USA Today has an in-depth investigation (via) of the remarkably good test performance of DC schools under Michelle Rhee, which seems to correspond with a remarkably high level of erasures on those tests:
A former Noyes parent, Marvin Tucker, says he suspected something was wrong in 2003, when the test scores his daughter, Marlana, brought home from school showed she was proficient in math.
Tucker says he was skeptical because the third-grader was getting daily instruction from a private tutor yet struggled with addition and subtraction. “She was nowhere near where they said she was on the test,” he says. “I thought something was wrong with the test.”
He questioned Ryan, the principal, and teachers about his daughter’s scores but no one could explain how she had scored so high, Tucker recalls. Ultimately, Ryan barred him from the school for a year, saying he had threatened staff members, Tucker says. Tucker denies that.
Tucker also points out that if his daughter was proficient as a third-grader, that didn’t last. When Marlana moved on to middle school elsewhere in D.C., her test scores fell and she no longer was considered proficient in math, he says.
ED has a post about parents opting out of standardized tests, and who can blame them? Even if they’re administered honestly, the amount of effort that goes into teaching test taking skills (versus the content of the tests) makes them a time-wasting diversion.
D-Chance.
RIP, Mario Cuomo.
No, I won’t say anything bad about the internetly deceased. :)
dr. bloor
This isn’t quite right at the elementary level. The problem is that instruction is limited to test content at the expense of teaching kids how to think. Or, as was the case with dr. bloor jr, spending some of his time in science class during the first three weeks of the year prepping for the math portion of the state benchmark tests.
Corner Stone
Did this site recently link to the complete scam the standardized testing industry is?
I can’t recall where I saw it, at the moment.
Ash Can
Except that as long as the students are going to keep encountering this exact format of test, all the way up to graduate school, it’s not that much of a waste of time — ridiculous and frustrating, of course, since, as you point out, the content is what’s really important. But unless and until all schools come up with an alternative to these standardized tests, as an assessment method for both the students and the teachers, test-taking skills are going to be very valuable ones for students to have, and beneficial to the teachers as well. Sad but true.
Bruce S
Rhee has always struck me as, first and foremost, a self-promoter. She made school improvement “about her.” That her efforts led to this kind of faked performance “enhancements” isn’t really surprising.
Unless you get parents and teachers on board with reforms and improvements – which Rhee failed at spectacularly, taking Fenty down with her – and don’t over-promise on “cure-all” gimmicks like standardized testing, nothing will change that actually helps students.
Alwhite
My wife works in a school with a large non-English speaking population. The school is punished because of poor test scores because of these kids not performing to grade level. I seriously wonder why the administrators don’t cheat. Its not that a lot of these kids are not smart or know the material, they just don’t know it in English yet.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
We’re going to see a lot of this kind of cheating here in Florida, I predict, as the bullshit “merit-based” program takes effect. Tell a group of people that their continued employment is dependent on how well kids do on a set of tests (not how well they’re teaching those kids, which is a completely different issue), and you’ll get teachers putting their thumbs on the scales in order to make sure they have a job the following year.
NonyNony
And that’s before we get into the fact that tying teacher compensation to kids performance on standardized tests is going to lead to teachers working their asses off to make sure that the kids do well on the tests. Not that they understand the material, or that they can abstract what they’ve learned to new areas, but that they perform well on those tests.
It’s a market dynamic that basically tries to turn all the teachers into Kaplan SAT tutors. Looking at it from a purely economic point of view it’s idiotic.
Soprano2
I’ll look forward to reading Bob Somerby’s take on this, sure to come sometime this week. He may be a PITA on some issues, but he’s had Rhee’s number for a long time. I’m glad to see that her supposed “miracleworking” is getting some much-needed examination. I’ve heard her interviewed on NPR several times, and she’s never challenged on the things she’s done in a substantial way – there’s mostly oohing and ahhing over her “miracles”, and her empty rhetoric that all it takes to get a child to learn is a good teacher. Maybe this will begin to change that.
Alecmcc
“The Atlanta Journal Constitution” Has been on top of our own erasure scandal for a couple years now. Test results-based rewards lead to this. Our local paper has fallen a long way in its disapppointing lurch to the right, but appears to have been dead on about this.
12/2009 http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/7-educators-from-atlanta-235081.html
6/2010 http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/100-atlanta-school-employees-552164.html
11/2010 http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/standardized-tests/testing-scandal-claims-atlanta.html
wvng
Sounds like a repeat of the Houston Miracle/scam.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60II/main591676.shtml
mai naem
You can’t blame teachers for crappy students. When you allow your kid to sit in front of the teevee and play video games for hours after they got home from school, you get stupid students who aren’t ready for learning. I have a bunch of acquaintances who do that to their kids and they actively don’t seem to care that their kids aren’t going to be able to get decent jobs. I don’t care how good a teacher you are, no teacher is going to change this attitude. Ofcourse it doesn’t help that lots of people are working their butts off to put food on the table and just don’t have the energy to spend time with their kids on homework.
Superluminar
Not disagreeing with what everyone’s said here, but what alternatives are there to standardized testing in terms of assessing students and teachers? It seems like a shitty way of doing things, but if we want a quasi-objective measure of people’s ability how do we do that?
ornery curmudgeon
@Ash Can: But unless and until all schools come up with an alternative to these standardized tests…”
Only a short time ago, we had SAT’s, IOWA and AP tests … but never this mandated slog of routinized ‘testing.’
The NCLB legislation is a political tool to destroy public education, not enhance it. I didn’t realize that wasn’t widely known; I think it’s one of those things like Blue/Red State colors where the media just *poof* invented it in 2000 and everyone goes along like it’s geology or something, as if it’s like the Sun and Moon, it’s just always been there.
We have always been at war with Eurasia, We have always been divided into two colors and had mandated standardized testing.
Unbelievable, but there it is.
Anyhow, there are many other ways to promote standards, this kind of rote mandated testing is to numb minds in classrooms and make school distasteful and non-productive.
It’s so strange to hear people accept what’s going on today blindly as absolute necessity … and without looking back even two decades of history. What is it, authoritarian “thinking” ? I dunno.
rickstersherpa
Although not a big fan of Michelle Rhee (another educational grifter in my opinion), this problem apparently predated Ms. Rhee as she did not become Chancellor of the DC schools until 2007 and the article mentioned above speaks of 2003-04.
Zifnab
That did always strike me as a little silly. Different testing rules require different “strategies” – don’t guess an SAT test question unless you can eliminate at least one answer choice, read the questions before you read the English paragraph you are analyzing because it saves you time on TAKS, watch for a given kind of trick question, etc – but they were mostly about time and score management. They didn’t have anything to do with the subject you were studying.
I think I upped my chess game after taking my SAT Prep Course, but my Math and English skills remained about the same.
Suffern ACE
Maybe the USA Today will become the country’s “last attempt at a serious newspaper” if it continues to take on issues like this.
Superluminar
@mai naem
I’m not sure this is directly connected to the issue of testing. What you say is certainly true, but it is an age old problem of all education systems, the home/peer group environment has a huge effect on kids in terms of what they choose to learn.
geg6
Four fucking standard deviations higher than the erasures at all the other DC schools? Seriously? Four?
