Number 2 Pencil

School's (not) out for summer

Apparently, summer school is now de rigueur for everyone, when it used to be just the losers and potheads who were stuck inside during the summer months:

There was a time when summer school was rare for anyone except high schoolers who had flunked a course. But in the late 1990s, when Virginia and many other states put new emphasis on standardized achievement tests, summer school classrooms were suddenly filled with children of all ages who had been told they might have to repeat a grade if their test scores didn't improve. Educators in Arlington and Alexandria say the academic emphasis continues, but summer school is no longer simply a last chance to pass a test for promotion. Some summer school students will need to repeat a grade anyway. What is important, teachers say, is giving as many students as possible a chance to keep learning during the summer break so they will not have forgotten so much by the time they return to school in the fall.

The goals "are to maintain, review and reinforce basic reading and mathematics skills," said Felicia Russo, principal at Long Branch Elementary School in Arlington, which has 110 students enrolled in summer school. Sue Ditmore, who at Cora Kelly teaches a class of students who just finished fourth grade, favors eliminating the long summer break for everyone. "It is awful how much time we have to spend reteaching" what is forgotten over the summer, she said.

Am I missing something here? What's going on when even kids who attend summer school will end up repeating grades? And I just don't remember falling behind every summer. Sure, teachers had to catch us up a bit, but it's not as though I completely turned my brain off every summer. Is there really now a much larger percentage of students from such deprived homes that they do not read a single book, learn a single new word, or become enriched in any way every June, July, and August?

Is this happening because schools that teach in an inefficent manner are now panicking about test scores? Or is this related to the over-competitiveness debate that has been featured on many an N2P post?

Problems in the Palmetto State

This is not a great way for a failing school to go about fixing things (free sub required):

Former Brentwood Middle School teacher John Smith was told that being white and male at the mostly black school could count as two strikes against him, the Charleston County School District admitted in its response to his federal lawsuit Tuesday. Smith sued the district, Principal Wanda Marshall and Associate Superintendent Darrell Johnson last month after his dismissal from the North Charleston school, alleging racial discrimination.

In a letter dated April 13, Marshall told Smith he was not invited back to the school for the upcoming school year, though he had "successfully completed" his first year of teaching. She said he could apply to another school in the district. Johnson wrote in a subsequent letter to Smith that the teacher's year was not successful, so he must seek employment with another school district.

Not a good mess to get into. Principal Marshall, who made the comment, is being transferred out of the middle school after it received an "unsatisfactory" state report card grade for the third year in row. Problem is, she'll now be assistant principal of a local high school. Brentwood's administrators claim that Brentwood's problems were not Ms. Marshall's fault, thus distracting us from realizing that, if anyone had the power to do something to change it, she did. They also insist that the school, in which almost 70% of student scored below grade level on the math and English portions of the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test, doesn't really have that much of a discipline problem.

"Bona fide geeks"

Some kids are using the summer to get away and really exercise their brains:

Liz Rodrick, 16, is a self-professed nerd. It takes some cajoling for her to get a stranger to use that term, but she insists it isn't derogatory.

Some of the students are so motivated that organizers take precautions to ensure the students aren't doing too much work.

An entire year into three weeks? Good lord. Either these kids are geniuses, or what counts as a year-long lesson plan for "normal" kids is really, really slow. My guess is it's a little of both.

A Johns Hopkins University program, the Carlisle site is one of 20 nationwide. The second of two three-week cycles began last week.

Then they have to take the SAT, and score a minimum 550 for seventh-graders or 600 for eighth-graders on either verbal or math.

Wow. I would have qualified with my eighth-grade verbal scores - except for that little matter of the $2625 cash. My parents would have probably offered me $100 and all the library books I could read instead.

A Snapple drinker who isn't made from the smartest stuff on earth

Oh, for heaven's sakes....

A 17-year-old Bronx high-school student wants the city to pay him $5 million because a Snapple vending machine fell on him at school as he shook it. Court papers filed yesterday charge Albert Salcedo suffered a broken foot and ankle in the incident on May 25...

Salcedo's mother, Diana Tineo, acknowledged that her son had sued before. He received $30,000 to settle a 1999 case in which he suffered facial cuts after he fell through a broken school fence.

Oh boy. So he's 17, has already dropped out of high school, AND is well on his way to becoming a professional litigant. Let me guess, when he "fell" through the broken school fence, he just happened to be in the process of trying to climb over it, right past the "Do Not Enter" sign, right?

Yeesh.

Cheating around the world

The Cheating News roundup from Caveon this week includes a rather surprising example of a test administration with no cheating observed:

The Education and Training Ministry [of Vietnam] took measures to prevent cheating among the 750,000 twelfth graders who began taking their three-day final exams on Wednesday.

Any supervisors caught violating exam regulations would be seriously punished, said Le Thi Thanh Xuan, deputy chief inspector on education of the ministry.

Oookay, so maybe it's not surprising that no one cheated. Deputy chief inspector Le Thi Thanh Xuan doesn't sound like he's joking around. Gee, why can't he be more relaxed about this whole cheating phenomenon? You know, like the enlightened professors in American who gladly admit that their students are "no saints"?

When Bill was unsure of the answer to a question in a finance exam last year, he sent a text message on his cell phone to a friend who was also taking the test. The friend sent him the correct answer. When Lisa wasn't sure she could remember mathematical formulas for an accounting exam, she stored them in a calculator with its own memory, and then used them to help complete the test.

"We like to think our students are more committed than most, but they are not saints, either,'' said Charles Strain, the school's associate vice president for academic affairs.

Oh, hey, as long as they're committed, then it's okay, right? I mean, God forbid you should try to take Bill's cell phone away from him during an exam, or insist that would-be accountants like Lisa actually memorize formulas. God forbid you should expect students to be smart enough to understand that cheating is still cheating when you use new technology:

Cheating these days comes with an added twist -- new technology, which in some cases makes it so easy that students don't even believe what they are doing is wrong. From cutting and pasting text from a Web site into a term paper to using cell phones or personal data assistants equipped with wireless Internet access to search for answers while taking a test, technology is becoming a partner in dishonesty.

Emphasis mine, because I'm not buyin' it. Nope, no sale here. You cannot convince me that just because a student can cut and paste off the Internet, as opposed to out of an encyclopedia, that student doesn't realize that it's cheating. You cannot convince me that a student, who knows that asking their friend for answers during an exam is wrong, somehow will believe that it isn't wrong if they use a cell phone to do so.

I call horse puckey on this one. The powers that be have merely pulled the wool over their own eyes, and allowed themselves to believe that students are somehow confused by all this new technology, when the rest of us all realize that students are becoming experts at using these new gadgets to cheat.

And I think Le Thi Thanh Xuan would agree with us.

But back to the poor, confused American students:

And because of increased competition to get into top colleges and graduate schools, students say they are under more pressure than ever to get good grades, leading them to cheat more.

I think I accidentally stepped on, and crushed, the world's smallest violin this morning, so the sad, sad song to accompany this tale of dishonest, over-competitive woe will have to wait until I locate the world's smallest banjo. Then you can all join me in a moving bluegrass song entitled, "I Got Them Non-Ivy-League Blues."

And speaking of bluegrass, here's one Kentuckian who isn't buying the notion that we have to give in and allow these poor, confused, pressured students to cheat whenever they want:

The Newsweek headline says resume lies are on the rise, and it details harrowing stories about the huge increase in "fibbing" on resumes. The magazine cited a-Korn/Ferry online survey that said 44.7 percent of respondents think resume fraud among executives is increasing.

That means the cheaters win and get rewarded. That has to change. Perhaps we don't have the wherewithal to turn people in to the authorities, but each of us should be able to find the courage to tell cheaters we disapprove of their behavior...

I think we should find the wherewithal to do at least that much. If not, we really can't say much about the students for whom high grades without subject mastery are the ultimate goals.

"Critical thinking" about just one side of the story

Devoted Reader Tracy A. uncovered a humorous effort to discredit the meme that schools of education are biased and intellectually lopsided. It seems that the Teacher College Record wasn't too happy about David Steiner's investigation of the bias evident in education programs nowadays, and has published a rebuttal from one Dan W. Butin.

From Steiner's report:

What are students taught in these education programs? Surprisingly, almost nobody in the last 20 years has examined the coursework that education schools, as well as states, require as a preparation for teaching. Doing so is not easy: Some schools put their syllabi on the Web, some do not. Many have extremely complex programs — determining what students are required to take as part of their professional preparation often requires considerable detective work. Nevertheless,with the help of my research assistant, Susan Rozen, I decided to try.

Given the divide between “back to basics” and the “constructivist-progressive” models, one would expect education schools to expose students to both points of view. Our research (which covered 165 syllabi of required courses in the foundations of education, the teaching of reading,and teaching methodology) strongly suggested, however, that at many of our highest ranked schools of education, the constructivist-progressivist arguments are being taught to the almost complete exclusion of the other, direct instruction model.

No real surprise there. And it's no surprise that those who defend constructivist-progressivist education would defend it, and that they'd be very silly in doing so. Here are a couple of excerpts from the Butin rebuttal (in italics), with Devoted Reader Tracy's comments in bold:

-----
Steiner’s study was seemingly straightforward: a content analysis of course syllabi in order to determine whether prospective teachers are adequately prepared to become good teachers in the public schools. Buried within such an articulation, though, are a host of questionable assumptions of causality.

Put simply, there is an extremely loose coupling between what is written and what is taught, between what is taught and what is learned, and between what is learned and what is subsequently enacted in an efficacious way.

As I read this I had to chuckle. This seems to argue that you can't prove anything by the course syllabus because that's no way to determine that the teacher actually taught anything from it, that the student learned anything by what actually was taught, or that the student was ever able to use anything that was taught. If that's supposed to make me feel better about schools of education, it most certainly fails.

I agree, as does Butin's insistence that Seiber's sample was skewed because he examined only the elite schools, and everyone knows that the elite schools produce only researchers, and not those people who actually teach. It's nice to know that even defenders of schools of ed insist there is a gap between those who develop the theory and those who learn from it.

Here's another passage that had me scratching my head -

In regards to the fourth criterion, Steiner’s call for “ideologically balanced” content is a political and theoretical minefield. One teacher’s critical justice emphasis is another teacher’s disdain for rigor and clarity. Steiner’s target here was obvious. He highlighted the usual suspects of the intellectual left – Freire, Giroux, hooks, Ladson-Billings – that seemed to take precedence over other seemingly relevant content by, e.g., E. D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, and Chester Finn.

This is a legitimate complaint. Yet the social foundations of education field has reframed this issue long ago. As the Standards for the foundations field articulate (Council of Learned Societies in Education, 1996), the “purpose of the foundations study is to bring these disciplinary resources [of the humanities and social sciences] to bear in developing interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives on education, both inside and outside of schools” (p. 4; emphasis mine). Put otherwise, the political left, right, and center can all engage in deep analysis, explicitly articulate specific morals, and critically examine the assumptions and implications of normative stances. Steiner’s criteria of “balance,” in other words, focuses on the wrong agenda: he seems to want particular names included in syllabi, whereas the social foundations Standards emphasize tasks and skills.

Excuse me? Ideological balance isn't necessary, only the ability to engage in "deep analysis, explicitly articulate specific morals, and [to] critically examine the assumptions and implications of normative stances." It would seem that if all the critical thought you read is written from a single or a limited ideological perspective, you are not really grasping the concept of critical thought. It does remind me of concepts that fit very well within the definitions of propaganda and brainwashing.
-----

I can't really improve on Tracy's comments (and boy do I love it when my readers do the hard work for me. )

The unions get worried

Remember when I said we'd never hear about membership woes of the NEA? Well, Eduwonk (with the help of the Wall Street Journal, if you have a subscription) has proved me wrong. One paragraph alone lifts my spirits:

The rise of nonunion teacher associations is helping erode the longstanding clout of the NEA, the nation's biggest union, with 2.7 million members. Rival nonunion groups have amassed at least 250,000 predominantly rural and suburban members in 18 states -- including recent start-ups in Washington state, Arkansas, Alabama and Virginia -- by offering lower dues, a less-confrontational attitude toward school boards and fewer social pronouncements than the NEA. Now, after years of growth, NEA membership and revenue are leveling off, and younger teachers are less inclined than older teachers to agree with union positions.

The WSJ also covers the divide between John Kerry and the NEA:

But the unions are wrapping their support for Mr. Kerry around opposition to President Bush's No Child Left Behind education program...The unions are demanding changes to an initiative that many Democrats voted for and still generally support.

That has unions worried.

That's the same stance that some say he's backed off on, though. As I said before, it's going to be an interesting 100 days.

Embracing controversy

Some people prefer to remain a stranger to controversy. Others are more bold about walking up to controversy and shaking hands. Some people even go so far as to make friends with controversy, issuing invitations to tea and offering extra theater tickets.

And then there's Secretary of Education Rod Paige:

Secretary of Education Rod Paige this month condemned leaders of the NAACP for opposing the federal No Child Left Behind Act and questioned the organization’s commitment to improving the education of African-American children...

"You can’t expect anything different from a man who called the National Education Association terrorists," Mr. Bond said, referring to a comment Mr. Paige made earlier this year...

The writing test gets written off

Illinois' new budget cuts mean the state standardized exams in writing and social studies are history. Some educators have no problem with this, claiming the tests were "inessential":

"Standardized tests are important, but they're nonessential in 85 percent of the school district. In the state of Illinois we are in deficit spending right now. We're in a nationwide crisis and non-essential programs are going to have to go," says Guilford High School history teacher Walter Hoshaw...

Hoshaw says there are plenty of other ways to test a student's ability. "We have pretty good measures through the SAT and ACT tests that we do (with) our high school kids. That gives us a much better measure of how our kids are doing," says Hoshaw.

Others, though, aren't so sure:

The decision was as much about the state's testing philosophy as saving money. It is not expected to change even if the money were restored.

"I have heard the philosophical argument that if we stop testing it, schools will stop teaching it. But I believe in professional educators more than that. We have to remember that, long before this standardized student movement, teachers were teaching their students how to write."

Yes, they were. But are they still?

The announcement already has educators rethinking their priorities for next year. Becky McCabe, a principal in Urbana, said she originally planned to make writing part of her school's improvement plan. But the testing change means her staff likely will refocus on improving reading skills.

"I hate to say this, but you treasure what you measure," McCabe said. "When it comes down to money, you're going to focus on things that are on the bubble. Writing is just not going to be the same, and that's a shame."

