moore shouldn't have to face this kind of abuse every day on her own.

Militant math

Thanks to the narrow focus of this blog, I don't often get to post on matters of national security. But Bill Evers circulated a story that seems to have flown under the rader of the mainstream media:

At New York's Kennedy Airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school math teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

Attorney General Ashcroft said,"As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks."

Math teachers, be careful out there. Ashcroft's got his eye on you.

Promoting the failers in Houston

Social promotion is back in Houston:

After years of toughening standards for the promotion of ninth graders, the Houston Independent School District reversed course on Thursday, saying high school students who failed core subjects could now go on to the next grade, provided they had sufficient credits from other courses.

Under the policy approved Thursday, students in the Houston Independent School District must still pass the core subjects — including algebra, geometry, biology and English — but may do so at any time before graduation.

Allegedly, this is to keep kids from getting discouraged and dropping out. But what happens to the 16-year-old who keeps getting promoted but cannot graduate after his senior year because he hasn't passed algebra? Is this a proposal to keep students from getting discouraged, or is it a plan to keep them enmeshed in a system that never provides the education that they need?

(To the Devoted Reader who alerted me of this - I forgot to forward your email so I could thank you by name. I'll rectify this tonight.)

Can good grades be rationed?

Here's one way to curb grade inflation - Princeton is considering rationing the number of A's to be awarded in each department:

In what would be the strongest measure to combat grade inflation by an elite university, Princeton faculty will vote later this month on a plan to require each academic department to award an A-plus, A or A-minus for no more than 35percent of its grades.

"I think it's tremendously significant that Princeton is doing this, and I do think it will have a ripple effect," said Bradford P. Wilson, a part- time teacher at Princeton and executive director of the National Association of Scholars, a group that has spoken out against grade inflation. "What goes on at the premier institutions sets the standard of quality for every institution."

Even if a quota produced the "right" results, I don't know that this really fixes the problem. The problem is not the number of A's per se, but the fact that college professors have lowered their standards and students have come to feel more entitled to good grades. In some departments (say, math or engineering), I'm sure this quota would have no effect because A's aren't just handed out anyway. But in other departments, the culture of the A is so ingrained that it would take more than this plan to set things right. My guess is that some professors - those who believe in rewarding effort over acheivement - would do away with grades altogether rather than limit the number of A's.

Sad stories from CSU

Cal State math professor David Klein (whose been featured on this blog before) provides some commentary in the Orange County Register about the racial politics surrounding remedial math education:

By 1998, 54 percent of all entering freshmen students in the 23-campus CSU system were so weak in math skills that they were required to enroll in remedial programs (the figures were similar for language skills). In March 2000, math specialists in Los Angeles Unified School District estimated that 60 percent of L.A.'s eighth-graders did not know the multiplication tables.

Sounds like L.A. could have spent money more wisely sending each student a copy of the Schoolhouse Rock Multiplication Rock video. What does it say when an entire system can't do the job of a few animated videos?

The California school board began to reverse the worst math fads in 1997 after approving rigorous, world-class math standards written by leading mathematicians at Stanford University. Those reforms are now working at the elementary school level in California, and year-by-year improvement is wending its way up the grades. But we are still dealing with a lost generation in high schools and state colleges.

How lost? Students enrolling in CSU are working at the fifth-grade level and rely on calculators to do basic math. The remedial program seemed to be working well, but those who were dissatisfied with the 19 percent failure rate played the race card:

The 81 percent passage rate - however impressive in context - was not high enough for the Pan African Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments at CSUN. Both departments wrote open letters denouncing the math department. Pan African Studies wrote on behalf "of black and brown student clientele regarding the structure of the program, the ambivalence and/or elitist attitudes of some of its instructors and the high failure rates in the developmental math courses"...

Besides citing the failure rate of 19 percent, the math department's critics gave no other evidence to support charges of racism, elitism or other accusations. Many of the remedial math instructors were themselves Latino, and all worked tirelessly to help the students, including tutoring outside of class...Nevertheless, attempts by the math department to defend itself from charges of racial insensitivity, etc., were ignored by the CSUN administration. Control of the program was taken away from the math department - and now no one complains about passage rates. That's because the problem of remedial math education was solved largely by defining it out of existence.