I always knew Michelle Rhee was nothing but a scammer. I knew it from the first glowing piece I saw on her. The claim that she moved students in her class from the 13th percentile to the 90th percentile (for which she never provided evidence) in the course of two years just always struck me as simply impossible. As Chancellor, she made accusations against teachers and principals for which she never provided evidence but whom she nevertheless fired. She’s a scammer who cheats and lies her way through life.
She’s perfect for the GOP.
rickstersherpa
Reference Bob Somerby being a PITA. I guess he is and I wish the world had more of them. I appreciate him challenging my own tribal assumptions.
Zifnab
@ornery curmudgeon:
I don’t think it’s that insidious. From what I understood of NCLB, it was designed to pave the way for charter schools. The idea was that charters would do better on standardized tests, get higher marks, and attract more parents. Then you could phase out “failed” public schools.
Instead, we’ve had public and private schools alike get frustrated by standardized testing. Now the whole system is a screwed up mess.
As for “many other ways to promote standards…”, honestly I’m not sure what metrics you could run on. College admittance? That’s as much a function of personal wealth and family situation as it is school performance. Post-graduate employment / salary? Heavily weighted by region and by the fluctuations of the economy. Parent approval? There’s so much local politics in that bag, I doubt you’d want to weigh anything on it.
Frankly, the only way to get data is to test for it. The current crop of standardized tests might be ill-crafted or poorly administered, but they’re the only tool I’ve ever seen that gets anything close to unbiased and reliable data.
ornery curmudgeon
@Superluminar: “what alternatives are there to standardized testing in terms of assessing students and teachers?”
You can have straight-forward, non-punitive assessment test administered yearly (graduation time) …
But what is the problem here really? It is administrative salaries that are drinking the milkshake, and there is NO testing or accountability there.
Just because the Right says something is a dire problem, that doesn’t mean it is … all it means is their ‘leaders’ and willing acolytes smell profit and power. If mindless testing can bore and deform a bright young mind then the Right has got a future voting tool.
Ron
@Superluminar:It’s very tricky. The problem is that a big factor in academic success is what happens at home with the students. This isn’t to say there aren’t bad teachers out there, because there surely are. But so much is out of the control of the teacher that it becomes difficult to assess how well they are doing.
Ash Can
@ornery curmudgeon: There’s a difference between “acceptance” and “dealing with reality.” I don’t have many gripes with Obama, but one of my biggest is that he hasn’t done more to do away with NCLB. Unless and until someone does, however, teachers and students are stuck with the status quo and have to make the best of it. My fifth-grader son isn’t going to take a few years off from school and wait for the mopes in DC and Springfield to pull their heads out of their asses.
And even though those tests of yore were from different sources, they were still the same basic multiple-choice format. Students who “tested well” still had a distinct advantage over those who didn’t, regardless of actual learnedness.
EconWatcher
My best friend from college has spent the last 20 years teaching high school in a rural southern district, about half black and half white, with some of the kids living in third-world shacks.
He is exactly what you’d want for that job: dedicated, smart, decent, fair. But at this point, he despairs of making any positive difference as a teacher. He says the grades for his classes line up almost perfectly with the socioeconomic condition of the kids, and fates seem to be predetermined.
He also coaches several sports, and he believes if he’s made any difference in the lives of any kids, it was through that work rather than teaching, because he gets to know his athletes really well, and every now and then gets a serious talk in.
rumpole
The thing that baffles me about this (really) is that in the so-called “elite” institutions like Horace Mann in NY, St. Alban’s in DC, Exeter,etc, they don’t teach for standardized tests at all; in fact, they’re largely considered a nuisance (SAT excepted). And yet the quality of education prepares graduates for academic careers at pretty good schools. So my question is why is that curriculum simply not replicable in the public school system?
Don K
I recall several years back there was a bit of a scandal here in MI when it was discovered many school districts, um, encouraged certain kids to stay home sick on MEAP day. This was particularly prevalent in some high-performing districts that didn’t want to endanger their 97% “pass” rates.
ornery curmudgeon
@Zifnab: I don’t think it’s that insidious.
Well, if I throw a wrench in the machine and instead of wrecking the machine it ricochets and takes out the foreman and crew … it has still done its job.
I don’t believe good, committed teachers are that hard to acknowledge and empower … but that is not the goal in any way. The idea is to have good teachers throw up their hands and quit, thereby leaving our public schools to those for whom teaching is a paycheck, nothing more.
This testing is about strapping down good teachers: not finding and empowering them. The administrators are Daddy and teachers are Mommy, and Daddy knows best. Now Daddy has to close the school, sorry suckers.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Superluminar: One of the big mistakes in this whole argument, I think, is the idea that it’s reasonable or fair to judge the work a teacher has done with students in a single year based on those students’ ability to take a particular test. But that’s what these teachers are faced with. Their very livelihood is dependent on whether or not the kids in their classes can score well on this test taken at this time. Nothing else matters–not the home life the kids have to deal with, not what’s happened in the classes they took previously to this one. None of that is taken into account. All that matters is test scores. The best you can hope for in that scenario is that the teacher does a good job of teaching to the test. The worst is that the teacher actively cheats.
Corner Stone
@Ash Can: Race to The Top is NCLB with new wallpaper slapped on.
Corner Stone
@ornery curmudgeon: I agree. NCLB was a guide manual to the wrecking of public education. It’s a not so slow poison in the school system, to eventually force those monies to crony industry insiders.
Superluminar
@ornery curmudgeon
Just to clarify, I’m not buying into rightist narratives about this (or anything else!), but I think it might be reasonable to have some metrics on what schools perform well, and what ones don’t. I just have no idea what the best method for doing this would be. The current system is clearly stupid, what would be better?
@Ron
Exactly. Just what I was trying to say.
NonyNony
@Zifnab:
Even that’s giving the thought behind standardized testing too much credit. Mostly it’s there because there has long been a push to “treat our public sector like a business” and in a business the lie is that there are objective standards that you hold employees accountable for. Standardized testing is supposed to provide an objective standard to separate good teachers from bad teachers.
ornery curmudgeon
@Ash Can: There’s a difference between “acceptance” and “dealing with reality.”
First, let me say I know this isn’t an easy issue, and I wish everyone and their children the best education possible.
The reality is that heavy standardized testing in our schools is an unnecessary, damaging political ploy. It may even be failing your child, and if we can’t get parents concerned (apparently you are informed) than maybe America has already failed. Somehow some schools do teach well without testing, it’s been done.
Instead of ‘accepting’ this, maybe we can resist even the small amount needed to type out opposition on a blog, rather than urging ‘acceptance.’ It matters more than you’d think, even if only for solidarity.
rikryah
never was a fan of Rhee
jwb
@ornery curmudgeon: Yes, but even folks in the red states just hate, hate, hate this testing regime when it is imposed on their school districts.