Have we really reached a point where teachers - teachers, for heaven's sakes - won't teach kids how to write in any non-tested fashion? Where do the teachers think kids will pick this up, if not in school? Comments like this make me wonder if Representative Eddy really understands the lack of focus on writing skills these days.

Update: Devoted Reader JW has this to add:

A liitle more background for your post about dropping the Social Studies test here. The most important thing to understand is that Illinois is undergoing a profound, severe, and probably long lasting budget crisis. There are a lot of reasons for this that don't matter much for this discussion. Every state program is getting chopped to some degree. The Social Studies test doesn't seem to measure very much, or to provide useful info for parents. Districts that do well on the reading and math tests tend to do well on the SS, so it gets the chop. Sure, there are a lot of teachers and administrators who aren't nuts about NCLB, and who don't like testing anyway; it's part of the territory. There are also a lot who just deal with it without being obsessed one way or another-like, I'm happy to say...

Democrats and teachers unions

The dance between soon-to-be Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and the educational unions ought to be fun to watch over the next 100 days...

...while education experts agree that Kerry has mapped out a more liberal education agenda, he has surprised some educators with more moderate proposals.

"I believe we need to offer teachers more pay. More training, more career choices, and more options for education. And we must ask for more in return, that's the bargain," Kerry said.

Emphasis mine. Think this was because Kerry sensed the parental approval of get-tough acts like NCLB? Whatever the case, he now appears to be backpedaling. So he's for "pay for performance," until he's against it. And even though Kerry's not yet at the convention, the teachers are, in full force:

Milton Bond Jr., a high school teacher from Milwaukee, Wis., and a first-time delegate from that state, said he wanted to come to the Boston convention because of his concern about the direction the country is heading under President Bush...

“I feel like you’re punishing schools, and you’re punishing students. It’s an empty policy,” he said.

But we are punishing schools. That's the point. We're trying to punish the schools that are punishing students by depriving them of a quality education. It's pretty hard to hold schools accountable for anything if there's never any punitive action for the schools who fail their students. Perhaps Kerry, with his talent for "nuance," can think of some way to get accountability with only praise, never punishment.

And then there's this:

Convention delegates flipping through copies of the Boston Globe on Monday might have stumbled upon a provocative quarter-page advertisement with the headline: "No Child Left Behind?" The ad, signed by more than 100 classroom teachers, parents, noted education advocates, and others, suggests the federal law is part of a plan by President Bush "to privatize America's public schools," and that it threatens thousands of schools with closure. The law, the ad argues, encourages "lying about the facts" and "uses blacklists to banish professionals, institutions, methods, and books."

"It's outrageous," said Andrew J. Rotherham, the director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank aligned with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "There are legitimate criticisms of No Child Left Behind, but that ad seems to go out of its way to avoid them."

Yes, it does, and in doing so overplays its hand. I can't improve upon Mr. Rotherham's summary of the effect of the ad:

...Mr. Rotherham suggests that the ad's rhetoric may well undermine its mission.

"Ads like this hurt the cause of people seeking changes in No Child Left Behind, rather than help it," he added. "Your average person sees an ad like that and is going to smell weirdness, not reasoned debate."

A weak link in the testing process

Columnist Dan Bernstein has some harsh words for teachers who cheat on tests (free sub required):

Suppose you're a student at Riverside's Sierra Middle School, and you've wrapped up another round of state tests and it comes out that one of your teachers changed the answers on 78 of those exams. What do you think of them apples?

So it's bad enough when one bad apple (Mr. Akinremi, who resigned) takes it upon himself to cheat the system. But when 37 of the bad apple's co-workers sign a petition, begging the powers to keep the cheater on the job, well that does bring on the chuckles.

As Dan rightly points out, a teacher who's willing to change test answers to help students also has the freedom to change answers to hurt students. And that should make students feel very insecure, indeed.

Rounding up my Devoted Readers

Hey, since I don't post my hit meter (not because I don't want to, but because I don't know how to since I switched to MT), I figured I'd keep you up on my latest stats:

Month ----- Unique visitors ----- Hits
Jan 2004 ----- 24389 -------------- 136302
Feb 2004 ----- 19809 -------------- 144938
Mar 2004 ----- 20084 -------------- 138170
Apr 2004 ------ 25075 -------------- 140546
May 2004 ----- 21152 -------------- 131253
Jun 2004 ----- 18850 -------------- 119133
Jul 2004 ------- 20508 -------------- 149199

I can't thank my Devoted Readers enough. Two-and-a-half years ago, I thought no one would ever read this blog.

Suspended from school for crossing against the light

Okay, there has GOT to be more to this story. Surely, even in Canadian schools, principals have more important things to think about than whether students cross against the light:

A Grade 12 student at Anderson Collegiate was given a one-day suspension by the vice-principal for allegedly jaywalking after school.

"The next morning when I went to school, she called me down to the office...and (said), 'I have to suspend you for jaywalking,'" Kelly said, adding vice principal Pauline Langmaid insisted the light was red when she went across the street. She was told to stay home on Friday, Feb. 6. She complied with the suspension, but her mother is battling the school over what she calls a "ludicrous" decision.

I'm not Canadian, but I have to say - EH? How the fark did the school even KNOW that Ms. Simo jaywalked? She wasn't given a ticket, so the police weren't involved. Did a crossing guard rat her out? And why should the school care?

Ms. Simo's mom was pretty pointed in her rejoinder to the principal:

Jackie Simo, the girl's mother, said Ms. Langmaid told her it was a "safety issue" and the school would have to set an example for its junior students.

"What I was told was, 'Let's not get carried away...'

Yes, let's not. That means not issuing suspensions for jaywalking, for heaven's sakes. I mean, in some cities (NYC, I'm thinking of you here), jaywalking is an art. Why shouldn't students be able to get in on the fun?

Plus, it's just creepy that a school administrator would say, "the school day does not end" until the students actually reach home. That's not comforting, unless you thought 1984 was a really fun book.

(Thanks to Devoted Reader Greg M. for the link.)

Movin' on up (in the blogosphere)

Woo hoo! Michelle Malkin, for whom I have tremendous respect, knows I exist! I'm thrilled to see a link to N2P from her blog - and thrilled to know she's not singling me out for skanky behavior (though that would get me another Insty link). She doesn't pull any punches.

But Mom, I have to have this new dress from the Gap! It'll help me on my SATs!

Whee! Let's have fun! Let's get kids wondering whether the outfit they wear on the day of the SAT will effect their score! That's so much more fun than drilling them on vocabulary!

Test-prep company Peterson's says it plans go beyond drilling students in the three Rs, starting what it's calling a testing laboratory to see whether students gain any edge on the SAT from the little things - the choice of pre-exam meal, the hue of their clothes, the music they hear on the drive to the test...

"We don't want people to think they really will raise their scores 100 points if they wear the right color," said Jessica Rohm, vice president of communications for Thomson Learning, Peterson's parent company. But "just taking the edge off by bringing in some fun things associated with testing I think will raise their scores a little."

"Fun things associated with testing"? C'mon. I'm in testing, and "fun" is not one of the first five words I'd associate with the field, or with the image the public has of it. I'm all for taking the edge off for examinees - test anxiety is through the roof these days, in no small part because of inaccurate press which claims that tests are biased, unfair, useless, or all three. But I don't think everything should have to be "fun" to get students involved, and that includes a demanding admissions tests.

I'll eagerly await the outcome of Peterson's experiments, but I'm betting the top scores will continue to be delivered by students who see the SAT as a challenge for which one has to methodically and intensely prepare, and are able to motivate themselves for it without "fun" - or wardrobe considerations (how classist! What about those kids who don't have that many clothes to wear? And doesn't that just add more stress for obsessive clotheshorses?) - being in the picture.

Segregation (by sex) now?

One Florida middle school is so satisfied with their experiment in sex-segregated classes that they've expanded to include most students, in every grade:

Boys and girls will be seeing even less of each other when school starts next month at Odyssey Middle School. The school's sex-separation experiment will expand to include the majority of students in every grade. Ninety percent of sixth-graders, 70 percent of seventh-graders and 60 percent of eighth-graders at the 1,200-student school will be in boys- or girls-only classes.

Parents have the option of choosing mixed classes if they disapprove of the program.

Although standardized test scores did not significantly improve among the 270 students whose classes were sex-segregated last year, behavior problems plummeted...

Plummeting behavior problems is always a good thing, and I applaud Odyssey for being willing to strike out and try something different (or, in this case, something that was the norm way back when). In this day and age, though, any attempts to move towards sexual segregation would have to take into account, at least in California, the upswing in students who are changing sexualities - and genders - while still in school. Should segregation be done by actual sex? Perceived gender? Or none of the above? Would students experience less harassment if they were placed in classes with the gender they identify with, rather than the one they are?

Whew. All the issues that your one-room schoolteacher never had to deal with, way back when....

Do eggs over easy make the tests easier, too?

Suburban schools are facing more and more low-income children every year, and have responded by opening up the breakfast buffets:

The children at Meadows Elementary School in Plano don't hide their hunger well. "The little ones will just sit at their desks and cry," principal Linda Engelking said. "The older ones sometimes will just be angry."

Ronald E. Kleinman, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has studied the effects of breakfast on schoolchildren for 15 years. He said the free breakfast program, known nationally as universal breakfast, offers strong rewards at a low cost.

It sounds like free breakfast is needed in Dallas, given that the percentage of "economically disadvantaged" students has nearly doubled in less than 10 years. A hot breakfast hasn't been shown to raise test scores, but it certainly can't hurt. And offering breakfast to all students does help reduce the stigma of having to accept a free meal.

Does it bother anyone else, though, that so many of Dallas's children have parents who either don't bother to feed them breakfast, or just can't be around when the kids wake up to go to school? Aren't any adults around at home when they go to school? This seems like a ominous harbinger of more than just grumbly tummies.

Stressing out in Massachusetts

Testing features prominently in this article about the raising of academic standards - and parental stress - in Massachusetts:

Making sure a student stays above the pack requires more active parenting than ever before, say parents and educators. Waiting lists are growing at the best private schools, public schools now require students to pass a state standardized test to graduate, and graduates of any high school face increasingly intense competition to get into college.

''Just keeping your kid afloat requires an overwhelming amount of parental support," said Jane Frantz, whose three sons graduated from Newton North High School, the youngest last month. ''Academically, there's so much more work now. That's driving an increase in how involved parents feel they need to be."

Is that really true? Or was there such a decline in parental involvement in the 1970's and 1980's that this is just the pendulum swinging back? Do these parents who hire tutors work harder than parents who homeschool? Is the school system just so complicated nowadays that even a stay-at-home parent will feel overwhelmed? Or are teachers so inefficient that parents now feel compelled to hire tutors in every class?

Given that I'm not a parent, nor am I involved with a K12 system, I don't really have answers for these rhetorical questions. I'd love to hear your point of view in the comments section.

The obligatory "competitiveness/anxiety" meme appears shortly thereafter in the article, but the first example given doesn't sound like a description of a concerned parent to me:

The competitive academic climate also fuels an overzealousness that some school officials say is dangerous for students and their families. One elementary school principal said he has seen a rise during the past three years in the number of parents suspected of doing their child's homework for them, or at least helping more than they should.

Those aren't overzealous parents, nor pushy parents, nor competitive parents. Those are dishonest parents. If a parent really wanted their kid to do well later on, why would they help them cheat at this level? This, to me, does not so much spell a rise in competitiveness among parents as a decline in character.

One of my commenters said, on a cheating post of mine, that cheating might be on the rise because a college degree is now seen not as a growth process, and something you earn, but something you simply have to get to be able to get what you want later on. Parents who help elementary school students cheat are reinforcing the idea that grades matter more than learning, which is not the same thing as being a concerned, or even pushy, parent.

Non-testing roundup

Next week, we'll be back to our regular educational testing programming. But for now, a list of everything else that's jamming up my brainwaves.

Metal Yamulke (great name for a blog!) shows his Boston spirit by eviscerating an inane letter to the editor of the Boston Globe (thanks, Reginleif!). And speaking of Boston, I could have used this guide when I drove there a few years back. I found the highway patrol kind, but, to this lost Southerner who didn't understand the accents, rather unhelpful.

My long-distance crush on Hal Sparks is reaching life-threatening limits. I first noticed him on VH1's "I Love The {insert decade here}" shows, and now I'm dreaming about him. He's by far the funniest commenter they have; he's got this wildly-expressive face and a seemingly never-ended list of one-liners. I have an incurable passion for funny, smart, geeky dark-haired musicians with handsome faces, goofy demeanors, and a penchant for pop-culture humor. Luckily for him, my boyfriend also matches this description, but if I ever meet Hal, it's all over. (And yes, there is a LiveJournal fan site, where fellow crushees describe themselves as "Halapenos.") (And no, you don't need to point out to me that, given the comments Hal himself has posted to his website, it's pretty obvious we'd disagree mightily when it comes to politics. I'm aware of it already - just let me dream, would you?)

Got a problem with a local company? Be sure to post your tale on The RipOff Report. It's like NoIndoctrination.Org in that you can make public complaints, and the focus of your wrath has the chance to respond with a public rebuttal. Unlike NoIndoctrination.Org, though, there's a chance that an outraged customer might actually get his money back through Ripoff.

Need the latest metal music news? Dying to read what metalheads say when they get into an online pissing match over Vince Neil or Ozzy? There's always Blabbermouth, which has the latest news AND the great squabbles in the comments section. If you're suffering from a mullets-and-Camaros deficiency, go visit Blabbermouth at once.

I'm not as bad as my sister, who actually has a subscription to the National Enquirer, but I am addicted to celebrity gossip (although I suppose if you have a subscription, only your mailman knows how pathetic you are, as opposed to everyone at the grocery store). And I am ultra-addicted to Defamer. It's very catty, very sharp, and quite unafraid. Whether they're introducing stalkers to their favorite stars, or just belching with nausea at the latest rash of Kevin-and-Britney pics, they're always an entertaining read.

And speaking of Hollywood, this is just goofy. If you're really dying to see what Amish kids are like when they test the waters, rent the stunning, emotional documentary Devil's Playground (which was actually produced by two of the same producers of the upcoming reality show, Daniel Laikind and Steven Cantor. Go figure.)

That's all for today. Normal kvetching about testing critics, shoddy reporting and asinine educational theories returns tomorrow!

Update: Oh, I almost forgot! The blogosphere is abuzz over this paper by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell, which is said to be the first scholarly paper about blogs. It's fascinating. It's concerned primarily with political blogs, but much of what it says applies to edu-blogs as well.

Update #2: Oh, and how could I forget this? Classic movies, re-enacted in 30 seconds. By bunnies. I can't really describe it; you have to see it for yourself.

