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?
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 court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston, the district denied Smith's other allegations and asked for a dismissal. It admitted that Marshall told him before he was hired that "in the eyes of the students, he could have two strikes against him, because he was a white male."
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.
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.
She said she, and the 369 other middle school-age students visiting Dickinson College [PA] for the Center for Talented Youth, are bona fide geeks, 100 percent dorks.
And they're proud of it.
"I think of it as a sanctuary for nerds," she said of the three-week academic program. "You don't feel guilty about being smart." Ditto, said Max Bernstein, 15, of San Francisco, Calif.: "If you define nerdiness as an interest in accumulating knowledge, then yes, there are lots of nerds here."
The students in CTY forgo days lounging by the swimming pool for seven-hour days of advanced courses generally not offered in their public schools. Many of the courses pack a year's worth of material into three fast-paced, brain-pumping weeks.
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.
Parents pay $2,625 tuition for three weeks, though most parents receive financial assistance. But to even be considered, students must first score in the 97th percentile on a nationally normed standardized test.
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.
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, 17, was in the lunchroom of Theodore Roosevelt HS in The Bronx, attending a nighttime GED class, when the Snapple machine malfunctioned. "It ate my dollar, so I shook it very gently," he said. "It must have been top-heavy, because it fell right down on me."
Salcedo said he was in the hospital for two weeks, undergoing two operations.
The Department of Education disputed Salcedo's claim. According to the high school's incident report, Salcedo "pulled a vending machine down and it fell on top of him."
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.
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.
The ministry set up four teams to supervise exam preparations in 12 provinces and cities, six teams to supervise the exam itself and three teams to oversee grading in certain places.
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.
Bill, 21, and Lisa, 22, both of whom asked that their real names not be used, study business at DePaul University, which has seen a tenfold increase in reported cases of cheating in the past five years.
"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.
On April 29, Charles Gibson hosted an hourlong ABC special that explored cheating. The program cited a 2002 survey of 12,000 high school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics that revealed 74 percent cheated on an exam at least once in the past year...
Some people can say they never took anything from the office or winked when they benefited from a clerk's error, but most of us have some act of cheating in our past for which we feel guilty. But there's the difference. Many people cheating now don't feel guilty. Worse, some people seem to think the real dolts are those who don't cheat!
As we mature, most of us come to realize that cheating is lying, and liars cannot be trusted. Families, workplaces and commerce do not work well when people flout the rules...I think there are two [reasons for this]...
One, winning has become the only thing. We pressure our kids to get the best grades so they can go to the best schools, then we act shocked when they cheat on a test. We worship at the altar of credentials, then we are incredulous that someone would make up impressive facts for their resume. We seldom use integrity and character as benchmarks. Instead, we get hung up on credentials and high test scores.
The second reason is uglier. Too few people ever say cheating is wrong. At work, across the back fence and at family reunions, we hear tales of cheating all the time...We say nothing. Our silence is approval.
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.
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.
We reviewed syllabi in 16 schools of education, 14 of which were ranked by U.S. News and World Report in the top 30 in the nation. We looked at the sequence of courses required in each school for the initial teaching license, only reporting the results when we were able to obtain the syllabi for all of these courses. By analyzing the required readings, the assignments, and the instructors’ stated intentions for their courses, we were able to offer a first portrait of what future teachers are studying in schools of education...
By noting what readings were commonly required and what were generally absent, and through an analysis of the requirements for the student-teaching experience, we raised questions about the rigor, the ideological balance, and the thoroughness of these programs.
A brief explanation: There is a deep division among those who engage in and write about teacher preparation. One school of thought, represented by such figures as Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. and Diane Ravitch, argues that teachers should focus on the basics. Like piano teachers who stress the discipline of scales and finger technique before encouraging deeper interpretive performance of demanding music, Mr. Hirsch and Ms. Ravitch argue that the best education — especially for the least advantaged — requires direct teaching of the three R’s and the other elements of cultural literacy (to borrow Mr. Hirsch’s term). The attainment of such knowledge and skills should then be assessed through state tests.