ETA: On the other hand, it does serve to discredit in the minds of the conservative-leaning independents who populate the rich suburban school districts the idea of public education in general.
jibeaux
I just throw my hands up about the testing. My son can take standardized tests in his sleep, but spends half the year drilling for the damn things instead of learning at his level. And I know that there are kids who, in an ideal world, would be fired up about learning and reading and doing interesting projects in school, and instead they’re doing endless rounds of practice tests to make sure that any shred of joy that may exist in their school experience is killed off. But at the same time, years ago before there was any attention paid at my state, there were many districts routinely running about 20% passing rates on elementary school reading and math tests. We’re not doing kids any favors if we don’t try to assess whether they can read and count, and then actually take steps to address it if they’re not. So I guess what I’m saying is I don’t have any damn idea what to do about it, other than I think we need more flexibility and local say as to how the assessments are conducted and what we do with the results.
artfuldodger
It has been proven that the best way to raise test scores is to cook the books. We, here in Florida, not only have a bat shit cray governor, but his education advisor is Rhee. Oh the horror.
jwb
@Zifnab: If you’ve never looked at one of the tests or the materials the schools use to prepare for them, you should. What struck me about the tests and the preparatory materials is that they result in a very thin and confused curriculum—at times it is really very difficult to discern what a particular test has set out to measure. There is also the very real problem of test designed to test the general performance of a school also being used to assess the relative performances of students despite the fact that there are not a sufficient number of questions on the test to do that with any sort of reliability.
Ash Can
@ornery curmudgeon: And what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter whether or not anyone’s accepting, opposed, who it is, or how much, when the ISATs are taking place tomorrow and the kids had better be prepared for them. We can badger our politicians and sign petitions and hand out fliers at election time all we want. But it has no effect on what’s happening in the school system and the classroom today. So yes, unless and until all of us who hate NCLB and think standardized tests are a waste can get a better system in place and up and running, the kids and teachers have no choice but to deal with the current system and to make the best of it.
ornery curmudgeon
@jwb: Yes, but even folks in the red states just hate, hate, hate this testing regime when it is imposed on their school districts.
It seems a characteristic of Conservatives to support policies which they hate once they become subject to them.
Which may in fact be the engine of human progress…
jwb
@rumpole: Because you can’t use a model like the Horace Mann School to show that poor urban schools are mismanaged institutions that are sinkholes for tax funds. The whole point of these standardized tests was, like the SAT, to find a measure to prove the objective superiority of students from rich families. The political problem, as I see it, is that it turned out that the schools of the rich ended up having to put a very large amount of resources toward test preparation in order for that “proof” to materialize. And even then the results have not been robust.
ornery curmudgeon
@Ash Can: “And what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter whether or not anyone’s accepting, opposed, who it is, or how much, when the ISATs are taking place tomorrow and the kids had better be prepared for them…”
I wish your child success, Ash. Yes it is today’s reality, and we have to do our best with the cards in our hand.
I’ve said all I know to say. Our poor kids, though.
The Moar You Know
@mai naem: The behavior of the parents that my wife – a high school teacher – has to deal with suggests that you are dead-on right. They don’t want the kids to work, they just want them to be given “A”s and passed onto the next grade and into college. They do not give a shit that once that kid gets out of college, they are useless for any kind of employment at all, they figure the employer will deal with it.
News flash: we won’t.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@The Moar You Know: Probably the best thing about my job is that if a parent wants to give me crap about their little snowflake’s performance in my class, I can tell them to go pound sand. Snowflake’s a legal adult now, and the parent has to deal with him or her, not me. I don’t get paid much, so I have to take my pleasures where I can find them.
jayjaybear
@NonyNony: The fact that it’s certainly put a LOT of money into standardized testing company pockets points to the MAIN reason it’s so popular to our corporatist politicians.
geg6
@Superluminar:
Take a look at the wealth/poverty in any district or school. The ones that perform well are almost always in wealthier districts/schools and those that perform badly are almost always in poor districts/schools.
No amount of teaching to the test is going to overcome the socioeconomic challenges of the students. No amount of money thrown at teachers (who may or may not be cheating on standardized tests to get that money) or administrators (who may or may not also be cheating) can overcome those challenges.
The only way to get these students to learn is to actually TEACH them while providing as much nutrition and safety while they are in the building as possible. And by teaching, I don’t mean how to take standardized multiple choice tests. I mean teaching how to read, not by rote, but for substance; how to analyze and take apart an argument or idea; how to argue and defend an idea; math skills that not only promote numeracy and higher maths but that provide practical math skills for life such as budgeting, accounting, and personal business; an understanding of scientific concepts and the scientific method; how to write with clarity and using good grammar; civics and what it means to be a good citizen, and an understanding of the past and how it affects and informs the present.
None of these things are easily translatable to standardized testing. That is why no college takes a student based on SAT scores alone. That is why no grad school takes a student based on GRE scores alone. Learning and teaching ability are not as measurable as the Rhees or the Bushes or the charter school proponents want to convince people they are. Anyone who claims they are are lying to you.
socratic_me
@Zifnab: …don’t guess an SAT test question unless you can eliminate at least one answer choice…
By the by, this is one of those test taking “strategies” that you only get when an English teacher coaches you through the SAT. 5 options. 1/4 pt off for incorrect answer. 1 pt for correct answer. Guess 5 times, you should, on average, miss 4 times and hit once. That gives you -1/4 * 4 + 1 * 1. Net loss = 0.
Granted, you don’t get an advantage unless you have some clue. But it never hurts to guess. It just doesn’t help to guess like on the ACT.
Corner Stone
As always in primary education, money is the silver bullet.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
Teach to the test is a free market solution for education reform.
Like NCLB and Race to the Top.
School funding is awarded by standardized test results.
Fix the schools, fix the teachers.
That is why America continues to drop in world standards. The world doesnt teach to the test.
Punchy
I’m sure it’s just a funny coincidence that the teachers who “scored” the best had the highest rates of erasure, and also the highest bonuses and awards bestowed. Nope, no formal connection at all. Pure coincidence.
Superluminar
@geg6
okay I agree with everything you wrote, and am sorry if my previous comments weren’t clear enough in that regard. …BUT…if as a society we wish to have some system by which to distinguish good schools from bad, HOW do we do that? I’m not suggesting the current way is the answer by any means, I just want to know how, or if, it’s possible. The wider question of course is whether a meritocracy is ok or not, and if ok, how do we design testing etc so that it doesn’t just replicate the existing socio-economic structures. If the answer to that were easy then we’d be talking about solutions right now, not kvetching about the problems.
Kirk Spencer
@Alecmcc: And the articles miss the ‘quiet’ scandal of Georgia’s standardized test scores.
One of the evaluations for schools is the average of their SAT scores. The trick is that counselors quietly recommend the lower-scoring students to take the ACT instead.
Sharl
Yeah, lunatic-savant* Bob Somerby is a good source for information on scammeister Rhee. I saw her once referred to elsewhere** as the Alan Greenspan of education reform – complete with the unquestioning media fawning and deferred disaster that implies. The description seems quite apt.
*h/t eemom (IIRC)
**I think I saw Moe Tkacik call her that in a tweet.
socratic_me
@Zifnab: The current crop of standardized tests might be ill-crafted or poorly administered, but they’re the only tool I’ve ever seen that gets anything close to unbiased and reliable data.
Also, just because you can put a number on something doesn’t mean that it is data.