Redefining sex-ed

The Common Sense Chronicles blogs on a school sexual-education course where the instructor displays a startling lack of common sense:

The Common Sense Chronicles says:

The sex-ed class I took in Jr. High was centered on the reproductive parts of the male and female anatomy. It wasn't about sexual positions, technique, or toys. It was anatomical information. It was more of a science class than anything else. I didn't miss out by not having "extra" information. Believe me; by the end of class everyone understood what it took to make a baby...and what it was like to have one.

According to a report in the Santa Fe New Mexican, parent Lisa Gallegos said that when her 15-year-old daughter balked at putting a condom in her mouth, instructor Tony Escudero told her, "Come on, sweetie, have a little fun."
-----

Someone remind me again why it's the schools that refuse to teach sex-ed, or who teach abstinence, who are supposedly the biggest threat to teenagers today? This isn't sexual education; it's sexual play, and it's appalling that Mr. Escudero has been given the freedom to decide that this is what is "age-appropriate" for a ninth-grader.

Update: Then again, I suppose I should be grateful that the US's Puritan heritage keeps us from doing away with adult supervision in sex ed altogether. Only in the UK could a reporter for a major newspaper open a story with a straight face and the sentence, "Teenagers want to learn about sex from one another rather than from their teachers." (Thanks to the Rottweiler for the link.)

Building character along with test scores

Now, this is interesting - A school in Virginia aims to "build character:"

An Achievable Dream, located in the inner city, is a partnership among the Newport News public school system, the city and the local business community. It began in 1992 as a summer education and tennis program for about 100 fourth-graders, becoming a full-time school in 1994.

"We don't want to love children into failure," he said.

Amen. So far, the results seem promising:

Eighty percent of the students passed the 2003 Virginia Standards of Learning tests, compared with 85 percent statewide for white students and 60 percent statewide for black students, according to the school.

About 90 percent of the program's high school graduates have gone to college, with the rest joining the military.

Wonderful. I have to wonder about that tennis requirement, though, although I suppose it's just my weak ankles that have made me fearful of the court.

AP exams disappearing in transit

It's not as exciting as Sandy Berger stuffing top-secret documents down his pants, but here's another tale of documents inadvertently going missing:

For the second time in two years, the company that administers advanced placement exams at Walter Johnson High School reported that a group of answer sheets are missing. As a result, halfway into their summer vacations, 44 students may be forced to retake exams they took back in May...

Another 19 exams were reported missing last week for a total of 44.

Out of 3 millions exams given, 44 isn't a huge number, but missing tests are like homicides. Ideally, there'd be none, and for each one, there's an anguished victim or set of survivors, not to mention a lot of news coverage. The school claims to have followed ETS's mailing instructions "to the letter." And other schools in the same county have suffered similarly within the past couple of years. No one seems happy with ETS's offer to refund money or assign students to a retake, but it's understandable why ETS isn't comfortable with projected scores (due to validity and reliability issues) or with just giving students credit for all the lost items (validity and reliability issues and the potential for abuse by unscrupulous schools).

Is there a way out of this standoff? Not likely, not with the mailing back and forth of 3 million packages every year. Even if the tests were all on computer, that kind of data can vanish, too.

College professors insist on less say in admissions decisions

This is, quite possibly, one of the dumbest anti-testing efforts ever from a political body:

The state Legislature has passed a bill that would limit the state and city university systems from using the SAT or other high-stakes tests as the major criteria in determining who gets accepted.

Both CUNY and SUNY consider SAT scores as one factor — along with scores on Regents exams and high-school grades — in determining admissions. The bill would not immediately impact the selection policy in either system. But the legislation, if signed into law, would bar CUNY or SUNY from relying more on standardized tests in the future.

Something's not right here. I can see professors being opposed to admissions tests. But how on earth can anyone in academia think it's a good idea to open the door for politicians to decide the best way to admit students? Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't some universities fight tooth-and-nail to preserve quota systems and sets of double standards, in the face of court decisions, all because it interferes with their plans for diversity? Don't universities normally claim that they alone know what admissions processes are best for their student body? Didn't the universities get mad when the courts tried to tell them they could not use race in admissions? And here university members are pushing for the government to tell them there's something else they can't use?

If the SAT is useful in admissions, New York schools should be free to use it as much as possible, because, despite the mythology, the SAT is a reliable, quick, and cheap assessment that can be quite valid for use in this context. If the SAT doesn't work for schools, they should be free to chuck it. Given that the anti-testing types tend to be the ones who complain about top-down control of education, it's appallingly hypocritical for them to be pushing for top-down control of the admissions process. Or is it just that unwarranted governmental interference is a good thing as long as tests are being prohibited instead of mandated?

(Thanks to Devoted Reader Kevin for the link.)

A surprising educational force in Oregon

Hidden amongst the hippies and educrats in Oregon are a group of pro-testing professors who have been developing empirical evidence to support standardized tests and NCLB:

Over the years, the University of Oregon has developed a reputation as a hippie haven, home to Hacky-Sackers, Frisbee-throwers and anti-globalism activists. But tucked away in a bucolic corner of the campus is a group of education professors whose work has been widely influential and found favor with the Bush administration.

"The emphasis on research-based instruction is a bit of a problem," said Barbara Bowman, a professor at Chicago's Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development. "Some of the more qualitative ways of assessing children's learning are generally not included. We are focusing on things that are easy to see, rather than taking a look at the whole."

Lovely to see the anti-science crowd rush in to identify themselves as fools. Apparently, it's more important to take a non-scientific look at "the whole child" than to measure how well a child can read. How easy it must be to "teach" a child when the assumption is that the outcome cannot possibly be measured.

On the other hand, given that critics insist the structured curriculums are actually harmful to kids, no wonder teachers are so stressed out today:

Rheta DeVries, who directs the Regents' Center for early development education at the University of Northern Iowa, said such structured curriculums [as phonics] are harmful to children.

"Testing takes over and determines the curriculum, and children don't get experience with hands-on science experimentation and activities that call forth their best energies," she said. "What a child knows cannot necessarily be measured in fragmented tests used for assessment."

Yes, it can. Tests can indeed measure what a child knows - maybe not everything a child knows, but someone who understands the material will not fail a basic skills exam. It's one thing to (correctly) worry that basic skills tests might lead teachers to dumb down curriculum, but it's just plain silly to claim that test don't actually measure learning.

What's nice is that some Oregon teachers who have special education students are rejecting the touchy-feely stuff and embracing the empirically-supported theories:

...Sharon Brumbley, a special education teacher who has long been a Direct Instruction disciple, said that using the curriculum at early grades has reduced the number of children placed in special education later on at her school in Springfield, Oregon.

"They've pared out all the nonessentials, and gotten down to what kids need to learn, what they need to know," she said.

Nothing but the 3 R's

A letter to the editor of the Pasadena Star-News says that students at one local middle school will soon be taking virtually nothing except math and English:

Students at Eliot Middle School in Altadena have just been informed by the Pasadena Unified School District that every student will have two math classes (yes, even if they are at or above grade level) most will have two English classes (apparently, even if they are performing at optimum level) and some will have three English classes next year.

First, understand that there are only six classes in a day, though these will now be divided into a block schedule. If five of them are English and math, what happens to foreign language, science, physical education, arts, history?

I don't think it's even good idea at first blush. Three English classes? Just how inefficent are the teachers at that school? Immersion and tutoring is one thing, but if it takes the teachers three hours a day to bring kids up to speed on the English language, something's not right. The letter writer points out that the kid will be tested in high school on classes they're supposed to be starting in middle school, like history. While I'm all for focusing on the core skills, I have to wonder why Eliot Middle School needs this much time to teach the basics.

Testing brouhaha in New Hampshire

Well, well. There appears to be a clash between teachers and SAU administrators in New Hampshire's North Hampton school district:

The School Board voted not to test North Hampton School students next year using a standardized test recommended by SAU 21 administrators. The NorthWest Educational Association tests were used this year, but teachers at NHS unanimously said they believe the tests are not useful and should not be continued. School Administrative Unit administrators suggested that teachers at NHS were not trained to properly use the tests and so cannot judge their effectiveness.

Ouch! But it's worth asking - who was in charge of making sure the teachers were properly trained? The NWEA is a computer-adaptive exam, so the students would have needed a bit of training as well.

NHS Principal Peter Sweet said teachers "tried to make (the test) meaningful," adding, "They used and shared the data, but they don’t want to do it again." Sweet said he would prefer that the school focus on grade-level assessments developed by the teachers to monitor students’ learning.

Teachers have complained that because of the structure of the test, students might end up being asked questions usually meant for much-older kids, and this kind of data is not helpful for how they want to teach.

SAU administrators pointed out that other districts in which more teacher training took place seem happier with the test, and more able to use the scores.

Self-defeating prophecies in education

Thomas Sowell has some harsh criticism for so-called "friends" of minority students:

My own moment of truth came when a roommate at Harvard said to me one day: "Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?"

Why endure all the hard work, self-discipline and self-denial that a first-rate education requires if The Man is going to stop you from getting anywhere anyway? People who have been pushing this line for years are now suddenly surprised and dismayed to discover that many black students across the country regard academic striving as "acting white."

And people who have pushing the line, "Standardized tests are biased against minorities" are now suddenly surprised and dismayed to discover that many black students regard tests as biased and unimportant, and the test score gap continues because black students are afraid of the tests, or are so convinced of their failure that they don't study for them.

The NCLB backlash, explained

Great article by Sol Stern in City Journal, about our incumbent "Education President" and the passionate reactions to NCLB:

For NCLB’s reading initiative alone, Bush richly deserves the title “education president.” But in addition, NCLB, though not perfect, is a powerful instrument of reform in other ways. What’s more, a new Bush-promoted school voucher program for Washington, D.C., may point the way toward further education reform in a second Bush term.

The educrats have ample reason to be upset. Before NCLB, the public schools’ failure to educate poor minority kids resulted in ever-increasing streams of federal money to local districts—more than $200 billion over the last four decades, disbursed with no questions asked. Now along comes Bush, requiring state and local districts to prove that the programs that federal dollars pay for have a solid scientific basis and actually work. Once public educators started trashing NCLB, Democrats suddenly decided that they hated it, too. Senator Kennedy now claims that the president “duped” him and that the act’s funding amounted to a “tin cup budget,” despite a big hike in federal education spending under Bush.

Stern's got some provocative theories - and blunt language - when it comes to the overwhelming negative reaction of educators to President Bush's reading initiatives:

You’d think that educators would welcome the scientific turn in federal reading policy. After all, the racial gap in school performance that liberals as well as conservatives decry as the greatest obstacle to equal opportunity in America first shows up as a wide gap in reading. While 40 percent of all American kids don’t attain the “basic” reading level by fourth grade, the rate of reading failure for inner-city black and Hispanic children is a catastrophic 70 percent. If we now have hard evidence on what methods will best bring these struggling kids up to speed, why wouldn’t educators support the government’s efforts to promote those methods?

There’s also tons of money at stake. If the idea of science-backed reading instruction takes hold in the nation’s school districts, millions of dollars in fees currently paid to the ed schools for whole-language teacher training and curriculum development will vanish.

Stern also uncovered a testing critic who is, amazingly, even more hysterical than Alfie Kohn:

Meanwhile, progressive education’s militant anti-testing wing had found a brand-new cause. Best-selling writers like Jonathan Kozol and Alfie Kohn have always maintained that “testing kills”—apparently meaning this metaphorically. But now, at least one of their progressive-ed allies believes that NCLB testing requirements literally will kill kids.

Margaret A. McKenna, a big Kozol fan and president of Massachusetts’s biggest teacher-training institution, Lesley University in Cambridge, writes that NCLB’s “overwhelming focus on student achievement on annual standardized tests” will lead inexorably to more school violence like the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. After all, she argues, Columbine was a “high-achieving school,” where students felt alienated by the pressure of high-stakes testing. Teachers, obsessed with test scores, didn’t have time to get to know the kids and create a “real community.” That’s why they missed the telltale signs of student alienation and impending tragedy. Now, McKenna warns in a bizarre Washington Post op-ed, Columbine-like carnage is likely to explode in schools across the country as NCLB’s accountability requirements “force communities to focus more on raising test scores than on raising kids.”

And here I thought Michael Moore's surreal Lockheed Martin/Kosovo bombing theory was a farfetched idea. McKenna, in stating that testing, rather than sociopathy and poor parenting, might cause school shootings, has gone Moore one better. I'd point out to McKenna a few problems with her theory - most school shootings don't happen in the "high-achieving" schools; not one person familiar with the case information has ever suggested that testing had anything to with Columbine, which happened three years BEFORE NCLB was passed; children are much more likely to face violence outside of schools, and the vast majority of homicide victims under the age of 12 are killed by adults - but I doubt that bringing her attention to logical inconsistencies would do much good.

Too much work for too little "growth"?

So far, we're not seeing a lot of good results from Florida's summer camps intended to boost FCAT passing rates:

Low grades and failing FCAT scores sent thousands of students back to classrooms throughout Southwest Florida this summer. For third- and 10th-graders who had to pass the FCAT or the alternative SAT-9 to advance, few were successful.

"There's not one person that we didn't see growth in their skills and that's what's important," said Michele Markstahler, lead teacher for the summer program at Sallie Jones.

The pitfalls of insufficient pretesting

Oregon's educators got caught between a budget crunch and a bad pretest sample, and have decided to toss the results of this year's 10th-grade math exam problem-solving section. Probably not a bad decision, given that 80% of the state's sophomores failed that portion:

The 33,000 students who failed the standardized test - about 80 percent of the state's sophomores - will have to retake the test as juniors. In previous years, about 50 percent of students have failed the test, which requires students to solve one complex math problem and show their work.

To avoid repeating that mistake, the state now will test potential problem-solving questions on a larger, more representative sample of students, and will be requiring schools to take part in the trials, said Cathy Brown, the state's math testing specialist.

I say they release the item, too, so we can see what it is that stumped so many of Oregon's sophomores.

The logical fallacies of testing critics

Recently, Devoted Reader Adrian sent me a link to Nizkor's list of logical fallacies. If you're unfamiliar with Nizkor, it's a site that is hard to describe with mere adjectives, although I think a combination of "awe-inspiring", "courageous," "immensely admirable," "humbling,"emotional," "phenomenal," and "we need more people like this" would do for a start.