Apparently, for the professional victimologist here, the real tragedy is not that students matriculate at CSU with fifth-grade math skills, but that at CSU these students are being held to real, if remedial, standards. Are those 19% who cannot pass remedial math courses now better off because the "elitist" math department no longer controls the coursework? It's doubtful.

What's more, even though the elementary school students in California are now learning math under more rigorous standards, CSU is ensuring that they'll be taught by incompetents:

Math professors who teach the arithmetic course for future elementary-school teachers, such as myself, are required to allow all students to use their calculators on the exam that tests their understanding of how and why arithmetic "works." The inescapable fact is that California expects more competence in arithmetic from its elementary-school students than CSUN expects from its future teachers. Since 1998, schoolchildren have not been allowed to use calculators on the state's annual standardized tests, and with good reason.

Update on the testing error study

Last June, I commented on the National Board for Educational Testing and Public Policy study on testing errors. I'm delighted to see that one of the study's authors, Kathy Rhoades, commented on that post, and I'm reprinting her comment here in its entirety:

Nice web site.

2. Similary, the 2001 error is a security error -- it is up to the contractor or test administrator to ensure that tests are not stolen. Test security cannot be taken lightly and errors resulting from poor test security are very serious.

I agree entirely that companies like ETS should do everything possible to insure test security and timely test delivery. Given the determination of some test-takers, though, I still question whether stolen tests should always count as errors. I am aware of one late-1990's LSAT test booklet that was stolen after the exam at knifepoint from the proctor. Other than arming proctors, what could LSAC have put in place to prevent that, and why should it be considered an error on LSAC's part, especially considering that those involved were arrested and prosecuted?

3. Miskeyed items are, arguably, among the most serious errors. Since problems such as these can be spotted easily in the item statistics. If they are not spotted by the contractor, then it is an indication that the contractor is not conducting even basic item-level analyses from which measures of internal test consistency are also established.

A very good point. I had argued that one or two items being miskeyed should not be considered a large error, but Ms. Rhoades is right to say that any such error, no matter how small, should, if it makes it onto a live exam, raise suspicion that the basic item-level analysis process is lacking.

4. The CTB TerraNova error calculation occurred separately for each of the states -- and each state was notified and had their results corrected at separate times.

Make sense to me.

As for your suggestion regarding including consideration of the seriousness of errors, I think it is a good one. Was considering updating the report with that information alongside new errors.

I'm delighted to hear it, and eager to see how the seriousness of errors will be quantified or categorized in the update. I'm also delighted in general to see that the author of this report discovered Number 2 Pencil, hopefully not through an email from a colleague which said, "Look at what this idiot had to say about your study."

Want your kid to go to med school? Buy 'em a Gameboy

Amusing correlation of the day: "Doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games:"

The study on whether good video game skills translate into surgical prowess was done by researchers with Beth Israel and the National Institute on Media and the Family at Iowa State University. It was based on testing 33 fellow doctors — 12 attending physicians and 21 medical school residents who participated from May to August 2003.

The study "landmarks the arrival of Generation X into medicine," said the study's co-author, Dr. Paul J. Lynch, a Beth Israel anesthesiologist who has studied the effects of video games for years.

Perhaps operating tables could have score counters attached, so that top surgeons can enter their initials? And I wonder if, 25 years ago, there were studies done to see how much better expert surgeons were at the board game Operation?

How to nurture kids and create peaceniks

Here's an interesting article about a teacher who is suing the South Bay (CA) Union School District for discrimination:

[Linda] Sorter taught sixth grade at South Bay School for 17 years. A longtime local activist with Amnesty International, Women in Black and other organizations, she said she's included community service and discussion of world events in her classroom for years. Sorter contends that Superintendent/Principal Rick Fauss discriminated against her for her political beliefs and peace activism by treating her rudely and eventually ordering her to move to another classroom...

She said she sees her dispute with the district as part of a larger struggle to maintain a nurturing attitude in the classroom when faced with standardized testing requirements and an educational climate which emphasizes hurrying to pass the test rather than dealing with children's personal lives.

The interesting part: The article doesn't mention what subjects Ms. Sorter teachs. As for her "peace activism," I can see where a principal could decide that such topics are not appropriate for sixth-graders, and he could also decide that it is better for a teacher to instruct her students in basic skills, rather than pry into their personal lives. "Nurturing" is all well and good, but when a teacher defines nurturing as not caring whether children can demonstrate solid reading, writing, and mathematics skills, I too would conclude that she has put her political agenda ahead of her teaching responsibilities.