In math, one of the biggest problems we see is with students struggling with questions that are over content that they are readily familiar with but presented using language that they are not familiar with. Tests, like textbooks, tend to be written in fairly technical jargon. I think the idea is that this gives a neutral presentation since it gives a sterile presentation. However, it isn’t the way most of our students (or us) think.
So what we end up testing is our students’ ability to read technically written non-fiction and apply it to their information base (and our ability to get them to recognize said techno-jargon). The data that results from this process is neither reliable nor unbiased, at least not as regards their ability to understand and utilize mathematics. Not surprisingly, there are both racial and socio-economic biases built into the process, not to mention the inherent advantages it delivers to procedural/logical thinkers over pretty much everyone else.
And, of course, teachers never get to see actual questions (legally) on most NCLB related tests, so who knows if we are ever actually preparing our students for the correct format, etc. Again, one cannot think that this actually leads to unbiased or reliable data gathering.
Funny thing is, I don’t tend to get very worked up about testing either way. Certain standardized tests- like AP Calc, for instance- are really nice measures of mastery. However, that is largely because they force so much conceptual understanding and cross-application that you really are testing for mastery of concepts, not just basic proficiency. Most of the tests we use are more a pain than anything else unless your admin or state is freaking out about them and going after individual teachers. But the idea that they are an accurate and unbiased method for determining whether our kids are actually proficient with certain skills and concepts is just ill-founded and untrue.
Superluminar
@ Hermione Granger-Weasley
I don’t think it’s right to say “the world doesnt teach to the test”. In my experience an awful lot of them do
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Superluminar:
Not by forcing schools to teach to the test with funding allocation. There are only two basic classes of education reform solutions, social justice solutions or free market solutions.
For thirty years studies have shown that the highest correlate with student performance is parental involvement, and the highest correlate with school performance is parental SES in the school district.
Liberals want to help parents, because they see the destruction of the middle class and the inequality gap is what is destroying American education.
Conservatives/libertarians want to impose free market solutions– ie firing “bad” teachers, teacher certification, merit pay, charter schools, vouchers, etc.
NCLB is a free market solution. School funding is awarded on the basis of standardized test scores.
socratic_me
@Superluminar: Go sit in your child’s class. Their admin does. You certainly have a right to be there. You want to know what is going on there, go find out. Take one day a month off work. Encourage other parents to do likewise so that someone is in at least once a week. See what is happening.
If employment makes that impossible, ask your child. Find out what they learned to day. Get them to teach you. It will be good for them and you both.
In short, use the time-honored informal assessment that we have used since the dawn of time- inquisitive conversation. If a company wanted to know if their managers were doing their job correctly so they took one workweek out of the year to formally evaluate their managers using a written, multiple choice test, would you consider that an efficient way to gather data? Would it give you an unbiased look at whether they knew what they were supposed to know and applied that accurately to new situations? Of course not. It would be a colossal waste of time. So why is education the one area where we think just talking to our kids and instructors is insufficient and, instead, we should waste everyone’s time for at LEAST one week a year and, unfortunately, often more like 1/4 of the school year.
wonkie
There is nothing wrong with teaching to the test if the test matches the cotent of the course. In fact there should be a v ery close match between what is beig taught ad what is tested.
The problem with NCLB ad the testig is another issue altogether: the mistaken assumption that the only successful edcuational outcome for childred is college prep academic achievement. That’s a very snobbish assumptio that defies by default all the kids who don’t want that kind of success as losers. All the artists, dancers, car mechanics, electricians, carpenters…shit out of luck, a bunch of losers for not being interested or not having the right array of talents to be at grade level in academics in high school.
Another sigificat problem with NCLH is the encouragemet of drop outs. Restricting schools to one kind of success and punishing them if every kid cannot or does not achieve that kind of success is a powerful inducement to quietly let kids leave school.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Wow, an authoritarian narcissist is also dishonest?
Hoocoodanode?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Superluminar: haha, got me.
….the World doesn’t teach to OUR test….bettah?
You do understand that the goal of NCLB is mathematically impossible, right?
For all american children to be above average?
So above average in America is achieved by teaching to the test.
ie, average in America has been redefined….downward.
;)
I just had to write a paper on the origins of Strong AI Theory. In the beginnings of the study of artificial intelligence the researchers thought that if a computer was good at game play, for example chess, it would be good at everything human chess masters are good at. Pretty naive, huh.
But human intelligence isnt like that. Being good at chess for a silicon intelligence only means its good at chess. Chessplaying doesn’t translate to vision or motion or speech recognition.
Standardized testing has devolved to the same thing.
It is a free market solution, rewarding schools that become proficient at teaching to the test.
geg6
@Superluminar:
If you really want to improve schools in America, it won’t be easy (certainly not as easy as the standardized testing crowd would lead you to believe) and it will piss off pretty much everyone.
There are a couple of things we could do right away that the Europeans and Japanese do. First, change the school calendar and day. Year-round schools with longer days would allow more time for covering important concepts and would eliminate the loss of learning that typically occurs over summer breaks. A second thing we could do is to quit pretending that every student should have the same curriculum and should be able to go to college. There should be various paths a student should take and high schools that specialize in, say, vocational education, college prep, or the arts should be available in every district so that a kid who wants to be or is best suited to be a plumber wouldn’t be wasting his/her time on chemistry or calculus instead of geometry and the metallurgy one learns in welding. Assessments are important for all, but standardized testing (such as the PSSA here in PA) in which it’s one size fits all are next to useless, so assess students using tests that match their vocational or academic goals.
There are plenty more things we could do to improve schools and how our kids do in them, but just from these three options, you can see how hard it would be to get people to agree to them. They would take a lot of money and a lot of time to implement, not to mention the time it would take to show improvements. But these are the changes we need to make if we are serious about improving education for the vast majority of students. The fact that we don’t even mention these things and keep pushing standardized testing as the be all and end all for improving education just proves that we aren’t really serious about it.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@socratic_me: that is a social justice solution. Parental involvement.
@wonkie: Obama has proposed a solution for that, with his early graduation program. How do you make trade school equivalent in social capital to a 4-year degree?
Its pretty genius.
Kids that want to graduate a year early can enter a 2-year votech school or an arts program and be out earning while the college prep still have 2 years of their 4year degree to go.
Obama made trade school cool.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@geg6: the main thing (ie highest correlate) we can do to improve our schools is rescue the middle class, because that would improve parental involvement, and parental SES.
Everything else is trimming and Glorious Free Market Innovation in action.
socratic_me
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: You don’t hear me disagreeing, do you?
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: If you change to a European-type system with vocational and academic tracking, I think you find that higher SES students will be routinely tracked into academic routes and the others will be sent to vocational tracks. In addition, such a system frequently puts people onto a track early and keeps them there. Someone who is a late bloomer can get lost in such a system.
Superluminar
@geg6; HGW
I really have no problem with your positions and agree that NCLB is appalling. However (also in answer to socratic_me here), I’m not sure it’s good enough to say that “a parent” thinks a school is doing alright so that’s ok. I think some measure of what “ok” is for everyone may be a good idea, we just haven’t found the best way of establishing a baseline yet. Your thoughts?