Essentially, Nizkor's mission is to combat Holocaust revisionists, which makes the work I do seem pretty insignificant. I first discoverd the site about eight years ago, and I had forgotten about their logical fallacies pages. Nizkor is pretty adept at parrying logical flubs, the kind often made by anti-Semitic "scholars" in their attempts to convince us that, gee, we didn't really lose all those millions of Jewish souls in the 1930's and '40s. Or if we did, it was an accident - but if it was deliberate, hey, maybe Hitler was on to something.

You know the type of slime I'm talking about. (The kind who got his ass handed to him by Deborah Lipstadt, that's who.)

Anyway, since Nizkor deals with this crap on a daily basis, they kindly present Dr. Michael C. Labossiere's Fallacy Tutorial, and to make a long story short, my Devoted Reader Adrian noticed that one variant of the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy seemed awfully close to the "fundamentalist reporting" I noted a while back. To put it shortly and sweetly:

Appeal to an Unnamed Authority. This fallacy is also known as an Appeal to an Unidentified Authority.

This fallacy is committed when a person asserts that a claim is true because an expert or authority makes the claim and the person does not actually identify the expert. Since the expert is not named or identified, there is no way to tell if the person is actually an expert. Unless the person is identified and has his expertise established, there is no reason to accept the claim.

As in, "Critics say tests are biased toward minorities." Simple, to the point - and wrong.

So this got me thinking. It's pretty easy to spot the other fallacies of testing critics that are mentioned on the Nizkor site:

* "Early psychometricians were white men, so they must have been racist." (Ad Hominem fallacy.)

* "Most teachers oppose standardized testing, so it must be wrong." (Appeal to Belief and Biased Sample fallacy.)

* "This standardized test upset an elementary school student, therefore it is wrong." (Appeal to Pity fallacy, at which Michael Winerip is an expert.)

* "I don't take tests well, so there's no way the SAT could predict my college grades." (Relativist Fallacy.)

* "It was in the news this week that there was a scoring error on the PRAXIS; ETS must make a lot of those errors." (Spotlight fallacy.)

* "You're a psychometrician, so of course any argument you make in support of testing must be taken with a grain of salt." (Circumstantial Ad Hominem, not to mention surreal.)

But I wonder - are there any other fallacies out there, not on Dr. Labossiere's list, that are more specific to testing critics? I think so, but I want some input from my readers as well.

Here are a few that I've thought of already:

* The "Live By the Statistics, Die By the Statistics" argument.

Evidence suggest X cannot be true, thus, Y must be true regardless of evidence.

This occurs when testing critics argue the inappropriateness of using a standardized test for predictive purposes, allegedly because the correlation of the test score with the dependent variable is "too low," but then suggest alternatives (such as interviews or essays) with no corresponding data to show that these alternatives are better predictors (as demonstrated here). This seems like a twisted alternative to the Burden of Proof fallacy; because testing critics have (they believe) provided proof that a test is not good enough, this relieves them of any obligation to provide proof that the alternatives they suggest are any good.

* The "Emotionally-charged Yet Undefined Word" fallacy.

X is true, even though no one knows what X is.

The obvious example here is bias, a word which is used in every article critical of standardized tests, yet is rarely properly defined. On the other hand, virtually every textbook on bias in test items presents, in the first chapter - nay, the preface - the definitions that psychometricians use when discussing bias. These terms aren't hard to find, and we don't hide what we think it means. But testing critics are very skilled at keeping exactly what they think it means a secret.

* The "800-Pound Gorilla In the Room" fallacy.

The cause of A must be anything other than what is most awkward to admit is the cause of A.

This is related to the Confusing Cause and Effect fallacy, in which one assumes that because A and B regularly occur together, A is the cause of B, and the Post Hoc fallacy, in which A occurs before B, therefore A must be the cause of B. But in the testing critic version, even when A and B always occur together and A always predates B, it must be true that A cannot be the cause of B. This happens when someone observes that, for example, poor teaching based on ill-defined concepts and "progressive" ideas often predate poor test scores, yet testing critics will claim that home life, discipline issues - indeed, anything except the curriculum - must be the cause of the low scores. It hardly needs to be said that this is also related to the Wishful Thinking fallacy.

* The "Omniscient Observer" fallacy.

Item X was created for Person A. Person B cannot solve Item X; therefore, Item X is not appropriate for Person A.

I'm thinking here of the logical fallacy that led reporters and observers to assume that because Governor Bush (who hasn't taken geometry in 30 years and doesn't use the stuff in daily life) couldn't answer an FCAT geometry item on the spot, he has no right to insist that Florida's high-schoolers take the test. In other words, testing supporters (or those who impose tests) must be content experts for any test they support - which would rule out a lot of parents.

Any others you can think of? Feel free to suggest new names for the ones I've already thought of, too; as you can probably tell by my post titles, I'm not so hot at coming up with pithy little blurbs.

It's hard to cheat with a slide rule

THIS cheating study ought to ruffle some feathers:

Thirty-eight percent of undergraduate students surveyed last year said they had engaged in "cut-and-paste" plagiarism from the Internet in the previous year, according to a national study led by expert Donald McCabe of Rutgers University in New Jersey. That was up from 10 percent in a 2001 study.

Business students across campuses generally self-reported some of the highest levels of cheating...High levels of cheating also were reported by those majoring in education, communication and journalism, while the lowest levels were reported by science majors.

That's not surprising. I don't say that because I think people in education and journalism are necessarily more stupid or lazy (although I'm sure one could argue that students in these courses might be given inadequate instruction on how to do proper research and exam preparation). I say that because science and math courses are cumulative in a way that journalism and education course are not. What's the point of cheating on a math exam when the next exam will require you to have mastered all the previous concepts? What's the point in copying down your roommate's chemistry homework when your inability to balance equations will quickly become evident in other areas?

In classes where the grades are based on papers or oral reports on non-cumulative topics, downloading an essay from the Internet would be a useful way of cheating. But in science courses, you learn the equations or you get the heck out. Anyone who tries bending these rules won't last long.

More cheating links from Caveon's Cheating in the News update.

Mississippi puts on the brakes

Mississippi recently switched over its drivers' license exam from a paper-and-pencil version (which was apparently well-known and photocopied a great deal) to a computerized version which presented questions randomly so that no two would-be drivers see the same test.

And guess what? The percent of Mississipeans failing the general knowledge portion of the test has skyrocketed from 20% to 60%:

Nearly 60 percent of people applying for regular Mississippi drivers licenses have failed the general knowledge test since the state switched to a computerized testing system in December. Only 20 percent failed before, said Rene Morris, state administrator of the Automated Drivers License Testing System.

"They don't have cheat sheets anymore," Morris said. "Most people had a copy of every test we handed out or had it memorized."

Guess now they'll have to actually study those little DOT manuals, won't they? Of course, the same problem is happening in other states that use this computerized system, so either (a) the system is flawed, or (b) EVERYBODY's been cheating on the drivers' license exam. I think both options are equally likely.

Yet another valedictory flap

Man, what is it about the valedictorian spot that brings out the creativity, the offbeat ideas - and sometimes, the worst behavior - in people? Some schools outlaw the position because it promotes unhealthy "competition," while other schools allow anyone with a certain GPA to use the title. In some schools, it's all about grades; in other schools, you have to be elected, so you'd better be popular as well as smart. And, thanks to those two infamous words, "Blair Hornstine," we all know that the valedictorian position is apparently worth suing over.

Well, yet another valedictorian controversy is in the news:

Moreko Griggs' grandmother used to stop people in the post office and brag when he finished the ninth grade ranked No. 1 in his class. She was even more proud when he was named the first black valedictorian in Waynesboro High School history.

Peeling denied that race played a part.

Even though I know no more than the rest of you, I don't this this is really about race, either. For starters, it's very hard to believe that a school would not take pride in a black student getting the top spot for the first time. That's not only something for the student in question to be thrilled about, but it says good things about the school, too. It seems counterproductive, in this case, for a school to intentionally bump a black kid out of first place, or make him share the spotlight. I don't know if I agree with the efforts to make this about race, or with the NAACP getting involved.

However, something certainly got bungled here. It's hard to understand Peeling's rationale for being willing to "recalculate" GPAs after the graduation fliers were printed. The only two reasons I can think of for an administrator to do that would be (a) an orignal miscalculation or (b) parental pressure. Did Peeling miss something in his original calculations, which named Griggs the sole valedictorian? Did the parents of the two new valedictorians happen to be people with some important connection? To me, this sounds less like a racial issue than simple incompetence mixed with overbearing parental authority.

Earning his (tabby) stripes

Awwwww....

Pfc. Hammer dodged bullets in Iraq . . . and lived to meow about it.

“He has been through mortar attacks,” Bousfield said. “He’d jump and get scared liked the rest of us. He is kind of like one of our own.”

I'll say it again: Awwww. Great photo, too. Hammer earned his rank by killing five rodents on base, including, allegedly, a rat almost as big as he was. The Fark comment exchange on this story was great:

Commenter #1: The cat was a Private First Class? How would you like to be a Private and be subordinate to the cat?

Commenter #2: ALL humans are subordinate to a cat. This is the first rule of cat 'ownership'.

Update: More on Pfc. Hammer, here and here, with some great photos. Plus, I don't know what the ranks are in the Coast Guard, but I bet Nemo would qualify for one.

A revision to N2P

I received a flattering email just the other day. It was from Kerry Constible, the motivated high school student who studied on her own for the AP History exam (she took the regular History course). Jay Mathews mentioned her in a WaPo article about a misguided attempt to prevent teachers from awarding "A's for effort." Ms. Constible let me know that Mr. Mathews actually made modifications, on the day of publication, to the text (including the part that describes Ms. Constible's academic record) in order to make the article more representative of the facts. I cut and pasted his writing before he made those changes, so what I had in the original post was actually incorrect.

So how did Ms. Constible know I still had the original text? That's the flattering part. She found me because when she Googles her name, my link comes up first (above Newsweek and the WaPo!). She made prominent mention of that in her email to me, so she must know that's the way to a blogger's heart.

Anyhow, all this is just to explain why I've gone back and deleted the original quote, and replaced it with the updated version.

What's going through my head today

Busy at work, so here's my roundup of, well, just about everything I'm thinking about, not all of which is related to testing.

Today, I was able to convince a colleague (just in time) that the story alleging a huge IQ gap between the Bush and Gore 2000 states is a hoax. I have great Googling skills, a good memory for what I read online - and Devoted Readers who send me every possible IQ story on earth.

Got kitties? Got a ShopRite near you? This week is ShopRite's can sale. Get 24 cans of Friskies wet food for $5 with your ShopRite card, limit of 96 cans. As God is my witness, my kitties will never go hungry again. (And for those of you who teach elementary school math, time to turn this into a good word problem! "Kimberly has two kitties who each eat one can of food a day. 24 cans of food cost $5. How much would six cans cost? How much does she need to spend to keep her kitties fed for 48 days?")

My boss bought in fresh cilantro from his garden. Pasta with cilantro pesto is on the menu tonight.

This kinda changes the idea of what "volunteering" is, doesn't it?

Sephora.com took in its usual infusion of cash from me this week. I am an unrepentant skin-care-product junkie, yes I am.

I don't have to defend tests anymore; Joanne Jacobs, Bill Evers, and Jay Mathews have done it for me.

Can I get one that says, "Hands off, I'm taken"?

Want to know more about value-added testing? The Pacific Institute's new research report, Putting Education to the Test: A Value-Added Model for California, is out. Also, the entire Spring 2004 issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics is devoted to this topic.

Jonah Goldberg provides a link to a cemetery for "Dogs of War". I love this comment: "If you search for Dogs of War on the web you get all sorts of sites like this, about dogs of war. If you search for cats of war the internet laughs at you."

And while we're talking about cemeteries, I learned two cool new words this week, both of which describe those who love these creepy, historic, unique places: taphophile and necrolithologist. The second term, believe it or not, is not anywhere on the web, but was mentioned in Cemetery Stories. Regardless, it's safe to say that buying a house because there's a graveyard behind it earns me these labels.

A blunder, indeed

Several Devoted Readers sent me the news of this big "ooops!":

Mistakes in the scoring of an examination that 18 states use in licensing teachers caused more than 4,000 people who should have passed it to fail instead, the Educational Testing Service said yesterday. The errors may have prevented many from getting full-time jobs as teachers in the last year.

Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which looks skeptically on standardized testing, said the grading errors were only the latest instance of quality-control problems in the industry at a time when testing was growing sharply.

Wow, they managed to wait until the second paragraph before bringing in the critics to claim that this is a harbinger of doom, rather than an isolated error. Given that it's the NYT, that's restraint. Also, notice how they also don't mention here that any field that is "growing sharply" is almost always going to produce more errors than one that is stagnant.

Of course, it was the Washington Times that reported Scheaffer's ridiculous quote about how there's no guarantee that anyone in my field is "highly qualified." Funny, but all the psychometricians and test developers I know have Ph.D.s. The demand for testing does mean that we need more qualified people, but it's absurd to insist that any testing error is evidence in and of itself that the people involved were not qualified (all humans, even qualified ones, can make mistakes).

The dog food industry analogy? Rude, bogus, and a cheap shot. Name me one industry that involves the ingestion of any substance by any critter that is not more highly regulated than any psychological testing or assessment industry. For those testing critics too biased to get the picture, let me explain - tests don't kill people. And that's why we don't have something like the FDA overseeing us.

The errors occurred from January 2003 to April 2004. During that time, the test - the Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching for Grades 7 to 12, called the Praxis P.L.T. 7-12 - was given eight times, to a total of about 40,000 people.

Besides calling state officials and test takers, the testing service has a toll-free phone line (800-205-2626) for more information. A recording at that number yesterday said that the company was "very sorry that this has occurred" and that it was "committed to addressing any concerns this issue may raise for you."

ETS blundered. ETS found the problem. ETS admitted the error. ETS is trying to rectify the mistake, in both the financial and career-impact domains. In my mind, these are signs of an industry that is functioning in a normal, healthy fashion. Glad to see the article close with a quote that is complimentary to ETS. And note, too, that the error was in the "performance assessment" portion of the exam; testing critics often call for such performance-based items due to an irrational hatred of the more reliable and cheaper multiple-choice items.

I see enough complaints about Praxis on the web, though, that I expect this to bring out many, many responses of how unfair the test is, and how this error must prove...something.

Conspiracy theorist extraordinaire

Oh, yeah, THIS is the kind of guy who should be elected as the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction:

I, David Blomstrom, a candidate for state office (Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction), hereby declare my belief that President George W. Bush deserves and should receive the death penalty, after the appropriate legal or quasi-legal formalities. I urge other patriotic Americans and foreign nationals alike to openly call for Bush’s execution. Furthermore, I sent my first press release announcing my position to Al-Jazeera in symbolic gesture designed to call attention to the corruption that runs rampant in America’s media.