For example, back in February 2003, before Gulf War II began in earnest, Ms. Sorter required her students to spend quite a lot of time on "peace" activities:

Now as the United States is on the verge of bombing Iraq once again, sixth-graders at the South Bay School in Eureka are sending a message of peace to children and families in Iraq. The 20 students in Linda Sorter's class spent three weeks making 1,000 origami cranes and sent them to be displayed at the Amariya bomb shelter memorial...

Sorter herself is an active member of "Women in Black," the nationwide anti-war protest group that holds silent vigils around Humboldt County every Friday afternoon. Sorter wears black to work on Fridays. Although she doesn't promote her philosophy in the classroom, several of her students also began to wear black on Friday.

Emphases mine. So she's not trying to push any particular agenda, or promote her philosophy in the classroom, oh no. But she has every kid in the class spending weeks making origami cranes to support victims of an accidental bombing. Did they do as much for those who were victims of Saddam, instead of the evil US? I doubt it. Does she nurture her kids who unhesitatingly support the war, or allow them to discuss pro- and anti-war arguments freely? I doubt it. Does she urge her students to think critically about Amnesty International's more controversial actions, such as insisting that Israel give all Palestinian Arabs free rein to move about? Does she allow them to criticize Amnesty International, as some very well-informed people have done? I doubt it.

Why can't Ms. Sorter just admit that teaching her students her particular, one-sided political beliefs is a big part of her agenda, if not the main part? She claims her student's parents don't complain, which is not surprising considering she teaches in Eureka, California, in a school district which strives to educate children to be "responsible participants in a global society." For Ms. Sorter to insist that she is merely "nurturing" her students, and not trying to push her personal philosophy on them, is extremely disingenuous, at best.

Substituting the SAT

Teachers in Virginia can now use their SAT scores in place of the Praxis I. The hopes is that it will simplify the process and perhaps encourage those who might not otherwise consider teaching to enter the field:

If teacher-candidates took the SAT after April 1995, they would need to have earned at least 530 out of a possible 800 on each section, mathematics and verbal, and a combined score of at least 1100. For those who took the SAT before then, a minimum of 450 on the verbal section and 510 on the math section is required, along with a combined score of 1000. The differences reflect the "recentering" of the SAT...

But, he added, the board does not expect a lot of new teachers to fall into that category.

I'll say. As ReformK12 points out, high school seniors planning to major in education have typically had a very low mean on the SAT. In 2003, that mean was around 965 for a combined SAT, which means that (if one makes some assumptions about the shape of the distribution), only around 16% or so will have a high enough SAT score to opt out of the PRAXIS. Changing the test isn't lowering the standards, in this case; I think it's debatable whether this change will encourage more high performers to enter the teaching field.

You can't teach what you don't know

Vermont has a program to immerse teachers in mathematics in order to help them keep up with the state standards:

Every educator here in this grand stone hall at the University of Vermont on a frigid Friday last month is taking part in a program whose goal is to make mathematicians out of elementary school teachers. Responsible for teaching many subjects, teachers of the lower grades often lack the in-depth math knowledge they need to help their pupils meet the higher benchmarks that state governments have set and the federal government has demanded.

"You can’t teach what you don’t know," said Kenneth I. Gross, a professor of mathematics and education at the University of Vermont and the director of the initiative.

I agree. But wouldn't it be useful to ask why these elementary schools teachers were able to obtain college degrees in education without ever developing the skills needed to teach math at the elementary level?

Like many in the program, Jackie Bailey, a 3rd grade teacher at South Burlington Elementary School, was "math phobic" when she enrolled.

Now, she excitedly pulls out colorful examples of the calculus work she has done with her students. "I never imagined I would have come this far," she said.

Again, kudos to the program, but I shudder to hear of teachers describing themselves as math phobic after earning a college degree.

Do poll results show US supports NCLB?

The Education Week headline reads, "Opposition to School Law Growing, Poll Says":

American voters are becoming increasingly aware of the No Child Left Behind Act, but a growing minority of them are deciding they don’t like it, a new poll sponsored by the Public Education Network and Education Week suggests.