By contrast, another school of thought stresses what is called "constructivism" and "progressivism." Broadly speaking, constructivism is the view...that the teacher should...be a "guide on the side" encouraging children to discover and create according to their natural impulses. Progressivism is the idea that teachers should focus on the particular voices and experiences of repressed minorities, tailoring instruction accordingly. In educational theory today, these two ideas are often fused into one view — constructivistprogressive — that is opposed to high-stakes testing and state-mandated, standardized school curricula.
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:
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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.
Specifically, the following causal connections are presumed: between what is written on a syllabus and what is taught in the classroom; between what is taught in the classroom and what is learned by students; between what is learned by students and what is retained by students upon the completion of a specific course; between what is retained by students upon the completion of a specific course and what is accepted as legitimate by the student; between what is accepted as legitimate by the student and how the student is able to transfer such theory into practice; and, finally, between what a student is able to transfer into practice and its subsequent effectiveness as measured by student performance.
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. )
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 could be a price that Mr. Kerry may be unable, or unwilling, to pay. The Massachusetts senator has generally endorsed the NEA's "fix it and fund it" mantra for No Child Left Behind. He promises more money to implement the law. He opposes judging schools by test scores alone, and proposes adding graduation rates and teacher and student attendance as other measures of school quality required by statute.
But Mr. Kerry hasn't promised big changes unions want, such as scrapping the "adequate yearly progress" measure that determines how schools are performing. And some of his proposals make teachers see red. In exchange for money to recruit, train and pay raises to teachers, he wants to make it easier for schools to fire those who are incompetent. Mr. Kerry calls for tougher teacher-certification tests -- someone with about a 10th-grade education could pass them now -- and for "rewards" for teachers who show "more skill or better results."
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.
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...
President Bush declined an invitation to speak to the [NAACP], saying that it has shown a lack of respect for him. The NAACP then blasted the president for his refusal, setting off a firestorm of fault-finding. Mr. Paige, who denounced the NAACP’s criticism of the president in his column, wrote that he was puzzled by the group’s opposition to the No Child Left Behind Act, which Mr. Bush signed into law in 2002.
"How a civil rights organization could characterize NCLB as ‘disproportionately hurting’ African-American children is mindboggling, since it is specifically designed to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged children and their peers," wrote Mr. Paige, who noted that he himself is a lifelong member of the group.
"Yet, the NAACP would prefer to attack it merely because of its origins in the Bush administration. How sad for black children everywhere," Mr. Paige wrote of the law.
Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP’s board, whom Mr. Paige chastised as spreading "hateful and untruthful rhetoric" about Republicans and President Bush, said in an interview last week that he was taken aback by the secretary’s "angry language."
"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...
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 results of tests don't always reflect how the student is performing on a daily basis. "A standardized test is just a snapshot of how that kid is doing that day," says 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 don't think anyone would argue that those tests don't have value ... but what it really boils down to is whether or not we can afford to expand an assessment system beyond what the federal government requires," said state Rep. Roger Eddy(R-Hutsonville). Eddy is a former social studies teacher who serves on the Education Appropriations Committee and also runs a rural school district Downstate.
"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.
Writing instruction will continue, she said, but probably will shift to the type of writing with which students and teachers are most comfortable--creative and narrative essays. The other kinds of writing now tested by the state--persuasive and expository essays--will likely lose favor, she said.
She also expects fewer districts will invest in training teachers on better writing now that they know their schools will no longer be judged on this subject.
"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...
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.
Kerry caused some consternation with the National Education Association in May when he proposed spending $30 billion over the next 10 years to hire 500,000 teachers, but to reward teachers with higher pay when their students' performance improved.
The NEA opposes the measure. It would use students' standardized test scores to determine whether teachers should receive bonuses, as opposed to traditional factors such as tenure.