Rather than link to the actual, repellant site (which uses Nazi imagery, from what I understand), I linked to the Peeve Farm's hilarious rejoinder. If you've seen Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie, the joke becomes even funnier (on the right in this photo is one of the aliens-that-we-weren't-supposed-to-know-were-aliens).

And don't miss the list of shocking "facts" that Blomstrom lists on his education reform site. My favorite is "Education reform is an international conspiracy," although I suppose it's also interesting that Blomstrom sees nothing inconsistent with listing these two "facts": "Mental illness is probably far more prevalent among teachers than among the general population" and "Teacher bashing is a national epidemic." I guess he's infected? Of course, nothing is provided to support these "facts;" that's something Blomstrom will comment on at a later date. Much later, I'm sure.

Googling him leads to the impression that he is much more obsessed with President Bush than with improving education, but don't assume he's anti-war; he's quite in favor of war. And the Seattle Post-Intelligencer redeems itself in my eyes by ignoring Blomstrom's campaigns. Seattle Weekly didn't ignore him, though.

The following sentence appears at the bottom of one of his websites:

"Feel free to use this image or the Education Revolt logo in the top left corner of this page for linking to this website."

Okay!

is the logo of a website run by a man who is either insane, an idiot, or both.

(No, I'm not going to activate the link. Give him two links in one post? Yeah, right.)

First leashes, now chips...

Japan is always quick to jump on the technology bandwagon:

The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.

The chips will be put onto kids' schoolbags, name tags or clothing in one Wakayama prefecture school. Denmark's Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.

More about RFID tags here. Is this a smart move that will allow administrators to better keep track of kids? (Needless to say, this would be a godsend if a child were abducted, unless the kidnapper was smart enough to discard all the clothes and bags the child was carrying.) Or are we on a slippery slope to having implanted microchips, just like our pets?

Consider the human body as well. Applied Digital Solutions has designed an RFID tag - called the VeriChip - for people. Only 11 mm long, it is designed to go under the skin, where it can be read from four feet away. They sell it as a great way to keep track of children, Alzheimer's patients in danger of wandering, and anyone else with a medical disability, but it gives me the creeps. The possibilities are scary. In May, delegates to the Chinese Communist Party Congress were required to wear an RFID-equipped badge at all times so their movements could be tracked and recorded. Is there any doubt that, in a few years, those badges will be replaced by VeriChip-like devices?

Fundamentalist reporting

You know how I'm always carping about when lazy reporters start a sentence with "Critics say..." for the sole purpose of rehashing anti-testing myths? "Critics say the tests are biased." "Critics say the tests are not fair to minorities." And so on.

Well, Orson Scott Card (yep, the sci-fi author), writing for the Opinion Journal, is peeved about the very same phenomenon, which he catches in a credulous article about the eco-scare movie, "The Day After Tomorrow":

The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda...

This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.)

Emphases mine. It's so nice to see that I'm not the only one driven mad by reporters who use intentionally undefined sources to make wild, sweeping statements about complicated issues. And I'm not surprised that a successful sci-fi author was able to describe the issue in much more complete, descriptive, and colorful a fashion than I ever could.

When those giving the exams don't quite understand the rules

Now, here's a classic headline about testing misbehavior: "Cheating or misunderstandings?"

Nine Arizona school districts have invalidated portions of their spring standardized test scores because teachers gave students extra time to complete parts of the test or read sections of the test to students.

In another case, state education officials are trying to salvage test scores of hundreds of students in Phoenix's Creighton Elementary, Gilbert Unified and Yuma Elementary districts, where teachers allowed students to take two, even three days, to finish essays for the most recent AIMS test. Directions clearly state that the essay must be written in one sitting. The state has asked the three districts to pay for a study to determine if the extra days gave students an unfair advantage.

I would be very surprised if it didn't, although if the kids had truly poor writing skills, extra time might not have helped them that much (but they certainly could have used their nights to do some revising and research, if needed). How this could possibly be a misunderstanding, though, I can't imagine, despite the testing coordinator's insistence that this mistake would have been very easy to make.

Granted, it's not outright deception, as in the case of one hapless principal:

The highest-profile case involved Maureen Booth, who was principal at Sequoya Elementary School in the Scottsdale district. District officials claimed Booth changed Stanford 9 scores so her teachers could receive incentive pay. Booth denied any wrongdoing, and the district dropped the allegations in December in exchange for her resignation. The state's case against her remains open.

Regardless, when "misunderstandings" are this widespread (and isn't it interesting that such misunderstandings almost always happen in a way that can only benefit the student), something is wrong.

Alice Finn Gartell is the attorney for the Arizona Education Association, which represents about half of Arizona's 46,000 teachers. Gartell said cheating allegations fall into three categories: intentional cheating; sloppy or accidental cheating, such as misunderstanding directions; and teachers who think it's acceptable to help a little, such as pointing to a question and asking a student, "Have you checked on these numbers?"

"It is breaking the procedures in such a way that students score better and thus it compromises the validity of the test," said Berliner, former dean of ASU's College of Education.

Exactly. This is why psychometricians like myself get so bent out of shape about even small instances of cheating. We spend a lot of time fighting the notion that such tests are by definition invalid; when teachers intentionally or carelessly invalidate tests through this kind of behavior, no one wins. Because there is such a strong emphasis on testing these days, teachers should recieve a thorough training that doesn't leave wiggle room. If anything, I think the situation is not "high-stakes" enough - at least, not enough to convince teachers that these kinds of "misunderstandings" are unacceptable.

FCAT items and test prep

In all the hubbub of commenting and contradictions on last week's post on the infamous geometry question posed to Governor Bush, I completely forgot to go find what Charles of Reform K-12 had to say on the topic. An unforgiveable mistake, on my part.

Charles is not only a superb geometry teacher, but is more willing to go out on a limb than I. While I tactfully said that I didn't think the item mentioned by Ms. Marques was on the FCAT, Charles said, "We have no doubt that there was some question involving either a 3-4-5 right triangle or a 30-60-90 right triangle, but not both. We will publicly eat a copy of the FCAT if anyone can prove us wrong."

Like me, he also found it appalling that it was "news" that the Governor got the item wrong, but not that the girl herself got it wrong:

No one expects grownups in non-scientific fields to remember high-school geometry, so the Governor's ignorance is understandable. But here is not only one student, but her friends as well, who are confoundingly ignorant on basic facts from 10th grade geometry, while being convinced they know their stuff.

In other FCAT-related news, I received an email from Devoted Reader, and concerned parent, V.G., who is an FCAT supporter but has some questions about a "research" FCAT remediation class. It seems that schools receive funding to place students in this remediation class and may be, um, overeager to place students (even those who are performing at grade level) in the class. Has anyone else had an experience like this?

Why is there a flashing red light on my kid's test score report?

California has decided upon a traffic-light theme to make test scores more interpretable to parents - probably not a bad choice in a state that's as car-crazy as California:

Parents of California's public school students can expect easier explanations this summer of how their children are performing on state standardized tests. Education officials have scrapped complicated old report cards that they said confused parents and replaced them with easier charts and color-coded guides.

Students will also gets lists of their strengths and areas that need more focus. For the first time, the reports also will include translation guides in Spanish, Chinese, Hmong, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

Sounds like he's a whiz at "creative thinking"

And the N2P award for Outstanding College Student of the Week goes to...Paul Cunningham of Wilmington College, Delaware:

A Delaware college student ate a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms and drove around in a pair of stolen cars before arriving, confused, on a mountain in northwest Connecticut police said.

Police said Cunningham, of Dover, Del., confessed that eating an entire bag of mushrooms, "probably wasn't a good idea." He allegedly told investigators that he had no idea how many laws he broke during a three-day excursion that took him 300 miles from home.

About $2500 worth of laws, at least in bail money.

A student at Wilmington College, he told a state trooper that he bought the drugs in Dover on Monday, according to the Republican-American of Waterbury. The next day, he went for a drive and twice got lost in Connecticut.

In Canaan, he decided to climb Music Mountain to see what was on the other side, police said. Investigators believe the exercise cleared Cunningham's head.

Hey, at least he's honest, once he sobers up.

The (sssh!) big stories in education

Instapundit links to Eduwonk's list of five education stories that are important, yet under-reported. I agree with most of them.

For your consideration, here are five education stories not getting the attention they should right now, each one has implications that could mean a major political or policy pivot in coming years:

*The increasing support for vouchers among African-Americans, now a solid majority overall and even more among younger blacks and families.

This one, I do agree, is important yet under-reported, and I'll say more about it below.

*How President Bush's mishandling of NCLB has created a mess for his signature education law, alienated even supporters, and potentially hamstrung some school improvement efforts.

Eduwonk thinks the idea that people are unhappy with NCLB is under-reported? Eduwonk is kidding, right? Virtually every day newspapers spill over with stories of teachers bitching about tests, educators bitching about NCLB-required bean counting, researchers insisting that tests cause kids to drop out, activists insisting that not all students should be held to the same standards, etc. The mass media lovingly catalogue every gripe, kvetch, and whine about NCLB and its related standards, tests, rules, regulations, and so forth.

What are under-reported are the instances in which NCLB seems to be working, and all the changes that have been made to the act in response to these complaints. The mass media have been very slow to acknowledge areas in which NCLB-related reforms appear to have had positive effects. Luckily, blogs like mine are helping pick up the slack.

*How important and significant it is that the entire Democratic ticket for president champions differential pay for teachers.

I think it's very important and significant that both Kerry and Edwards support differential pay. But Kerry also opposes vouchers- you know, the vouchers that African Americans tend to support, as Eduwonk notes?

There is debate, true, over whether urban America really supports vouchers, or whether vouchers are effective. But what gets relatively little coverage (other than on The West Wing!) is that, despite the fact that African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democrat, the Democratic platform is often at odds with the education-related choices that African Americans would make for themselves.

*The achievement gap. In personal terms it's catastrophic, in demographic ones if it's not the nation's top social policy challenge it's right up there.

Again, while this is incredibly important, how on earth is this under-reported? We hear about this all the time. I wonder if what Eduwonk means is that, while the test score gap is always big news, the fact that the test score gap represents a very real underlying achievement gap is often ignored, or even treated dishonestly (e.g., the notion that score gaps represent only bias on the part of test developers is taken for granted by many reporters).

*The teachers' union led referendum in Washington State to overturn the charter law there. Huge consequences for charters if this succeeds.

There's a simple solution to this. Put Stefan Sharkansky in charge of press releases and news reports from Washington State. Any news about charter schools up there won't remain under-reported for long.

Eduwonk titillates us with a couple more hush-hush stories:

Two More Bonus Freebies! (A) Why No Child Left Behind is going to be a boon to efforts to make state school finance systems more equitable for poor kids and (B) The NEA’s membership woes and what that potentially means for the organization down the road.

(A) Yes, I agree it will be a boon, and (B) Yes, I'd love to read more about that, but that kind of news will get heavy coverage on the same day that the NYT runs a story about how much NYC's third-graders just loooove their reading tests. I.e., never.

Educators lower the standards for teaching, yet again

I cannot believe that even a big-city educrat thought this was a good idea (from the New York Resident , current issue not yet online):

On July 1st, several thousand high school students will start to reap the rewards of their alma mater rap sheets for indulgences from assault to malicious vandalism and extortion. They will tutor failing third-graders in exchange for a five-hundred dollar scholarship and classroom credit towards their own graduation.

It also wants to help third graders, at minimal taxpayer investment, by providing them with academic aid. To achieve these commendable goals, they have embarked on a daring and fatuous experiment. They have instituted a project that enfranchises these troubled youths by entrusting them with elementary school guinea pigs.

Who thought this was a good idea? I mean, seriously. Who assumed that third-graders would benefit from tutoring from a group of older students who were selected not for reading skills but for criminal behavior? Yes, I'm familiar with the idea that those who have done bad can be reformed by being asked to do good; we've all seen the heartwarming shows about convicts who learn to help others behind bars (Cell Dogs is one of my favorite shows). But it's folly, and dangerous folly, to assume that any old juvenile delinquent who feels like earning some easy cash can provide an instructive, much less safe, environment for a third-grader.

These high school students, who have been suspended from school for the most serious violations, some of them full-blown crimes, will be thrown into confidential settings with eight-year-old kids to provide tutoring in areas in which the older child may not be competent himself. It is the poster program for the "hell is paved with good intentions" philosopy...

Among these "shake and bake" tutors are students who have been suspended for ninety days and reassigned to "Second Opportunity Schools." The general public is clueless how horrific a student's behavior must be, in terms of gravity and frequency of actions, for the educational authorities to approve such a suspension and transfer. Only the worst of the worst, whom public schools cannot expel by law, are welcome.

As author Ron Isaac points out, it is grossly counterintuitive to to offer young criminals the opportunity to earn $500 for tutoring when honor students who haven't been in any trouble don't have this chance. These wayward students aren't being offered the opportunity to help repay their debt to society; they're being offered money to do a job for which they may or may not be held accountable. I know of no other "redeeming" program for criminals that offers them money for "redeeming" themselves.

Tutoring is not a job that everyone can do, and it's bizarre that the DOE seems to be suggesting that even juvenile deliquents can do it. Does this mean that their standards for hiring teachers are much lower than we suspect?

Isaac's conclusion is worth reading, as he notes that the program requires that a student "apologize" for his crimes:

The question is not whether these troubled children/instant tutors are siphoning pay from legitimate teachers. The argument is whether totally unfit people should be entrusted with providing educational critical care to our most vulnerable students: third-graders who recently failed the test for promotion...

But a student's antisocial behavior can only become "water under the bridge" when he builds new bridges for and by himself. Any fresh water under that new bridge must be in terms of that student's self-improvement before we can let him gamble on the improvement of others. Even if they mastered third-grade skills, which many such high school students do not, the first step must be with themselves. Just saying "sorry" doesn't cut it.

You can't handle the truth!

First it was a secret. Then it wasn't. Now it is, again. Georgia's DOE needs to make up their minds:

The state will delay going public with any more "cut" scores — the number of correct answers needed to pass a standardized test — until the Board of Education adopts a formal process for releasing the figures.

Last month, the state released cut scores for the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test following an open records request from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a unanimous board vote that the cut scores should be released. The newspaper also requested cut scores for two other standardized tests: End of Course Tests, taken by high school and some middle school students, and the Georgia High School Graduation Test.