R-Jud
Another thing they do here in the UK is this: kids are done at sixteen. Done. They take some exams in certain subjects (GCSEs), and those are the qualifications they take into the world. If their GCSE results are so good that they want to go to university, they move on to a sixth-form college and prep for another round of A-level exams. And bachelor degree programs take three years, not four.
I don’t know about you guys, but I had a lot of HS classmates who were mentally “done” with school at sixteen, and who ended up dicking around for two more years because the law required it. I think we keep our young people in school a little too long.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we don’t know what public education is FOR in America anymore. It has too many ostensible goals and purposes.
Originally, the idea was to prepare people to participate in a democratic society: they needed the information and skills necessary to make informed votes and sit on juries. If we focused on that again, and let the trades and the private sector train its own workers, it might be a better country.
Anonymous
Former developer / scoring trainer from the testing industry here – there *are* better formats for testing than the multiple-choice business that DC uses. The problem is that writing good short-answer questions is difficult and expensive, and TRAINING the sort of people who are willing to work in the industry (people with any college degree, willing to work very short-term projects for $12/hr) to score detailed assessments correctly is an even bigger challenge. I worked with a couple state Depts. of Education that were on the right track, but they ran out of money when then 2008 crash got rolling.
dcdl
I have twin boys in 2nd grade with different teachers. They get their first test in 3rd grade. This year the school changed how they are teaching math. They are now teaching to the test. Which might or might not be a bad thing. The new math is all story problems which is not necessarily a bad thing, but what they aren’t teaching is basic math facts. Luckily, one of the teachers does more than just the standard story problems and does math facts and mountain math. The other teacher “loves” the new math and has now just realized that the children don’t remember how to do ‘carry’ and ‘borrowing’ with addition and subtraction. They also don’t know some basic math facts that they knew in 1st grade. She also does not communicate with parents on what is going on with the class. The other teacher does a good job on communicating.
So far my take on teaching to the test is that it makes a difference how involved the teacher is on doing extra work and how involved they are with their students. I admit the class sizes are creeping up to over 30 students and that makes a lot of extra work for the teacher if they want to do more. Plus, to do more they have to have the supplies. The past two years the school has been running out of colored paper, white paper, etc. So they have been taking donations of money or supplies. They also now make photocopies of pamphlets and the like that students used to take home with them to save money.
There are also a lot of good websites out there for educational learning if parents want to do extra work with their children.
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
The one size fits all education system in the US does not work. And tracking doesn’t have be done the way it is Germany, for instance. However, I really don’t see how a late bloomer couldn’t go on, later, and get that college degree he or she wants. As for the SES factor, unless and until we become a nation that has everyone earning the same as everyone else, you are going to have SES differences in learning outcomes. It’s just a fact of life that those who have more are able to expose their children to more and to provide outside learning experiences and have more insight into what can be done at home to enhance their children’s educations. I cannot say this enough: NOT EVERYONE SHOULD GO TO COLLEGE. Some because they aren’t equipped intellectually and some because it makes no sense economically for them to do so. I don’t really think that an average student from a middle or working class background should spend $65-100,000 (what a typical degree costs in PA) on a degree in social work or administration of justice when they could have, for free, a good education in welding or plumbing or electrical work or HVAC, vocations that earn much more than your average cop or social worker. If they are late bloomers, they can take what they’ve learned already, use some of those excellent earnings on taking some college business classes at night or weekends or online, and start their own businesses.
I don’t claim that my ideas are just mine or that they are perfect, but when you look around the world, they seem to work well for other countries. And the whole college for everyone idea isn’t working out so well, academically or economically, for us. As an educator, I see every day how damaging it is that we insist that everyone can and should go to college and make that the only socially acceptable path for everyone.
NonyNony
@R-Jud:
Not at all. As someone who spent a lot of time getting an education degree and studying the history of education in the US I can tell you that this is wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. But it fits with the ideal of what we want to believe our ancestors were doing when they implemented public education.
The purpose of public education in the US was to take kids off the street and train them to be productive members of the working class. In the cities, this meant training kids to show up on time, do what they were told, and expect to come back day after day and not just show up when they felt like it. Factory owners – especially in the north east – had problems with workers who would show up, work for a few weeks, get enough training in to be useful, and then disappear with their paychecks off to do something else.
Out in the rural areas it was mostly seen as a way of keeping kids occupied and out of trouble during the winter months. And it was a way to get the kids enough education to read the Bible, which their parents often thought was important.
In the early part of the 20th century things started to shift and this idea that education was needed to be a “good citizen” – rather than just a “useful worker” or to “keep kids out of trouble” – began to take hold.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@socratic_me: naw. ;)
But I just wanted to emphasize that there are only two general classes of solutions. I’m not adverse to hybridizing to optimize, but the conservative/libertarian position never acknowledges the core social justice solutions.
The unregulated free market is basically the survival of the greediest, and antipathic to social justice. That is why conservatives and libertarians always translate “social justice” as “so-ci-alism”.
In my Defense Against the Dark Arts of Conservatism class at Hogwarts we teach how to recognize and disapparate free market boggarts to first years, because they are so common.
Freemarket boggarts are much harder to detect than ordinary boggarts. The classic boggart assumes the aspect of the worst fears of the target, but a freemarket boggart assumes some shared value of the target in order to get close enough to inject the target with Glibertarian Reasonableness poison, which it secretes through the hidden fangs in its mouth.
To detect a freemarket boggart simply level one’s wand and cry “do you believe in the innovation of the market!” Usually this causes the immediate disapparation of the boggart, but sometimes one must also apply the Ridickulous! charm as well.
cyntax
@R-Jud:
Yeah, but what that resulted in were very high pressure tests early in life (think 12-13 yrs old) and these tests determined your career track. They’ve since designed for a somewhat more forgiving system, but were you ready to be slotted into a career at 13?
Triassic Sands
@Ash Can:
Sad, but untrue. The current high stakes testing craze is a disaster for education in this country. Testing has it’s place, but we currently have it all wrong and we are undermining our entire education system with these tests and the idea that free market mechanisms will work in education.
I deleted an overly long comment, for which I will substitute a suggestion. Read Diane Ravitch’s latest book The Death and Life of the Great American School System — How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
The subtitle is really much more important than the main title. If you don’t know, Ravitch is an education historian who has spent most of her career championing conservative education policies, the very policies she has come to realize are a disaster. In a striking example of intellectual integrity she has admitted how mistaken she has been (and how mistaken Barack Obama is). Unlike bright people like Gates and Obama, Ravitch is actually conversant with the research, so also unlike them, she is able to understand the damage testing, charter schools, etc. are doing. I’ve heard Gates talk (pontificate) about education and it’s painfully clear to me that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about.
Read the Ravitch book and then defend testing.
Omnes Omnibus
@NonyNony: I think education for the higher SES levels has always been geared toward creating a person who is ready to participate in a “democratic” society. Isn’t that really the purpose of a liberal art education? It was only in 20th century that this idea was projected onto the rest of society.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@geg6:
Bravo!
American education has become a procrustean bed, no?
NCLB really means no child gets ahead.
Did you know schools in colorado get paid by the day for student attendence per student?