Three-fourths of voters questioned in January said they had heard about the bipartisan law, up from 56 percent who said so in a survey a year earlier...While supporters still outweighed those who dislike the law, the opposition grew threefold between January 2003 and a year later. Twenty-eight percent of this year’s respondents said they opposed the No Child Left Behind Act, compared with 8 percent in the 2003 PEN/Education Week poll.

Although we certainly can expect that as the number of those aware of NCLB increases, so will the number of its detractors, there are a couple of ways to look at this. One way is to say that the people who have discovered NCLB only in the past year have got it right, and these increased numbers reflect a public response to negative effects that took several years to develop.

One could also claim that these Johnny-come-latelys have it wrong. Perhaps they're people who don't have kids in the system. Perhaps the mainstream press has been consistently biased against NCLB, and those who discovered NCLB in the past year only know about it from reading negative articles. This poll oversampled minority parents; if those parents are more likely to believe that standardized testing, the cornerstone of NCLB, are unfair and racist, then it wouldn't be surprising if they were more likely to oppose NCLB. The main increase in opponents appears to have come from the "Not sure about NCLB" category, and perhaps those undecided folks are more swayed by negative press.

And is it possible that John Kerry was one of the people surveyed?

How can we tell? We can't. We can say that it appears from this poll that NCLB appears to have more detractors, but we don't know anything about who they are and why they oppose it, and I believe that would be the more useful info. And there are usual disclaimers about respondents who are willing and able to complete telephone surveys.

Other polls suggest that support is holding steady:

But David H. Winston, a Republican political strategist and the president of the Winston Group, a polling firm in Alexandria, Va., said the opinion research his group has conducted on the No Child Left Behind Act doesn’t bear out the conclusion that more voters are opposing it...

Mr. Winston cautioned that there were some differences in polling technique, both in the phrasing of questions and the sample. His group polled 1,000 registered voters with no oversampling. A December 2002 poll by the Winston Group showed 50 percent of respondents with a favorable impression of "Bush’s education reforms," and 29 percent unfavorable. Results from a January 2004 survey were about the same, with 52 percent favorable and 33 percent unfavorable.

The climate of fear and sexually-charged tag

Jim at ZeroIntelligence has a long report on the despots of the Katy (TX) Unified School District:

Katy ISD has a reputation for excellence and a get-tough approach to discipline. That tough discipline is changing the spirit of excellence to one of fear.

Alyssa Nemec went to the gym one morning to join some friends. She took a sip of an offered soda and then discovered it had alcohol in it. She left immediately. Later that day she was called to the office where she did her best to help them get to the bottom of the situation. Once she admitted to taking a drink of the soda her help was no longer needed. Alyssa was suspended and then sentenced to 60 days of alternative education. She was not permitted to participate in scholastic functions including her own cheerleading or watching her brother's senior year of football. She received the same punishment that the student who brought in the alcohol received.

There's more, unfortunately; the zero-tolerance rules in place mean that parents who do the right thing and report small infractions see their kids given big-time punishments.

And then there are the questionable punishments for he-said/she-said infractions (from Best of the Web):

The father of a nine-year-old Ansonia [CT] boy is questioning his son's three-day school suspension from school. Jason Pardy says the suspension for inappropriate touching was too harsh. He says his son accidentally brushed a girl's backside during a game of tag.

However, school officials say the incident was thoroughly investigated and the penalty fits the offense. Pardy says his son, a third-grader, was playing tag with a girl last Friday when he accidentally grazed her buttocks with his hand while tagging her. The girl later told teachers the boy had grabbed her backside.

Unless this "thorough investigation" had an adult witness or the act on videotape, I find it hard to believe that the school did anything other than take the girl's complaint at face value while ignoring the boy's rebuttal (pun intended). I suppose the next step will be to outlaw tag altogether; after all, when kids are running and poking each other at high speed, is is reasonable to suspend every kid who accidently touches the wrong spot?

In an ISAT state of mind

The Champaign, IL News-Gazette has a long article on the new rites of spring, the ISAT (Illinois Standards Achievement Tests) (thanks to Devoted Reader Michael S for the link):

Cheryl O'Leary, principal of Champaign's Garden Hills School, and her teachers are getting students there psyched up for the ISATs to be given this week by planning a series of special events at the school and by giving them incentives to show up on test days.

"We're on countdown for the ISATs," said Cheryl O'Leary, principal of Garden Hills School last week of pretest and test-time activities that included a Wheel of Wisdom – like Wheel of Fortune – presentation Friday sponsored by the PTA to get students excited about taking tests.