Basically, they're not revealing any more cutscores until the public has the information they need to interpret those scores correctly (and not make disparaging comments about how low the cutscore is, as some other journalists - and I - have done). It's certainly not a bad idea to make sure a definition of cutscore, along with other test information, gets released when the cutscores do. So let's see what Georgia ultimately releases, if anything.

Cheating news roundup - 7/1 and 7/9

I didn't get a chance to post last week's Cheating News roundup from Caveon, so here you go. The two items that most interested me were the exam theft in the UK and the appalling widespread nature of cheating in California (Caveon's link is no longer active but I found one that was).

In the UK, parents and students are appalled and disgusted with the cheaters, as well as a lapse in security that allowed secure test items to leak out. But in California, there's no real question about where the security leaks are, and no quotes from outraged parents. Just a mention of one confused teacher who thought it was, you know, perfectly okay to let kids revise their essays before including them on the exams.

Don also links to a discussion found on an online bulletin board in which some kid babbles on at length about his oh-so-honorable "Five Ideals of Cheating." Now, I follow a lot of true crime news, and something about his guidelines rang a bell, but I couldn't figure out just what it reminded me of.

Then I realized that these five "ideals" - never tell anything to the authorities, never brag, use precaution, change your MO, keep doing it until your goals are achieved - are also the same five ideals that contract and serial killers use to avoid detection from the law. And I have about as much respect for this poster (for someone who insists, "Don't brag!", he sure is showing off here) as I would for any other criminal. I consider his list a pathetic attempt to reassure himself, and his readers, that these actions are somehow justified if you're clever enough in going about them.

(Cheating News from 7/9 will be added when Caveon's page is updated.)

Even a test score will bounce, if you drop it from a high enough platform

What's going on with test scores in Delaware? And where's Dave Huber on this?

Buoyed last month by an apparent bounce in the state's standardized test scores, elected officials rushed to put themselves in the way of reflected glory...

Nonetheless, both Minner and Education Secretary Valerie Woodruff said the improvement in test results is genuine.

The rest of the article, which is long but worth reading, goes on to explain that when the repeaters eventually reach the 10th-grade exam (next year), the scores will most likely drop down a bit. It's true that it's hard to disentangle the real progress from the examinee pool anomalies in Delaware's startling test score improvements (53 percent met the math standard, compared with last year's 45 percent; 71 percent met the reading standard, compared with 66 percent last year). The retention rate for eighth-graders in 2002 was 11.5 percent (as compared to 3.8 percent in 200), so that's a sizeable little chunk that didn't take the 10th-grade exams this year.

Of course, if retaining those kids did in fact help them to be better prepared for when they do take the test (results so far suggest otherwise), the test scores won't drop as much. So I think next year's scores are going to be very informative.

Me, I'm just savoring the opportunity to read a news article in which it is assumed that a state's standardized exam scores are accurate indicators of true student ability (we're seeing high scores because the examinees are smarter, for whatever reason). Funny, but don't we almost always read the opposite - tests are biased, educators shouldn't assume that student ability is being accurately portrayed - when low test scores are observed? Why isn't this reporter rushing to remind us that "critics say" such tests are biased? Most times, we see quote after quote in articles trying to convince us that the tests are meaningless and that students are really doing much better than scores would suggest; here, we're being cautioned to think that students are actually doing worse than scores would suggest.

This reminds me of a time-honored technique of testing critics, in which they damn all tests as biased and unfair - unless those tests support a political point they want to make. Witness the groups who claim SAT scores are biased, but then use SAT scores to make a point about a different test.

The littlest Republican

Republican Voices is a new wesbite with some nifty graphics and a nice design. There's an editor's blog, a chatroom, and more (including a "Hate Mail" link, the hottest thing for right-wing blogs). Its mission? Read what its founder and editor, Emil Levitin, has to say:

I decided to make this website when I saw this, www.presidentmoron.com (take a few seconds looking at the upside down flag on this liberal website). I took this image as personally offensive to me. Being a proud patriot, I could not believe how Americans can offend Americans. I realized that a new type of culture had formed in the United States which is called liberalism...

I decided that I want to show the country what liberalism really is through my columns. Everything is possible, through heavy research of liberal books, websites etc. Everything can be found and I feel a responsibility to reveal all of this to America and stop liberalism from spreading.

If Levitin's grammar and phrasing seems a bit off, well, that's to be expected, considering he's only 11 years old. Or so he says, and so we think. Given that reporters believe it's hot news when 10-year-olds publicly oppose testing, will Master Levitin, if he's really only 11, garner some fawning newspaper coverage as well?

Yeah, right.

When tests don't produce the "right" student body

From Devoted Reader Kevin S. comes this story of a school board which seems to think that "diversity" is more important than test scores, even when the school in question is the "elite" Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology:

Jefferson, a magnet school that draws students from across Northern Virginia, has long grappled with the role of race in admissions. Almost 3,000 students apply every year, and 800 semifinalists are selected based on a multiple-choice test of math and verbal skills. Last year, the student body was about 1 percent black and 2 percent Hispanic.

According to the panel's recommendation, which the School Board will consider tonight and again at a work session Monday, "work must begin immediately" so the amended admissions process can be in place by the fall for students applying to Jefferson next year.

The president of the local NAACP branch says that members are already "mobilizing" in order to speak at the July 21 meeting, but then he criticizes the school - which is a school for science and technology, remember - for communicating its policy changes using email and the Internet. His representatives "don't use computers," but anyone who doesn't use computers isn't going to be attending this school anyway.

Asian parents, on the other hand (Asian students make up 32% of the most recent entering class), wonder if their numbers are going to dwindle, and wonder if the suggested essay test might weed out some qualified students who are recent immigrants.

What no one wants to address are the possibilities that (a) students admitted from teacher recommendations might not be qualified and (b) the minority students who are already at TJ might not appreciate an influx of "diverse" students who didn't have to satisfy the same stringent testing requirements, especially if poor performance on the part of any of the newcomers leads to lowered standards, or more racial tension between those who can do the work, and those who can't.

Also, there's an unspoken assumption here that something must be wrong with the admissions test; otherwise, why say there are qualified students out there who can't score well on it? But does this school have any data to suggest that the test does not do a good job of selecting qualified students? Or are they just unhappy that they don't get the racial balance that they want using a purely meritocratic approach?

I hope TJ realizes that, now that they've opened the door to challengers who want to claim that their test is "biased" against minorities, they might have a hard time getting that door closed again.

Oh, the sacrifices I make for this blog

I suffer from tendonitis in my ankles and wrists, and it doesn't take violent motion to make them flare up; normal motion will do it. Things like raquetball and so forth are, of course, completely out.

Now I see that there are negative side effects to trying to catch up on all my blogging while still being swamped with work. I was on the computer so constantly today that I've developed tendonitis in my right-mouse clicking finger. I'm serious. (Stop laughing.) My finger is swollen to twice its normal size and I can't bend it. I can still type, barely, but otherwise moving my hand is painful.

Yes, I know. It's ridiculous. Now excuse me while I go figure out a way to make a teeny tiny little ice pack for my hand.

Another misconception of what "bias" means

Just had to point out this sneering quote that Michelle Malkin found, buried in a WaPo article about bloggers being allowed in the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this year:

...neither party has ever allowed bloggers to cover one of its presidential conventions firsthand -- and the decision seems to promise a clash of two very different cultures. The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public. Independent blogs -- especially those focusing on politics -- are far more freewheeling, their authors mixing fact with opinion and under no obligation to be either fair or accurate.

Pardon me while I gag. No, political bloggers - who almost always link to source articles so that readers can check the material for themselves - are not obligated to be accurate. No, political bloggers - who almost always identify their leanings very clearly on the very front page, if not in the actual titles of their blogs - are not obligated to be fair. I think what galls this reporter is that such bloggers often are accurate, and if not, publicly fact-checked. What's more, "fairness" isn't an issue because such bloggers rarely claim, as many newspaper falsely do, to be "unbiased" and "balanced" about issues. The suggestion that journalists who cover the conventions would have no biases is absurd, but unlike bloggers, they're unlikely to be honest about it.

I just had to comment on this, if for no reason other than a former friend of mine was appalled to find out that I was blogging my opinions about psychometrics. He was furious that I wasn't providing balance on my blog; I wasn't allowing people who disagreed with me equal time on a blog that I alone fund and slave over. How dare I not allow these people their "free speech."

I couldn't figure out what his deal was, until I realized that he had been so brainwashed into believing that the only acceptable method was of reporting anything is in an "unbiased" fashion that he can't deal with honestly-opinionated reporting. I think he truly believes, as does this WaPo reporter, that it is wrong for someone who is informed about a topic to take a stance, and quote material (research, data, events) in an effort to convince readers to support that particular mindset - to mix fact with opinion, as the horrified reporter said.

In the mind of this former friend, my blog should never present anything except a "balanced" view on testing, and the idea that I support tests, and testing, and will roundly criticize anyone who bashes tests in a clueless fashion, is, to him, "biased" rather than, well, having an informed opinion and allowing other people to know that.

As I said, a former friend.

Get 'em while they're hot

Dean Esmay has graciously helped me battle the Spambots by changing my comment specifics. Comments for posts over 30 days old are now closed, and in the future comments functionality will be closed once a post is over 30 days old. So if you have something to say, do it quickly; otherwise you'll have to send me an email and let me post an update.

And speaking of comments, I found this post on blog civility fascinating. I certainly have noticed the influx and effect of trolls elsewhere, but N2P has remained refreshingly free of them. Perhaps it's because of my civil tone (usually) and the fact that I don't post rash statements just to get readers riled up (though I loved the whole Blair Hornstine controversy). Perhaps it's because readership is below the danger point (10,000 - 20,000 a day).

Or perhaps it's because anyone commenting here probably knows they're dealing with a blogger with a Ph.D. and regular readers who are quite educated, and to leave ridiculous, nasty, incendiary comments here instead of thoughtful ones is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. You'll just get your tail whupped and your profanity (which doesn't impress us) deleted.

Gives new meaning to the phrase, "high stakes"

You know, Governor Bush should have expected something like this:

During a speech to high school students who mentor younger children in reading, a teenager asked the governor a basic geometry question taken from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which Bush has championed.

"If the point is, I haven't been in school for the last 30 years, that's true. But if I'm going to be graduating from high school and I can't pass a 10th-grade aptitude test, then I'm fooling myself," Bush said. "The fact that a 51-year-old man can't answer a question, is really not relevant. You're still going to have to take the FCAT and you're still going to have to pass it in order to get a high school degree."

Marques thinks Governor Bush didn't have much of a sense of humor about the whole thing, and he should have, but to be fair, he could have pointed out the grammatical atrocity in her opening statement, "Me and a couple of my friends...were wondering..." And what if he had known her answer was incorrect and pointed that out to her as well? Why did she ask a question to which she mistakenly thought she knew the answer?

BestOftheWeb points out:

Now first of all, does anyone who isn't a graduate student in mathematics know the answer to this? We certainly didn't. Besides, geometry is the most useless branch of mathematics, at least in our experience. We occasionally make use of algebra, trigonometry and calculus, but we dropped our high school geometry class after a couple of months, and we've never missed it.

I certainly wouldn't argue that geometry was useless, but I wouldn't have known the answer to that item off the top of my head, either, and I aced AP Geometry in high school, and I'm younger than Governor Bush. While I may not remember the proofs, the mental discipline that came from doing them has helped me in many ways unrelated to math, and to suggest that students shouldn't learn that material just because Bush doesn't know the answer to one item off the top of his head is just plain silly.

Update: Given the discussion in my comments section, I think the theory floated by commenter Josh - that the young lady misremembered a 1-2-sqrt(3) item as a 3-4-5 item - is quite possible. According to the FCAT math item specifications, the only trigonometry tested on the 10th-grade FCAT is right-angle trigonometry (the famous SOH-CAH-TOA). It's hard to believe that the uses of inverse trig functions (necessary to solve a 3-4-5) were tested on this exam. Perhaps she misremembered a Pythagorean theorem item that used a 3-4-5 triangle.

Given that WFTV went to the trouble to contact a mathematics graduate student for the correct answer (and note that they didn't ask a Florida high school math teacher), why didn't they ask her what skills were required to solve the item, and compare those skills to the FCAT item specs listed online? Why did WFTV (and I, for that matter) miss the possibility that the student misstated the item, especially given that she gave the wrong answer for the item she posed?

Or was the point here just to have a hook on which to hang two "critics say" claims and convince the audience that the FCAT is bad because Governor Bush was stumped by one item?

Massachusetts experiments with free tuition

In Massachusetts, students who score in the top quartile of the state standardized test, the MCAS, can get into college for free. Not surprisingly, this has brought out the protestors who are appalled that some of the kids who are smart enough to go to college also have enough money to pay their own way; these protestors miss the point of this "meritocratic" gesture entirely:

Governor Romney touts the program, which is projected to cost taxpayers $34 million annually, as a way to lure more of the state's highest-scoring students, many of whom can afford private school tuition, into its higher education system - and as a way to encourage all students to score better on the exam.

By contrast, 3 percent of students in blue-collar Lowell, Mass., score well enough to see the aid.

Expect this to bump up controversy over the MCAS quite a few notches. Sure, the money's not reliant on grades, as in Georgia's flawed HOPE scholarships, but, just as grades can be inflated, test standards can be lowered if there's enough political pressure. Giving money directly to students might avoid the accountability issues with awarding money to schools instead, but when there's tuition riding on the line, there's going to be a lot of complaints that wealthier kids don't deserve this boost, even if they earned it.

How long until Alfie Kohn lands a record deal?

More news from the NEA National Convention - President Bush, look out! Singing teachers!

[Utah teacher Lily Eskelsen] performed the song (with the unforgettable hook "If we have to test their butts off, there'll be no child's behind left") this week at the National Education Association's annual meeting.

"It shows how much opposition to No Child Left Behind has permeated the popular culture, at least with educators," says Bob Schaeffer of the Center for Fair & Open Testing, which has criticized Bush's education policies.

Yeah, so much opposition that they're strapping on guitars and writing rhymes, which is what I'd expect of a teenager's protest, not that of an educated person. They're basically letting off steam and having fun, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's ludicrous to represent this as serious protest.

(And, just for the record, I'd consider someone who wrote a song in support of testing to be equally goofy.)

The SAT vs. the ruling classes

From Business Week Online, a nice profile of ETS founder Henry Chauncey:

In the early 1930s, Harvard University's graduating classes were made up of young men and (a few) women who had spent their teen years reveling in the heady 1920s. It seemed to one young Harvard assistant dean, Henry Chauncey, that these sons and daughters of the elite were simply expecting that they would rightfully inherit top positions in business and society, as if the Great Depression couldn't touch the ruling class.