Diploma mills.
cyntax
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
The implications of this are pretty far-reaching. If you believe, like I do, that an educated electorate is vital to a functioning democracy, and that people need certain levels of literacy and critical thinking skills to be effective at making their voices heard in a democracy, then restricting access to education becomes an issue of social justice. And nothing predicts academic performance like socio-economic status, so the educational challenges the poor face are one of the main forces that keep them where they are.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Triassic Sands:
But you see….NCLB just did to our education system what 8 years of the Bush admin did to our economy.
Free market solutions don’t actually work in practice.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@cyntax: win.
/beams at cyntax
AAA Bonds
Marvin Tucker is a commendable parent in this day and age – more concerned with his child learning mathematics (and attending a school that promotes that goal) than with high test scores for his child.
Part of any test-score fraud, if that is what happened here, involves parents who must know something is up but keep silent to prevent their childrens’ scores from being challenged.
What’s sadder is that in a climate that confuses test scores with achievement and accountability, parents who shut up and accept the suspicious scores can see themselves as acting in the child’s future interests.
Triassic Sands
If you’re a teacher and you will get an $8,000 bonus if your students’ test scores improve (and you might lose your job if they don’t), what are likely to be your most important objectives?
a. Do whatever you can to help your students get higher test scores? (And exactly how far does “whatever” take you?)
b. Spend as much time as possible preparing for the tests.
c. Spend time that might have been spent teaching and learning content on teaching and learning test taking “skills?”
d. Cheat if necessary?
e. All of the above.
The answer, tragically, seems to be “e,” since “a,” “b,” “c,” and “d” all have been done by teachers (and principals) in the era of No Child Left Behind. And shockingly, in case after case where students’ state test scores improved greatly, those gains were non-existent on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That was true of the Houston “miracle” and the “success” of the Klein years in New York, as well as many other places.
High stakes testing — whether the stakes are for the students or teachers — is incompatible with educational excellence. Worse still, it isn’t neutral, it won’t be merely a waste of time that leaves the students no better off than they were before the tests. Rather, they will pay a price
R-Jud
@cyntax:
I would have, yes. but I understand most people aren’t, and I’d argue that they aren’t any more ready at 18, either. I seem to remember the tests I took in the US being extremely high-pressure as well, only with no outside function.
You couldn’t walk out into the world with your SATs and match it up to an entry-level job. When I worked in secretarial recruitment, we’d write ads for data-entry positions, for instance, that said: “Applicants must have GCSEs in English and Mathematics, C or above.”
@NonyNony: Thanks for the correction. I did TFA institute in 2001, so we got a very “School House Rock” version of public ed history. Are there books you’d recommend about this? Someone else mentions Diane Ravitch, above. Others?
cyntax
@Triassic Sands:
Exactly so.
cyntax
@R-Jud:
I don’t recall any tests I took at age 13 being high-stakes, and certainly nothing like the O-levels. SAT’s were high stakes, but when I was a kid no one was thinking of those at age 12-13, maybe that’s changed.
Part of the problem we have here is that a lot of the good middle class jobs are gone, so these days if don’t get a white collar job, you’re working a crappy service job that’s going to keep part of the poor/under-class.
Triassic Sands
Michelle Rhee is a charlatan.
@mai naem:
This is the one element of the educational system that is almost never discussed. Even Ravitch, in her new book, doesn’t deal with it, except to include (three or four times in the entire book) the inclusion of something like “students willing to learn” in a list.
An unmotivated student is not going to learn no matter how good the teacher is. A motivated student can learn even if he or she has a poor teacher. This should become more and more true as a person grows older, but in this country that is exactly the time when so many students simply withdraw from learning.
Note: Some want to argue that if the teachers are good enough they will motivate students. There is some truth to that, but it is probably a lot more limited than most people like to think.
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Properly regulated they will work for some things, but education, like health care is a public good that should not be subjected to free market solutions (even well-regulated ones).
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Triassic Sands:
Could you please give an example?
So in your opinion, fixing teachers (free market solutions like teacher certificarion and merit pay) is not as cost-viable as fixing parents (social justice solutions)?
R-Jud
@cyntax:
Hmm. This is probably pedantic, but: there aren’t any high-stakes tests taken at age 13 over here.
The O-Levels are now called GCSEs, and they are taken at the end of year 11, when kids are 15 or 16 (and always have been, from what I can tell, although I know some bright 14-year-olds who’ve taken some early one year, and some more the following year, to bump up their CVs).
When you say “age 13”, are you thinking of the 11-plus?
Also, I don’t mean to sound like I think the UK system is perfect, or that it doesn’t have its pitfalls, but it certainly seems better thought-out than the public system in the US.
My basic point was that a lot of kids are ready to leave school at 16. Here, they can do so, with a qualification that means something to employers. Offering this option to them in the U.S. might not hurt.
Absolutely, 100% agree. This is more of a problem in the US than the UK (for now). In my experience, it’s also why a lot of parents in high-poverty areas in the US can’t effectively parent: they are run ragged working a bunch of crappy service jobs to make ends meet. They’re never home, and when they are, they’re exhausted.
alone in the dark
@ornery curmudgeon:
As someone married for 22 years to one of the best teachers on the planet, I say “yes” to this. In fact, my spouse has decided to retire after 31 years, not because teaching is no longer a joy, but because the bureaucracy is changing teaching into monitoring.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@R-Jud:
or 17.
Are you aware of the National Center on Education and the Economy’s Early Graduation Program? It is being tested in 8 states currently.
Obama and Biden set it up as soon as O took office.
cyntax
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Just my 2-cents but…
Well, pretty much anything involving a relationship that is essentially transactional. The free-market is pretty good at supplying me with a range of different pencils at various price points, relating roughly to how I perceive their value.
That’s why TS’s linking of healthcare and education makes sense. Those aren’t strictly transactional relationships; those relationships are predicated on a holistic concern with an individual’s needs, not with supplying them with a specific product.
Though we often like to portray students as consumers and education as a product supplied by the teacher, once you get in front of a classroom, the shortcomings of that framework become very obvious very quickly.
alone in the dark
@jwb:
In my state, wealthy schools don’t even have to provide testing data. I guess it’s assumed that even if they’re stupid they’ll still be able to inherit money.
Socratic_me
@Superluminar: Perhaps we could hire some sort of management to oversee the teachers and ensure the general quality of education in the school. Then we could add another layer of administration to tie together all the schools in a certain area to help ensure vertical integration. At that point we could develop a set of state-wide standards (or, if the federal government doesn’t terrify you, national standards *gasp*) that outline what we expect schools to teach. Lastly, just to make sure that teachers and their administrative oversight don’t just game the system and do whatever they want, we could make school systems responsible to a panel of local citizens chosen by regular elections. With that, we could sit back and let the professionals Do their jobs. If we notice any problematic issues, we can take it up with the teachers. If they don’t fix it, we can take it to their administrators. If they don’t fix it, we can take it t the school board. And if they don’t fix it we can vote the bums out. Great system, right?
Look, I don’t really mean t be all snarky jerk-wad, but we have a system where well-educated professionals work in a system of high scrutiny and heavy oversight. If 70% of the populace thinks their teachers are great but that we, as a society aren’t producing educated citizens, maybe the problem isn’t teachers.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@alone in the dark:
Teaching is a factory process under free market solutions.