"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...
Mr. Bond echoed many complaints that his union has leveled at the law, which holds schools accountable for showing yearly academic gains by their students.
“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."
Addressing John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democratic Party, the ad declares, "Teachers need your support to save our schools from the punitive law misleadingly labeled No Child Left Behind ... " Sens. Kerry and Edwards, along with most other Democratic congressional delegates here, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. As candidates for the White House, both have suggested the law needs some changes, but the ad calls for stronger medicine.
"Will the Democratic Party commit to getting rid of NCLB?" it asks.
The ad quickly drew fire.
"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.
"Hysterical paranoia went out of style after the primaries, when John Kerry [prevailed]," Mr. Rotherham said.
"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."
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?
Please don't answer aloud yet, because this is a two-parter.
After the math teacher (we'll call him Babatunde Akinremi) admits he changed the answers (we'll call this cheating), a bunch of Sierra teachers sign a petition, urging the powers to spare his job. What do you think of them apples?
If I were a Sierra Middle School student - or any student - I'd probably engage in an involuntary bout of chuckling. Soon enough, though, I'd pull myself together and become concerned. Very concerned.
The chuckling is understandable because what student hasn't been lectured by a blowhard adult about the importance of hard work, playing by the rules, no free lunches and, oh yeah, the school of hard knocks?
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.
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.
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.
Kelly Simo, 17, said the streetlights at Anderson and Crawforth streets, a block north of the school, were yellow and then turned red when she was halfway through the intersection as she walked home Feb. 4.
"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.
"I said, 'You've got to be kidding. There are kids in (schools) with drugs, weapons, alcohol, violence...but you're suspending her because she crossed the light?' said Ms. Simo.
"What I was told was the school day does not end until my daughter is in the house. I laughed and said, 'So if my daughter gets hit by a car, is mugged, raped...assaulted, is the school going to accept responsibility because she has not walked in (my) door?'"
"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.)
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.
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...
In the end, Peterson's says, it's mainly aiming to inject some fun into the stressful standardized test process - and if scores creep up a few points, so much the better.
"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.
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....
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."
This year, no one should be hungry at Meadows – breakfast will be served every day, to everyone, for free. The school joins a growing number of suburban schools in the Dallas area that are seeing more children from low-income families walking through their doors. The schools have added myriad programs in response.
...It sounds simple, but educators say a full stomach can improve everything from absenteeism to behavior to learning.
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.
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.
Parents across Massachusetts say they are taking extra measures to get involved in their children's education. Some secure MCAS test questions for review at home or consult a college application coach...
''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.
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.
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.
It is obvious to me that the times of changed!
-----
The New Mexico Health Department is standing behind a sex-education teacher in Santa Fe who encouraged ninth-graders to taste flavored condoms.
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.)
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.
Nearly 1,000 children are enrolled in the program, which consists of a preparatory school for kindergarten through second grade, An Achievable Dream Academy for third through eighth grade and a high school component.
Ninety-six percent of the students are black. Most live in the city's poorest neighborhoods and many come from single-parent households. All qualify to receive free or reduced-cost lunches when they enter the program. The fathers of two students recently were murdered, school officials said.
Character education is the cornerstone of the program, which emphasizes integrity, honesty, courage, patriotism and respect for one's self and others. Banners with motivational phrases and school rules hang throughout the building.
"It's a safe place where you're going to be nurtured," said John Hodge, academy director.
But, he added, discipline and structure are key.
"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.
Results on 2004 scores available so far showed 100 percent of the students passed algebra I and geometry, 93 percent passed eighth-grade writing and 86 percent passed the fifth-grade writing test.
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.
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...
On July 9, [25] students received letters from ETS (Educational Testing Service) informing them that the multiple-choice portions of their AP Psychology tests were missing and unlikely to be found. The letter offered the students two options: Take a new version of the multiple-choice section at no charge or cancel the grade and receive a refund. According to the letter, the students have until Friday to respond.