Chauncey, a Harvard grad himself, was distressed to watch as class after left the august institution, and failed, in his view, to meet the titanic civic challenges of the times. Together with then-Harvard president James Bryant Conant, Chauncey initiated an experiment to bring Harvard a new type of student, based not on the connections they or their parents had, but solely on what the students knew and their potential for further learning.

Many people would like to forget (if indeed they ever knew) the proud principles upon which ETS was based. Yes, there are still inequalities in our educational system, and students with more wealth and health and good fortune still tend to do better. But it's a far cry from the days where, if you were very smart but from a poor family in Nowhere, Kansas, you were completely out of luck, and tests like these have a lot to do with that.

So, how did you feel about your elementary school experience?

One elementary school in Vermont isn't interested in the state standardized exams, and believes that surveys - yes, surveys - are the way to see if they're really being effective:

In an attempt to measure Marlboro Elementary School's quality without federally mandated exams, surveys will be sent out to graduates from the past eight years. A draft of the survey has been written by Marlboro Elementary alumnus Ariel Poster, who is a sophomore at Barnard College in New York City, a women's college affiliated with Columbia University. She was hired by the Marlboro Elementary School Action Plan Committee to evaluate the school's ability to educate.

The tricky part will be finding all the graduates, said board member Lauren Poster, Ariel's mother. The survey will go to high school students and graduates old enough to be in college.

Oh, this I gotta see. A survey. Are these folks aware that a response rate of 25% is considered normal for surveys? Are they aware that respondents self-select, and that only those who were extremely satisifed/dissatisfied may bother with responding? Are they going to account for the fact that a respondent's recollections and impressions of their time in elementary school, so far after the fact, may not only be incorrect, but also have nothing to do with how well the school did in educating students as a whole? Why is it more important, or more meaningful, to ask former students what they remember of the experience, than to see how current students are doing now?

And how 'bout that "you are an incredible person!" opener? This survey is going to high school and college students. You'd think Marlboro wouldn't feel the need to use the grade-school touchy-feely tone with more mature students. And what if one of those alumni is going through a rough time? If I'd just gotten fired, dumped, or rejected by the college of my choice, some goofy letter that told me how proud my elementary school was of my "accomplishments" would go straight into the ol' circular file.

In May, the school board announced that the school would no longer administer any tests which the principal finds void of educational value, participate in Adequate Yearly Progress as determined by the act, or forward any information to the Windham Central Supervisory Union that can be connected to a specific student's name...

A CD-ROM will accompany the survey, with the top 10 reasons the graduates should fill them out.

A CD-ROM? Well, that'll weed out any respondents who don't have easy access to a computer. And, face it, there's no pressure for students to respond, much less respond honestly. I eagerly await any data that might be produced from this little experiment.

Update: This interview with Windham Central Supervisory Union assistant superintendent Jim Peters contains a very odd quote on this survey topic:

The federal government, he said, has a bigger need to quantify everything in order to assess a school's quality. The method of standardized testing is something one school in his district has taken a blunt stand against.

"It's not surprising that Vermont has embraced portfolio assessment, because it speaks to parents' needs to see examples and samples of what their child knows and is able to do, instead of an annual achievement test," he said.

Stop right there. A survey is not the same thing as a portfolio. The article from Wednesday did not indicate that anything other than surveys were replacing the state standardized exams. A survey is most definitely not an assessment and it does not fall under a collection of work produced by a student. I still think the survey idea is ridiculous, but if Vermont is indeed using some type of portfolio assessment in addition to the survey - something that wasn't made clear in either article - that makes the whole thing seem not quite so ridiculous.

Helping the students who need it most

For some kids, it's easy to see that be the root of their educational problems might be their home, mainly because they don't have one:

Nearly two decades after Congress passed a law requiring schools to help homeless students obtain an uninterrupted education, school systems continue to grapple with ways to provide them with a stable environment - even as they identify more children as homeless.

At the same time, schools are coming under more scrutiny. School districts face potential lawsuits over their treatment of homeless children, as well as federal mandates that such students fare well academically. This fall, states will be required for the first time to report how many homeless students are meeting minimum requirements on standardized reading and math tests. At stake are millions in federal grants for homeless education.

Maryland reports over 8,700 students as being homeless, although that includes students whose families are living with another family due to economic hardship, something that may be more common with young immigrant families that are nevertheless intact. Over 5,100 of these students are in the Baltimore area. I was unaware that the NCLB Act strengthened the existing McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, but now there seems to be more guidance as to the rights of homeless students and the responsibilities schools have towards them:

For example, a school must allow a homeless child to enroll, even if he or she lacks the necessary paperwork such as proof of residency. School districts are also required to transport the student from a family's temporary lodgings to his or her original school - sometimes even across county lines - whenever it is feasible and in the child's best interest.

And school districts are required to help homeless students succeed academically. To do this, many provide after-school tutoring, summer camps, school supplies and clothes.

That could be a fairly substantial strain on a school, even if the money comes from federal sources. While some schools have been clearly out of line in the past (trying to block homeless students from taking tests, or even from enrolling), other schools have gone to great lengths to help out the kids who need it:

Anne Arundel County school officials go to great lengths to avoid embarrassing homeless children. When they provide them with free backpacks, for example, they choose different colors or styles so that the youngsters will not stand out.

Baltimore City schools offer a six-week summer camp to keep homeless children from languishing on the streets. It provides job training for the older students; for the rest, it offers academic and physical activities and two meals a day.

This is a lot for schools to be doing. I realize it's necessary, but it's very troubling just how necessary it is in some places. For all the complaining we tend to do on here about government schools, for some kids, it's the most stable environment they've ever known.

FCAT wailing and writing woes

John Jay Ray at Dissecting Leftism discovered two good education-related posts today. The first, from Dangerous Liberty, is from someone who's been writing about education in Florida for 10 years, and isn't happy with the anti-testing movement:

....Apparently, it is impossible to criticize public education without hating it. I don't hate public education. I want it to be better than it is.

And yet, when we get the wonderful news that of the 230 kids who repeated third grade after failing the FCAT once, 147 passed it, the entire focus is on the 83 who failed the test again and hand-wringing abounds. The concern is for these children's sense of self-esteem, but what self-esteem can they have if they get out of school unable to read?

Why, they can have the kind of self-esteem that some educators believe in, that comes not from accomplishments but from constantly being told you are fine just as you are, and that you always know best, even if you don't know anything. Other people might term that "narcissism," but hey, why quibble over the fine details?

And then we get the story that the “FCAT is frustrating seniors' plans” (May 10). We learn that a student with a B/C average in high school “has yet” to pass the test.

The observation hits ya right between the eyes, doesn't it? If she has a B/C average and still cannot pass the FCAT after two years and four more opportunities to take the test, she evidently did go to school for 12 years of nothing!

But blaming the test is easier, and it makes for snappier quotes.

I understand that any test is going to be imperfect and that there are bugs to be worked out of the system, but we're seeing some real gains happening that moves me to wonder what the true problem is here. Could it be simply that teachers and schools are not used to being held accountable?

Mmmm, I think this writer is on to something.

The second article is by a guest commentator, Tina Blue, on the Irascible Professor's site. After reading it, boy, do I see why she's Blue:

Those of us who teach college English classes are always overwhelmed by the astonishing deficits in our students' ability to get their facts straight, to think clearly and logically, and to express their ideas in language that actually makes sense and that follows the most basic rules of grammar.

Now, Mrs. Colona did not give us "deep" topics to write about. One I remember was "Write about your favorite holiday memory, and explain what makes that memory so special to you." But you know what? Almost none of the college students I have taught since 1972 could write a 500-word essay on that topic in 45 minutes without that essay's being marred by numerous errors or infelicities in one or more of the following areas: grammar and usage, diction, style, formatting, structure, and logic. I know this for a fact, because we often do give such simple topics as the first essay assignment in English 101.

Why, I see the problem right there. They aren't giving "deep" enough topics these days, for those "deep thinkers" with "deep minds" who can't be expected to do well on standardized tests, much less essays. After all, what is self-discipline, structure, dedication, and instant, objective feedback when compared to the merits of having a "deep" mind?

For more essays by Ms. Blue, visit her Teacher, Teacher website. I've read through some of them, and let me tell you, Ms. Blue has NO problems with expressing exactly what's on her mind in language that is grammatically correct and to the point. And I agree with everything I've read so far.

High grades vs. gangsta culture

Devilish Delewarian Dave Huber sends along a fascinating op-ed from a Virginia teacher about the clash between smarts and street smarts in tough schools:

A few weeks ago, I arrived at school to see a police car with flashing lights parked in the driveway. Nearby, two black girls were rolling around on the ground, pummeling each other as a cop tried to pry them apart. One had threatened the other with a knife the night before, and now the girl who had been threatened was getting even with her fists.

Cosby was criticized for being too hard on the less fortunate, but let me tell you, the black students in my AP English classes are even harder. To them, the fighting and posturing that morning was nothing but out-and-out "ghetto."

Teacher Patrick Welsh notes that adults have such a hard time getting past their concern that anything and everything is a sign of alienating blacks that they're afraid even to promote Alexandria as a city looking to attract families. Since when is wanting a safe, family-friendly environment attractive only to whites? And if that wasn't depressing enough, Welsh references a book about Philadelphia life that was one of the most depressing books I've ever read:

University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson, author of the book "Code of the Street," told me that the guys who think studying is selling out "are caught up in a street culture that is in opposition to middle-class values, which they see as white. Through their clothes and language and behavior they think they are dissing conventional society."

This book described black students who were virtual prisoners in their homes because never going outside was the only way they could avoid violence for their "selling out" and "acting white." Welsh has seen a similar effect in Virginia, where an agenda driven by those who refuse to value education has affected the state exams as well:

In many ways, [unprepared and unmotivated] kids drive the academic agenda of schools. Take the Virginia Standards of Learning exams. They were initiated as a desperate quick-fix effort to close the gap between low-income minority kids and middle-class kids. The thinking was that if schools like T.C., with a large number of minority students, were labeled as failing, teachers and administrators would suddenly feel pressured to transform these kids into scholars. In fact, the performance of minority students on the SOLs has been so poor that the tests have been made easier to avoid a political uproar over disproportionate numbers of minority students not getting diplomas.

In the national debate over education, it's fashionable and politically safe to blame the schools for poor test scores and self-defeating attitudes. Inner-city schools, the argument goes, don't have as many resources as schools in the more affluent suburbs. But Alexandria has the highest per-pupil expenditure of any school system in the Washington metropolitan area. Since T.C. is the Alexandria's only public high school, every kid is offered the same opportunities.

Emphasis mine. This is not all about the money. And Welsh does see hope for the future:

I've taught long enough to have the children of former students in my classes, and in almost every case, even when I remember the parents as being thoroughly into the street culture, I've found that their children are much more serious about school than the parents were. It's as though the parents eventually learned, even if too late, that being scholarly wasn't the sellout they thought it was and have done everything they could to make sure their children got that message. At least, that's what I think.

I hope it's that, and not that the ones who figured it out in time were the only ones who lived long enough to have kids.

Oh look, a testing critic!

Devoted Reader Erin T. sent along an email in which she expressed her astonishment about an anti-testing site on the web. Why, I never knew such things existed, did you?The author of this website, Chris Carter, cites Wacky Alfie Kohn's books approvingly, and also posted this "press release" to a teacher's e-board, which is how Erin found it:

I have created a website that summarizes the critical literature regarding standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, GMAT, and so forth.

Because, Lord knows, we need more criticism of testing out there, and it needs to be easier to find. I mean, doesn't it get to you how reporters fall all over themselves to print only the good things about tests?

With few exceptions, students who wish to attend professional schools anywhere in the world, or to attend almost any university in the US, are forced to write these tests.

"Write these tests"? "Forced"? I love it when someone restates a requirement as being "forced" to do something, especially when schools vary widely as to how much emphasis they place on test scores.

I think it is our duty as educators to be familiar with the case against these tests.

I would think it was your duty as educators to be familiar with the research and hard data surrounding these tests, and be familiar with the cases for and against testing. Is there any particular reason that educators should have only this one viewpoint?

If you read my article, you will see that these tests have no validity as predictors of actual accomplishment in any field.

That's because SAT scores predict college grades, which aren't necessarily linked to later performance. Thus, the flurry of low to negative correlations between scores and later accomplishment that the author cites in this article are beside the point. The SAT has never claimed to predict success in life, so criticizing it for failing to do so is incorrect. What's more, for someone who goes to a lot of trouble to explain what a correlation is, Carter leaves out a discussion of restriction of range, possibly because to do so would leave the door open for contradiction of his theories.

An extended discussion of restriction of range wouldn't be appropriate here, but to sum it up quickly, a correlation is a measure of how multiple variables co-relate, or co-vary. If one of those variables has restricted variance, the correlation of that variable with any other variable will be "restricted" or lowered (closer to zero). If a variable does not vary, it cannot co-vary.

SAT scores for college students are restricted, because, for the most part, if you have a low SAT score, you don't get in. So, as a hypothetical example, let's say that most everyone who goes to Harvard has an SAT of higher than 1200. That leaves us with scores of between 1200 to 1600 to correlate with some measure of college success, or later success in life. Given that even smart people will screw up, fail to be "successful," or simply choose to stay out of the rat race, it's very possible for a Harvard grad with an SAT of 1200 will do fine, while one with an SAT of 1500 may drop out, or go bankrupt years later. That results in lowered correlations, but it doesn't necessarily follow from this that the SAT is not useful in college admissions. SAT scores tend to correlate with other measures of intelligence, and as long as we believe intelligence affects college performance, then colleges will have more success with high-SAT admittees than low-SAT scorers.

To continue on with Carter's criticisms:

They have extremely limited validity as predictors of first-year college grades;

For what school? Every schools weights the SAT and ACT differently, because those tests hold different predictive validity for different populations. To average over all schools is to again mislead the reader. And the author reports that, "The SAT has the most predictive validity of the tests1, with correlation coefficients ranging from .2 to .5 at most (R-squared ranging from .04 to .25)," as though this were a bad thing. Obviously, he's unaware of just how rare a correlation of .5 is in the social sciences, especially for one test, taken on one day, with a limited number of items. It's such a tiny snapshot of performance that the correlations of .2 to .5 are just amazing.

Does Carter know of any other snapshot that is this cheap, standardized, and quick for schools to use that will have that high of a correlation with college grades?

...and they are biased against women, minorities, and the poor.