That seems like it would be as difficult as turning lead into gold. I appreciate O'Leary's enthusiasm, but do kids need to be made excited about everything in school?

One director is refreshingly pro-testing:

"High stakes tests like the ISAT have influenced districts greatly because of the accountability factor," said Mary Muller, the district's director of elementary curriculum...She said administrators take a positive approach to testing, which is sometimes criticized for taking up increasing teaching time in classrooms and for forcing educators to tailor their teaching to what's asked on the tests.

"You hear the negatives, but these tests really can give everyone a better picture of how students are doing so we can improve instruction," Muller said. "That's the missing piece. The ultimate goal is to raise student achievement, and the way to do that is to align with state standards and to assess what we're teaching."

Stephen Lucas, principal of Edison Middle School in Champaign, gets it as well:

"As far as this teaching-to-the-test thing goes, my idea is that if it's a good test that really measures state standards and what the district wants to achieve, of course it's a good thing," he said. "If you have good standards and the tests measure them, of course we want to teach to the test."

Actually, it's my hunch that a lot of teachers, principals, and administrators are pro-testing and think the same way as Muller and Lucas. The news media, however, tend to take a relentlessly anti-testing stance, and it's rare to see a news article like this one prominently feature pro-testing comments.

Dealing with "this new type of parent"

At the University of Calgary, administrators are shaking their heads over parents who just can't seem to let go:

...university and college staff are walking a fine line these days, trying to manage parents who can't let go and students embracing all the independence living away from home provides.

In that case the mother, worried her daughter couldn't combat a cold alone, stayed a week. Staff forced the parent to leave when she began meddling in the daughter's roommates' affairs, telling the other three students when to go to bed, do their homework and to stop watching television.

Ah ha ha ha! That's too funny. Can you imagine? My mom couldn't wait to get me out of the house when I entered college; I can't imagine her moving in with me over a cold, much less ordering my roommates about.

Most agree the new parent is an extension of a new breed of student, commonly referred to as the "millennia student." Born in 1980 or later and emerging from structured lives, these students rely on parental involvement and many don't mind if their mom or dad checks in.

"These are kids who, all their lives, have been woken up for breakfast, driven to school, picked up, then driven to soccer practice," said Lynn. "They run on structure and their parents aren't sure their kids can survive without them."

Wouldn't college be the logical point for the parents to step back and find out?

Catching them at an early age

I love this intense, yet enthusiastic first-hand description of the gifted-and-talented test being administered to kindergarteners in the Kerrville (TX) Independent School District:

It was kindergartner Dillon Young’s first time with a standardized test, and it was hard.

As for the questions themselves? “Oh, they were fun,” Dillon said with a small grin.

The assessment of children this young is new for the Kerrville G&T program, and the test results will be considered in conjunction with teacher reviews:

Anybody, including teachers and parents, can nominate a child for the program. Then those students are given different tests to determine their aptitude and ability.

“I want to learn how to times (multiply), and how to read,” he said with a big smile.

When blocks don't help schools build

One Pennsylvania school district turned to "block scheduling" in the 1990's in an attempt to boost test scores. They've concluded that this method wasn't helpful:

Now, with the nation's public schools facing intense pressure to improve math and reading test scores under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, administrators in the district near Philadelphia have concluded that providing four nearly 90-minute periods of "block scheduling" hasn't helped.

...no broad national studies have been conducted to determine whether block scheduling improves standardized test scores...

Some teachers liked the block scheduling and thought that it was useful for classes like art and music, but thought that math and science were best conveyed in multiple short classes that required students to concentrate and gave them time for concepts to sink in.

"Self-teach" and get a good grade to boot!

When a student is caught plagiarizing, there's no need for punitive action that might harm the cheater's self-esteem, because plagiarism is "self-teaching," don't you know.

Students plagiarising internet essay material in their coursework are using a form of 'self-teaching', says the director of the qualifications body...

She told the programme: "Pupils can change the language and grammar and put it into their own words, but if they are going to that sort of effort they are essentially self-teaching and are learning the subject anyway.