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.
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.
College officials are quietly urging Gov. Pataki to veto the measure — sponsored by Sen. Kenneth Lavalle (R-Suffolk) and Assemblyman Ronald Canestrari (D-Cohoes) — because it sets a dangerous precedent of having state politicians dictating their admissions policy.
Decisions on admissions and standards should be left in the hands of the city and state universities' trustees, the officials said. Such a law would also have implications in the debate over the use of standardized tests in determining promotion and high-school graduation.
Anti-testing groups are pressuring lawmakers to pass a law lifting the Board of Regents policy requiring high-school students to pass five exams to earn a diploma, and to stop Mayor Bloomberg from using standardized exams to largely decide whether third-graders are promoted.
Sources said the Professional Staff Congress — the union representing CUNY professors — initially pushed for the anti-test bill.
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.)
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.
Along with their counterparts at schools like the University of Illinois and the University of Texas, Oregon professors have been the driving forces behind the push for letting "scientifically based research" inform classroom practices. The professors are promoting teaching techniques that they say have been tested extensively in classrooms and have produced good results on standardized exams.
Some of their concepts have been scooped up by the Education Department for use in the No Child Left Behind act, the Bush administration's centerpiece education bill...
Critics say the Oregon professors have helped usher in an age of rigidity in education, with classrooms full of teachers who "teach to the test," and students whose creativity is stifled because so much time is devoted to preparing for testing.
"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.
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.
Ostensibly, the reason for this is to improve test scores, and at first blush giving kids immersion in major subject areas might seem like a good idea. On further examination, however, this decision is a disaster.
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.
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.
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?"
Goofing off! I didn't know what he was talking about. I thought I was working hard. But, when the midterm grades came out — two D's and two F's in my four courses — it became painfully clear that I was not working hard enough. I was going to have to shape up or ship out — and I didn't have anywhere to ship out to...
Today...How many white college students are going to tell a black roommate to stop goofing off?
In today's climate, too many teachers think they are doing black students a favor by feeding them grievances from the past and telling them how they are oppressed in the present — and how their future is blocked by white racism. These are the kinds of friends who do more damage than enemies.
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.
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.
Not that the president’s opponents in the education establishment and the Democratic Party are likely to give him any credit for these accomplishments. With all of today’s harsh criticism of NCLB, it’s easy to forget that it passed Congress by overwhelming bipartisan majorities (87 to 10 in the Senate; 381 to 41 in the House) and that Ted Kennedy stood beaming with the president at the bill-signing ceremony (above). That era of good feelings lasted only a few months—about as long as it took for the public education industry to realize just how serious Bush was about no longer rewarding failure.
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?
The short answer is ideology and money. The nation’s leading teachers’ colleges and professional teachers’ organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, hate phonics. Columbia University’s Teachers College, to take one prominent example, doesn’t have a single class in phonics instruction. In these precincts, “whole language” reading instruction, in which children ostensibly learn to read “naturally” by absorbing word clues from whole texts, is the politically correct pedagogy, even though its claims to success have no scientific backing. The educational establishment views President Bush, Reid Lyon, and all their works as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to regiment America’s children.
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.
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.
District officials in all three counties said they have not compiled scores yet, but among a handful of schools contacted, all reported few passing students.
Among third-graders attending reading camp at Sallie Jones Elementary in Punta Gorda, only one of six passed the SAT-9. At Taylor Ranch Elementary in Venice, three of nine passed...
Teachers said the test scores don't reflect everything.
"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.
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.
State testing officials say they didn't adequately evaluate the difficulty of this year's problem-solving questions before giving the test because they were trying to save money...Legislators had cut back their testing budget, so instead [of doing more pretesting] they used questions that had been tested on students in 2002, which they thought would be just a hair more difficult than questions used in previous years. But when posed to all students, the questions proved to be twice as hard as believed.
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.
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 perso