The invisible hand of the market is just pumping out graduates in the most cost efficient and high volume model available.
R-Jud
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I am now. Thanks for enlightening a muggle.
cyntax
@R-Jud:
Well, my mistake. I’ve had some Brits mis-characterize things to me then.
And that’s a very good point. Along with some other changes, it would be a good idea. I think part of the reason we emphasize college more and more, is because the alternatives look bleaker and bleaker.
If, in the US, we made a better commitment to open-enrollment systems like community colleges, then it would be easier for people to go back to school, if they felt life in the trades wasn’t working out for them.
But pulling one particular lever in pursuit of fixing our educational system here won’t work all that well. Our economy is becoming more and more bi-polar, and the educational system can only respond accordingly, it can’t train people for jobs that don’t exist.
Dr. Morpheus
Utter bullshit, there’s a latent ideology lurking beneath the surface of that conceit that only Alphas should go to college while Epsilons shouldn’t waste “our” time and “our” money doing so.
You’re correct in saying that the real origins of the American education system wasn’t to prepare children to be participants in a democracy that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t.
A two tiered education system like you’re proposing only solidifies the class structure that we currently have into a caste structure.
Education should be breaking boundaries and pushing students beyond what they might think they can accomplish. NOT merely confirming what everyone expects of a child “from that background” or who doesn’t seem to express interest in post secondary education while in high school. My high school councilors were convinced that I wasn’t “college material” and so didn’t even mention that there were elective college prep courses while I was in high school. I had to learn about them from one of my friends. I ended up not only going and completing college but also getting my PhD.
Moreover there is a hell of a lot more learned during college than what is contained in the text books and every child needs to experience that. Living independently with peers, learning to budget time and class demands, and a host of other things that are crucial in later life.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@cyntax:
oh I see. Like Jody Foster’s freemarket eugenics or ivy league co-eds selling their eggs for 10,000 dollars?
Whatever the market will bear, right?
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@R-Jud: You aren’t a muggle. You are a liberal wizard or wizardette in training if you read here.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Dr. Morpheus: What Obama proposed is not a two-tiered system. It is a way to give trade school equivalent social capital to a four year degree. There is no testing involved to determine early graduation track.
It is free will of the individual, a free choice.
cyntax
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Oh come on. You can find parts of any system that aren’t ideal. That doesn’t mean the whole thing is always automatically wrong.
I’d say IVF is much more a part of the healthcare model than not, but unless we as a society are willing to view it as a right, it’s going to function in the grey area it currently does.
ETA: The ability to purchase organs overseas is much more troubling in my opinion.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@cyntax: oh, I was making fun.
But sadly you are right. Like one of my one-time conservative mentors, Dr. Jerry Pournelle, often said….
He was right about a lot of things.
:(
Brachiator
@EconWatcher:
I really wonder how effective this person is as a teacher, and whether he communicates his sense of failure to his students. Grades lining up perfectly with socioeconomic condition? Predetermined? Bullshit.
Sounds like he is a good coach and maybe good motivational speaker, but I would really wonder about his ability as a teacher.
cyntax
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
It’s good to be the King.
alone in the dark
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
If and when every child reaches grade level, some will still have higher scores and some lower. This results in “average” being redistributed upward. You can no more have everyone at or above grade level academically (especially via legislative fiat) than you can declare everyone shall be an Olympic sprinter.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@cyntax: haha! Dr. Pournelle is a scifi author, not a Monty Python sketch.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Brachiator: 30 years of research corroborates his position. SES of parents is the highest correlate with school performance, and parental involvement is the highest correlate with student performance. Parents that are working two service jobs to make ends meet dont have time for parental involvement.
Has anyone regressed national academic performance on the shrinkage of the middle class or the growth of the inequality gap?
Hasn’t anyone read Heckman?
25% of American preschoolers now live below the poverty level.
It is our national shame.
Brachiator
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
It’s 2011. And yet people still make references to “correlations” as though this in itself is meaningful. It’s not.
And neither you nor the original poster know much in detail about the backgrounds of either the students or the parents in the anecdote given.
On this, we agree.
HyperIon
@Socratic_me said:
Couldn’t you make the analogous stmt about congresscritters?
“Everyone” thinks their rep is great/OK but they hate congess as a whole.
So…do you endorse the congress analog as well? enemy = us?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
mistermix, you should have titled this post Eraserhead.
Far more appropriate for a Forbes link.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Brachiator: well….in a limited fundage environment it still makes sense to target the largest correlates to improve performance.
I learned that in COLLEGE.
;)
geg6
@Dr. Morpheus:
Bullshit right back at you.
I’m not advocating that a student be forced into a track and kept there forever against his/her will. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t be preaching that a college education is the ONE AND ONLY option and anything else is substandard. Because other career paths are, prima facie, not. I have an MEd and will still never make a third as much as the electrician next door who never went to college for a second. He loves his job and wouldn’t want to do anything else. But his son, who also loves electrical work, is being told that his father’s trade is not good enough for him and that he is setting his sights too low. Even as an electrical engineer, he would only probably match his father’s earnings, he would be just as happy (if not more) doing what his father does, and would not spend four years and $100,000 to find that out.
Brachiator
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Samuel Johnson said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. I would add that correlation is the last refuge of college educated social science scoundrels.
Brachiator
@geg6:
By the way, I think that this clarification is helpful, since there are people who believe in a rigid determinism. And tax credits like the Lifetime Learning Credit help people who go to institutions other than a 4 year college for education and training to improve their job skills. There has been an acknowledgement for quite a while now that not all paths to life skills enrichment has to go through college.
Triassic Sands
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
I’m a former teacher and teacher certification and merit pay are from opposite sides of the menu. The free marketeers think certification is unnecessary; that any bright person can walk into a class room and do a good job. On the other hand, merit pay is supposed to be the incentive to get teachers to work harder — competing with their fellow teachers to get a bigger share of the pie.
I’m for certification and against merit pay. There is such a thing as worthwhile teacher training and the alternative certification program that I went through was among the finest and most productive educational experiences I’ve ever had. Make that the finest. By the time I received my certification I was already an experienced teacher, because we spent a year working in classrooms and for those who could handle it, taking full responsibility for classes. In my case, my second semester cooperating teacher was neither. In me, she saw an opportunity to take the semester off, which is what she did. However, I had plenty of support from the university if and when I needed it. By the time I started my first full-time job, I had already been responsible for every aspect of teaching (including lesson creation and planning, grading and/or evaluation, parent-teacher conferences, etc.) Every day when we finished in the classroom we went to the university for coursework. Unlike the courses that have earned teacher training programs such bad names, the courses we took were directly relevant to teaching and prepared us for actually doing the job. We also had to earn MAs, which in addition to coursework included written exams, an oral component, and a thesis. I’ve never worked harder or gotten more out of an educational program.