Well, in the sense that reading other people's words is learning, yes, the students are "self-teaching" here. But they aren't copying other people's words for the purpose of learning; they're copying other people's words for the purpose of presenting them as their own and receiving a grade on them which is undeserved. If students aren't punished for copying, no matter how small an amount of text, and no matter how much of the accompanying text is original, then the only thing they're really learning is that it's okay to cheat, not think for oneself, and take credit for other people's work.

Presumably Dr. Searle would be offended if someone else copied "bits and pieces" from one of her journal articles, so why does she insist that allowing students to do the same is a legitimate part of the education process?

Teaching anger management to the mob

I know, I know, it's not appropriate to find this funny:

WOODLAWN, Md. (AP) — A brawl broke out during an anger management assembly at a suburban high school. Two people were arrested and 11 students were suspended after a shoving match escalated into a melee during Thursday's assembly.

Here's a tip for Woodlawn High School - shoving 750 kids (a prefab mob) into an auditorium and then forcing them to watch as students act out "peaceful ways to resolve conflict" isn't the best approach to dealing with the situation. I'm thinking smaller groups, consisting only of those who have been shown to have anger management issues, with a lot more structure and guidance.

Ken must be so disappointed

Natalie Young wore a "Barbie is a Lesbian" t-shirt to her high school in NYC and got suspended for it, despite the lack of a formal dress code. And now she's $30,000 richer because of the situation. Despite the young woman's pride in the "message" this sends to openly-gay students, I have a hard time believing that we should view the t-shirt as a legitimate political expression.

The education department has agreed to develop guidelines relating to student dress and their "expression of sexual orientation." I wouldn't want that job.

Friday education/testing news roundup

Remember a few days ago when I said my boyfriend Dave should have his own blog? Well, he's not blogging yet, but he is writing for a website. Scroll down on this page to see him featured as a new reviewer for The Agro, an underground metal website. What cracks me up about the grim photo of him is that I took that photo, in our hallway; he cropped out the floral border and the myriad cats circling around his feet. I guess those wouldn't have looked "metal" enough. I'm happy for him; it's nice to know that his ability to write an engaging and cogent review of a Polish Death Metal CD won't be going to waste.

As for today, I'm swamped, so I'm going to put up a few quick links. If I haven't sent a reply to your email, I apologize; I've been lax about email and it piled up while I was sick. I hope to get the inbox cleared out this weekend.

Remember the discussion a few days back about the possible link between Phys Ed and test score? A new study has linked heavier kids with lower-income homes - and lower test scores. Even if BMI is a useful predictor for test scores, that doesn't necessarily mean that a PE program would be helpful in raising mean test scores at the school level; one expert suggests that changes must be made within the family, not at school.

An Alabama school system has proposed tranferring kids within local apartments to schools outside their communities, the better to reduce the population of "transient" students in some schools. A ruckus has already begun about the bad public image of the "apartment people" and whether it's unfair to move these kids around.

More wiggle room in NCLB; schools will now be able to average student test participation rates over a three-year period, instead of being held responsible for testing 95% of kids every year. Kids who miss tests because of medical emergencies and "other problems" are also off the hook.

Southern University, which is the nation's largest historically black university, is facing a scandal. It was revealed yesterday that 541 past and current students paid a worker in the registrar's office to alter their grades, and this has been going on for nine year. Chancellor Edward R. Jackson is threatening to revoke the degrees of guilty graduates and expel those involved who are still enrolled. The LA Times is calling it the "Cash-for-Grades" scandal.

Finally, millions of dollars are at stake in an Orange County (CA) school district because the board members have taken a stand against a state anti-discrimination law. State education officials could withhold millions of dollars in funding as a sanction against the Westminster School District; the three board members are citing their Christianity as a reason to oppose a law that "immorally allows students and teachers to define their own gender and promotes alternative lifestyles". Zero Intelligence has more.

With that, ya'll have a great weekend!

Setting the limits for student misbehavior

One Oklahoma school managed to kill two birds with one stone and address the problems of school discipline and overcrowding simultaneously; as Joanne Jacobs reports, of the 147 sixth-graders at F.D. Moon Academy, 136 were suspended on March 25th alone:

Sixteen of the 147 sixth-graders at F.D. Moon Academy were suspended Monday for class disruptions, and 120 students were suspended Wednesday after they picked up cafeteria tables, slammed them to the floor and talked back to faculty, school officials said.

Jarona Knight, whose daughter was suspended, said after the meeting that she wasn't surprised by the students' behavior because some parents in the audience were yelling while school officials talked.