Oh, again with the bias. As OpinionJournal likes to point out, if the world were to come to an end, the NYT would print the headline, "Armageddon arrives; women, minorities hit hardest." I have to give Carter credit for trying to define bias in his article, but then he wedges the idea of bias in where it shouldn't belong, here:

Are the tests biased against the poor? Well, it depends on what you mean by "bias." The poor certainly do not score as highly on average as wealthy students. Over the last forty years SAT scores have been positively correlated with family income...So the SAT appears biased against the poor in the sense that the poor tend to score lower and therefore will be less likely to be admitted to the college of their choice.

Sorry, but that's a definition of "differential impact," not bias. And while differential impact IS a topic that should be discussed thoughtfully, to lump this kind of effect in under bias is misleading. If the "poor" simply do not learn as much - quite possible given the likelihood of deprived homes and poorly-funded schools - then the test is actually performing correctly in assigning them lower scores.

Perhaps most surprisingly, there is evidence that these tests are biased against students with deep minds.

Pardon me while I snicker uncontrollably. "Deep minds" sounds like a concept you think about while passing a bong around. The SAT is test of basic skills which are very likely to come in handy for college classes. Will very smart - forgive me, "deep" - students find the test boring? Probably. Will it be less than useful for predicting how those students at the very high end of ability do in school? Most likely. But the only way that "deep" students will bomb the SAT in large numbers is if they fail to learn basic geometry and algebra, or how to discern the main point of a paragraph.

Anyway, that's my take. I also just have to point out that, although I started N2P as a way of rebutting anti-testing articles, I don't believe all test criticism is bad. There's plenty of room for debate on issues of standard setting, high stakes for young kids, differential impact as mentioned above, and so forth, and it would be great to see a website that discusses these issues without resorting to that old journalistic standby, "Critics say".

Unfortunately, Carter's site looks like it will just be rehashing the myths and bashing tests unconditionally, while not providing much of an alternative for states that want all their students to meet certain standards, or universities that are flooded with thousands of applicants each year. If testing is so bad, what's the best alternative? Carter believes it is, "Samples of work, references, statements of purpose, and extra-curricular activities," all of which are fine, but not necessarily verifiable, or comparable across students, or shown to be predictive of college success. Never fails to amaze me how people who will nitpick to three decimal places the predictive validity of the SAT will offer up, as an alternative, things like "statements of purpose" for which no predictive reliability data exist.

Oh, wait, before I go, I just have to quote this portion of his article, if only because I am amazed that he believes it is correct, or to the point:

Incidentally, despite having a mailing address in Princeton, New Jersey, ETS has no connection with Princeton University. Its luxurious headquarters, including tennis courts, a swimming pool and a private hotel, are in Lawrence Township, not Princeton. The Princeton mailing address is merely for public relations.

How EVIL! Actually, the Princeton link is very simple. In the 1920's, Carl C. Brigham, the Princeton professor who published A Study of American Intelligence, came up with his own version of the Army Intelligence exam to use as an admissions test for Princeton freshmen. Brigham was hired by the College Board (which is in NYC) to lead a committee to develop the test that eventually became the SAT, which was administered for the first time in 1926 - 22 years before ETS officially opened its doors.

The two founders of ETS, Henry Chauncey and James Conant, met Brigham in 1933 when they traveled to Princeton and decided the SAT could be of use for Harvard students, and the rest is history. Why they incorporated in Princeton rather than Boston, I'm not sure, but the first ETS office was in fact in Princeton proper, in Professor Brigham's original space on Nassau Street:

By the middle '50s, ETS was cranking out not only the SAT, but the Graduate Record Exam, Law School Admission Test and a host of Foreign Service and military exams - each exam swelling in importance with the size of the American educational establishment. The company was badly outgrowing its Princeton headquarters. Often, tests had to be prepared at the nearby firehouse on Chambers Street. When the fire alarm rang, employees had to push their work tables out of the way and make room for the engines.

The need to move was obvious. In 1954, Chauncey had a vision of its future when he took a hike along Stony Brook and saw a stretch of open farmland that looked perfect for ETS headquarters. ETS' move to its 360-acre campus in Lawrence Township was complete by 1958. It was a complex of low-rise, modern, brick buildings, but for the first few years it also shared space with a working dairy farm.

Therefore, the claim that ETS has no connection to Princeton University, or that ETS chose Princeton purely for PR, is both laughable and easily disproved through a bit of Googling. But I suppose the truth didn't fit with Carter's meta-theory about how all psychometricians are eeeevil capitalists, though.

Education and testing news roundup

Let's see if I can catch up on just about everything at once...

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From the Intelligence Education Agency: Direct postings from the NEA convention. John Kerry locked up 86.5% of the NEA delegate vote; I'm only surprised that it isn't higher (but don't assume they're telling their members how to vote; no way). The NEA also passed a new business item, NBI 12, which "requires NEA opposition to the passing of 'barrier tests' for grade promotion or high school graduation." They'd rather stick with the plain old barriers of low standards and poor teaching, which do enough to prevent graduation.

Oh, and they defeated NBI 26, which "would have directed NEA to support international pressure to demand the Sudanese government 'stop its efforts to displace and starve native populations' in Darfur." For those of you wondering how the NEA came up with a business item on a topic that is so far beyond its domain, and presumed area of expertise, I figure it's the same leftwing groupthink that has led Students Against Testing to be added to the list of "anti-war" activists (kudos to Charles Johnson for catching that one). Peace on earth, except towards psychometricians.

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Gifted kids might be self-assured, but in Illinois, they're not self-contained. Board members who justified keeping gifted kids "clustered" in regular classrooms pointed out that "only 3 percent to 5 percent of students are truly academically gifted," but the 50% or so of Illinois parents who believe they have gifted kids disagree.

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I never miss the chance to use "North Fond du Lac" in a sentence, and it sounds like the parents of NFdL, Wisconsin, never miss a chance to complain about test scores at a school district board meeting. Well, okay, it's only one parent, but that's probably, what, 20% of the population? It's also easy to see why district officials couldn't talk about race issues in regards to low test scores, since, according to this, non-hispanic whites make up 97.2% of the local population.

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Hope springs eternal for 39,000 students in Louisiana who are retaking the LEAP in hopes of leaping forward to fifth- or ninth-grade. The standards were recently raised for the fourth-graders, who now must pass half, rather than 40%, of the items to move forward.

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Algebra is now the standard for eighth-graders in Florida. This is interesting. Is the idea to introduce it early so that kids who don't make it through high school will still know it? Is that the reason it's on the ninth-grade FCAT? Eighth-graders who perform poorly on the FCAT will be exempt, but I have to wonder what's going to pass for "algebra" now that almost everyone has to take it in middle school. Heck, I didn't qualify for it in eighth-grade.

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You gotta love an op-ed that begins, "In the world of standardized tests, Christmas never comes," but I should point out that the author is concerned about the lack of "controversial" content in test items, rather than overtested and gift-free students. As for the couch-on-the-porch item, I empathize with item writers who are forced to figure out a "what doesn't belong in this household" situation that applies to every examinee. I myself have frozen mice in my house, which my mother emphatically states do NOT belong in my freezer.

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Tests are reliable, report researchers Jay P. Greene, Marcus Winters, and Greg Forster. A press release about their most recent peer-reviewed study is as follows:

A newly published peer-reviewed study by Manhattan Institute researchers Jay P. Greene, Marcus A. Winters, and Greg Forster finds that scores on “high-stakes tests,” where the results hold consequences for either schools or students, are reliable indicators of academic proficiency. The study appears in the latest issue of Teachers College Record, published by Columbia University...

Greene, Winters, and Forster find that if high-stakes tests cause teachers to “teach to the test,” then they do so in a positive way. The study shows that if teachers are changing their curriculum and classroom techniques in response to high-stakes tests, they are doing so in ways that convey real skills to students. This sort of “teaching to the test” is a positive development.

The two well-known gadflies Greene and Winters also reported in the New York Post that per-pupil spending in schools is much, MUCH higher than most people assume.

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From Newsday, a fairly balanced article on the problems with using high-stakes tests for third-graders in NYC. The article mentions the research of Professor Joshua Aronson, who studies stereotype threat in test performance. It's worthwhile to note that while "You might not make it to the fourth-grade" isn't a helpful comment to an African American kid with test anxiety, neither is "All tests are biased against minorities and those kids just can't be expected to do as well." Professor Aronson points out that minorities "are sort of suspected of intellectual inferiority in this culture," and I believe people who claim that minority kids can't be expected to answer basic test items fall into the category of perpetuating those suspicions, and in fact help to perpetuate stereotype threat as well.

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Finally, I'm 100% in favor of students producing writing portfolios. Unlike the author, though, I don't see such portfolios so much as a way to assess student ability as to enhance it, something that standardized tests do not, in and of themselves, do. The trick is finding a quick, cheap, and reliable way to assess those masses of students who have produced portfolios, and that's where standardized testing is more likely to be helpful.

Discovering Georgia's standards

The good news: After much dithering, the cutpoint for Georgia's CRCT reading exam for third-graders has been released (or, at the very least, leaked to the press).

The bad news: It's a pretty low cutpoint, which puts into perspective Georgia's triumphant announcement that 91% of their students passed.

To meet expectations, third-grade students this year needed to answer 17 of 40 questions correctly — just 42.5 percent. In Glynn County, 89 percent of students met that requirement on the reading test and will matriculate to fourth grade. The remaining 11 percent were targeted for summer school and took the test again Tuesday, according to a new state mandate that requires third-grade students to pass the reading test before moving on to fourth grade.

"What it's supposed to do is help us identify when students meet the minimum competencies on a test," he said. "That says you're on level. You're where you're supposed to be."

It's a minimum-competency exam. Fine. Now give us some measures of variability. What does the distribution of test scores look like? What's the standard deviation? How many students are within a few items of the cutpoint? Parents need this information to judge the claims of the state that 91% of its students are really ready to move forward.

A victory in the math wars?

I was recently forwarded, from a Yahoo group about the "Math Wars" of NYC, a resignation letter, with commentary. It is Manhattan District 2 Director of Mathematics Lucy West who has resigned, to the apparent relief and joy of everyone who favors clarity and effectiveness in math education.

The preface to Ms. West's resignation letter, written by Elizabeth Carson of New York City HOLD (Honest, Open Logical Debate on math reform), was interesting - especially the last paragraph. I have quoted substantial portions of Ms. Carson's comments below:

Lucy West has written a farewell letter to Region 9 staff which is forwarded below.

Good riddance.

Amen (emphases mine). I won't include Ms. West's resignation letter in full, but I think this small excerpt fully conveys her love for meaningless educational prattle and her hostility towards standards, accountability, and genuinely effective and useful math education:

It's easy to believe that accomplishing a mission requires prescriptive remedies--mandated curriculum materials, required numbers of periods devoted to the study of mathematics and literacy; a set of standards; and high stakes tests. While these things may play a role, they are just as likely to keep us entrenched in a factory model of teaching as they are to catapult us into a new paradigm for education. They are at least in part based on mechanistic models of change and the misguided premise that change and people are controllable; the myth that programs, structures and a fearless leader are what it takes to make a difference.

Got that? A set of standards aren't useful; they keep the students "entrenched in a factory model". It's a "myth" that programs and structures are useful in math education. It's misguided to think change - i.e., math education - is controllable.

And this person was a director of math curriculum in NYC? Horrifying. Go read the stuff at HOLD's and Bas Braams' sites to learn more.

Bill Cosby takes no prisoners

I always enjoy it when a celebrity who is rich and powerful enough to take the heat gets into the kitchen to cook up something seriously politically incorrect. We got to see this, for example, when Mel Gibson bypassed the Hollywood chain-of-command and delivered The Passion of the Christ to an eager public.

And we're seeing it now, because beloved and filthy-rich entertainer Bill Cosby is angry and vocal about the cultural and educational deprivation from which many young black kids suffer - or bring upon themselves:

Bill Cosby (news) went off on another tirade against the black community Thursday, telling a room full of activists that black children are running around not knowing how to read or write and "going nowhere." He also had harsh words for struggling black men, telling them: "Stop beating up your women because you can't find a job."

"Let them talk," he said.

Bravo.

The question of nerds

It's not every day that Instapundit send me suggested links. Oh, ok, he sent it to other edubloggers too, and he linked to it as well. But I still feel special.

Anyway, the link is an fascinating essay from last year about "Why Nerds are Unpopular." It's a long essay, and hard to quote from since it's all very good. But here are some key grafs:

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

A good question to ask.

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it...

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

I think that's a solid theory. Nerds, as the author puts it, don't realize that being popular in high school is a job, and they don't put the work into that other kids might. They don't really want to, in fact, because they have interests other than trying to make themselves beautiful, or athletic, or beloved by all. This would certainly explain the success of nerds after high school, where "popularity" can depend on an entirely different set of personality characteristics.

Or, it could be because real life isn't as similar to prison as schools are:

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

This is something that, I think, homeschooling parents instinctively realize, and educrats would like us to forget. It's laughable that the main charge hurled at homeschooling parents is that their kids will be "undersocialized," when, for a lot of kids, "socialization" at school involves either abuse for being unpopular or the ever-present drug scene. Homeschooled kids are more likely to be living in the real world than kids in schools, and less likely to suffer any abuse for not worshiping at the temple of "popularity."

This topic doesn't just make me think about homeschoolers, though. I think of the abuse that smart black kids, who are supposedly "acting white," receive in government schools, especially if they criticize the low standards all around them. I think about the harassment that Goth kids, who may not only be smart but too "different," get from others, especially every time a school shooting happens. It's not just about being a nerd anymore. At some schools, being unpopular and/or too smart can literally be hazardous to one's health. And that's a crying shame.

Update: Chris O'Donnell has some kind things to say about my post, including the tactful reminder that he linked to this same essay 10 months ago. Hey, around here, posts are accurate, insightful, or timely - pick any two.

Final Test

From Dean: "I believe the blog is now working as it should, and our spam problem should be fixed. Stay tuned...."

And it does appear to be. Regular bloggage should resume over the holidays. And a big smooch to Dean for upgrading my site and getting rid of all that nasty spam.

Warning - Hard Hat Area

Comments are still out, and I'm still working 11-hour days with no time to blog, and Dean Esmay is graciously helping me resolve some MT and MT Blacklist issues (N2P was one of the sites he so kindly switched from Blogger to MT about a year or so ago). So, consider this site "Under Construction" for a few more days. Hopefully everything will be back up and running after the July 4th holiday.

So get up from the computer and go eat a hot dog (or tofu dog) and watch some fireworks, will you?