Probably the single most valuable class was “Methods,” taught by one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, and equipping me with a wonderful array of techniques, practices, and tools. What I learned in that “Methods” class made it possible for me to give an assignment after only two weeks on the job in my first paid teaching assignment that the students (high school) almost unanimously agreed was the “best thing they’d ever done in school.” It wasn’t just fun, it was a lot of work, and was nothing like the worksheets and textbook questions they’d been fed their entire academic lives. (Which is one way of saying that the assignment I gave wouldn’t have to be all that good to top what they’d seen before.)
I graduated with fine grades from a fine university, but my value as a teacher was enhanced many times by the certification program I went through. Sadly, it no longer exists.
I taught in a school where well over 98.3% of students were eligible for free or reduced price lunch. Without the training I had my first two years would have been pretty horrible.
As for fixing parents, it’s the only thing likely to fix our educational system and one thing that isn’t going to happen. Therefore, I don’t really see any hope of fixing our educational system. A Nation at Risk came out in 1983 and now almost thirty years later we haven’t made any headway. Worse, instead of doing the things that might help, we’re following Gates, Obama, et al. down the road to educational hell.
Teachers need to work cooperatively and collaboratively. Merit pay puts them in competition with one another. That’s a terrible idea. I had experience with merit pay at another job I had many years before I became a teacher. When I started I worked in one department and got a “merit bonus” every pay day. Then, I switched departments. I worked just as hard and my work quality was no different. What was different was my supervisor. The only thing worse would be basing merit pay on the test scores of students. Gawdawmighty are we dumb!
I’m not shy about saying that when I taught, no teacher was more dedicated or worked harder. When NCLB became the law of the land, I quit teaching. I couldn’t be an active participant in educational malpractice. Things have only gotten worse.
Sorry for the personal details, but it’s difficult for me to discuss education without getting angry…and very, very sad. And the fact that I know what it means to be a teacher certainly influences my opinions.
geg6
@Brachiator:
No, there really hasn’t, at least among the general public (we, in educational circles, discuss it all the time but no one listens to us). Speak to any college age student, his/her parents, or any high school guidance counselor and you would know that is true. I know because those are the people I deal with every single day on the job. It is the greatest insult you can possibly give any parent or student that, perhaps, little Johnny/Jennie is not college material and that a high school GPA of 1.98 and an SAT score of 900 are not sufficient on which to risk $100,000.
Socratic_me
@HyperIon:
Given that most parents have a much better idea of what their child’s teacher is up to than what their congress critter is up to, I am not sure the analogy applies. Moreover, when people DO know what their congress critter does and approve of it, even while disapproving of Congress in general, they are complaining about the way the mass of others affects THEIR preferred results. Since the classroom is taught by a single teacher, liking THEIR teacher should be much more aligned with actual teacher quality (at least to the extent that parents can evaluate it). If we don’t think parents can actually evaluate what their own child’s teacher is doing, I don’t know how we are supposed to think the populace en mass is any better at evaluating what teachers should be doing and whether or not they are accomplishing those goals.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Triassic Sands: I feel you. And I agree merit pay is just as awful as firing “bad” teachers…and may I point out that both are pure-D free market solutions?
I am suspicious of accreditation, because the freemarket boggarts all salivate over it. If poorly managed it would just turn into standardized testing for teachers.
You know…kinda like NCLB for Teachers? Having failed to make every child in america above average, the freemarket boggarts now want to make every teacher above average.
Ridikkulous!
;)
I got fantastic gifts from my teachers. But I had loving devoted high SES parents and plenty to eat and a very nice place to live.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Brachiator: wallah, im an aspiring quantum biologist. I took nonparametrics and multivariate regression analysis because I want to model the metaverse and the microverse.
;)
what's left
Adding my $.02 as a Special Ed, self-contained classroom teacher, in a school that is under threat of closing due to “poor performance”, which I voluntarily transferred to this year, my school is over 90% free and reduced lunch. My students ask me for food every day. Needless to say, they come without pencil or paper every day.
At least 25% of our teachers are first-year teachers. Teacher and admin turn-over is unbelievable – some voluntary, some not. I’m on the second case of paper that I’ve bought for my class. Although “resources” are being “poured” into our school, this apparently does not stretch to supplies or food.
Because we are a “failing” school, students can use vouchers to go to other schools. Our proportion of students with disabilities, identified and non-identified, is at least twice that of “performing” schools. You can’t even imagine how many serious mental and psychological problems are so glaringly apparent and yet teachers are powerless to do anything except “document”.
The district is unabashedly asking us to “teach to the test”, because the test determines everything, and is literally life or death for our school. The Rhee-advised governor is proposing a 10% cut in the state education budget, after campaigning on not touching the education budget.
But, on the other hand, it is now Spring break, and I have the wonderful leisure to catch up on the blogosphere!
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@what’s left: The invisible hand of the free market is choking our school system to death, just like it just punched american working families in the face with the Econopalypse that Ate Americas Jobs.
And mistermix links Forbes.
go figure.
/sigh
smintheus
How do you evaluate teacher performance without using test scores? By having good teachers go into their classes and watch. Don’t have to be teachers from their own school; better would be to create regional boards of top-notch teachers (on leave/retired), train them to evaluate consistently, and then let them tell you who’s competent and who’s not.
The destructive myth in all this is that kids are not learning because, rather than despite, their teachers. IOW, that bad teachers are roaming the schools tearing kids’ futures down and we’ve got to ferret them out. The less facile truth is that what determines whether or not a student will do well academically are largely factors outside the teachers’ control, especially the parents’ attitudes and background.
If you make sure your teachers are competent, and your academic programs and school infrastructure are sound, then the results are largely on the students and their families. You don’t really need standardized tests because you don’t need to measure one body of students against another. What those tests would show basically is that one group of kids is more inclined for whatever reasons (wealth?) to thrive academically than another group.
Triassic Sands
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
HG-W, I’m puzzled. We seem to have very different ideas of who favored what. If you can, get a hold of Diane Ravitch’s newest book (“The Death and Life of the Great American School System”). She lays out the reform movement pretty clearly.
Originally, certification was awarded after completion of an accredited teaching training program taken at an accredited college or university. (And in some states it was necessary to pass a standardized test. I took an all-day test in New Mexico. Anyone who couldn’t pass that test had no business being a teacher.) Many of those programs were abysmal, the school got the students tuition, but the students didn’t get much in the way of tools for actually teaching.
However, in recent years all the freemarketeers I am aware of have been firmly on the side of no certification. The most extreme say anyone who graduates from college ought to be able to teach (Why waste the time getting a degree; why not just go to work after high school graduation; and while we’re at it, why bother graduating? Isn’t the GED good enough?) Some of the less extreme proponents of loosening the requirements to teach, say the college classwork isn’t necessary, but there ought to be some minimal instruction to prepare mature adults for the classroom. I assume they would all be fine with Bill Gates teaching, since his billions of dollars are way better than any ol’ diploma or degree. It’s difficult for me to believe that Bill Gates wouldn’t be one of the absolute worst teachers in history.
Who are the free marketeers who are so enthused about accreditation? Do you have any names?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Triassic Sands: lol.
The subject of mistermixs link is one.
Manzi and Millman at TAS.
Don’t you see how standardized accreditation could become a standardized teacher test?
Like NCLB for teachers.
No teacher left behind.
All teachers in america will be FORCED to be above average.