The comments on Joanne's site are, as always, interesting. And Reform K12, who teaches high school students in Philadelphia, has his own take on the topic:

While we applaud their efforts at trying to get the school under control, we have to wonder, why are teachers spending 85% of their time on discipline? How could nine-tenths of the sixth grade class be suspended in one week?

It was at this point that the teaching staff was able to roll up their sleeves and get to work teaching academic knowledge and skills.

We need more principals like that one.

Should preschools be subsidized for all?

Joanne Jacobs wonders if "universal" is synonymous with "low-quality" when it comes to preschools.

(From the Globe):
Most social science researchers agree that, as the Ypsilanti experience showed, intensive, high-quality preschool offers significant benefits for poor children. For many, that is reason enough to support public preschool.

The problem with the research, said David Blau, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina and author of "The Child Care Problem," is that it focuses on very high-cost, high-quality programs unlikely to be duplicated in a broad public system. "What we don't know," he said, "is whether, if you scale it down, you get proportionally smaller but similar kinds of benefits. If you cut the costs in half, do you get half the benefits? Or is there some threshold before you get benefits?"

(Joanne's comments):
Blau is right on target. Head Start and state-funded pre-schools for the poor rarely provide a high-quality program; it costs too much, even for a small group. "Universal" pre-school inevitably would be the sort of program that duplicates what happens in middle-class homes and isn't intensive enough to help truly disadvantaged children.

I think commenter Bill is right on target, too:

But, like Head Start, we will have created another group of agencies, with no sunset. It will not be necessary that they accomplish anything; like Head Start they will squirm and writhe away from any meaninful measurement of their effects.

Do we really imagine that the same establishment that has given us nearly terminal mediocrity in our public schools will do any better here?

Good point. I'd expect the same outraged cry that follows any testing or assessment of Head Start programs to be attached to this "universal" preschool, which means yet another expensive program with unknown efficacy.

Good information on testing special education students

An informative and balanced article about the trials of testing disabled students, from the Chicago Tribune:

There is no love lost between many teachers and the push for more standardized tests. But rarely has a required assessment attracted such ire from educators, who say the IAA is too subjective to be an accurate measure of students' ability, takes up valuable teaching time and does nothing to improve student instruction.

Although doomsayers had feared that including special education students in the mix would drastically drive up the number of "failing" schools, that didn't happen in Illinois last year. Just 101 of the state's some 4,000 schools did not meet standards solely because of their special education students.

Mixing it up in the classroom

Here's one for my Devoted Readers who support multi-age classrooms:

The classroom that holds 21 fifth- and sixth-graders is unique at Garden City Elementary (MN). Teachers Karen Wifler and Shella Huggett are excited about the class they team-teach, and the progress they’ve seen since the beginning of the 2003-04 school year.

“That’s the advantage of this class,” she added. “Some are doing grade-level curriculum, some are moving more rapidly.”

Huggett admits that some kids don't do well in this format, and students were chosen specifically for this classroom. Students do both independent and cooperative work, and the setup can be challenging. I've no doubt that it works very well for some students, though, and apparently their TerraNova test scores looks pretty good.

NCLB as scapegoat

Here's an article that is sympathetic to the problem of "overtesting" in schools, told primarily from one elementary school teacher's viewpoint. The article is straightforward and fairly informative. But can you spot the simple solution to this problem?

Under President Bush's "No Child Left Behind'' bill, [this teacher's] district received a three-year grant worth nearly $5 million to implement a literacy program in kindergarten-through-third-grade classes. Similar grants totaling $900 million went to thousands of low-income, low-performing schools across the country.

I know a teacher who would like that blueprint. The one she has now isn't working so well.

According to this teacher, the school was already implementing a successful literacy program, one which apparently conflicts with "Reading First." But why is the blame being placed on NCLB here? The blame should be on the school for taking the $5 million without understanding the accountability that comes with such a large chunk of money. It's not surprising that additional testing comes with additional money, but neither the money nor the additional testing is mandatory.

What conclusion are we supposed to draw here? That NCLB is bad because schools are required to account for grant money spent? That it's unfair when some reading programs conflict with one another? That students who are in federally-mandated reading programs shouldn't have to follow federal rules? This article is, as I said, sympathetic, but this teacher is barking up the wrong tree.