I think we all know how I feel about standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind profanation. If there remains any confusion as to my opinion regarding those particular atrocities (and if my hints haven’t been overt enough), there will be an opportunity to catch up on your reading below.
Standardized testing, while possibly necessary in that there currently exists no practical way to collect student-achievement data from every public school in America, is still evil and has crushed an already handicapped education system into a non-functioning machine that has time and money only for teaching to the test. It has failed utterly and I work at maintaining some level of optimism that my kiddos will somehow manage to escape its evil clutches.
Bad news for me and my innocent progeny: New and exciting standards in science and math for public school kids are being implemented now, with the new assessments to begin in 2011 for math, and 2012 for science. The fabulous-er dog and pony show requires that students pass the exams in order to graduate. Were educators not teaching to the test enough already?
On the bright side, State Superintendent Randy Dorn is trying to convince the powers that be that the time between implementation and assessment is too speedy for the first wave of kids to be tested. People should pay attention when a politician uses the word “fair.”
Dorn said students and schools will need more time with new math and science learning standards that are now being implemented around the state. The new standards won’t be assessed until 2011 for math and 2012 for science. That doesn’t provide ample opportunity for the class of 2013, current ninth graders and the first class required to pass four state exams, to learn the standards, or teachers and schools to align curriculum and materials to them, he added.
“It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that we have a big problem in our state. Less than 50 percent of our 10th graders are passing the math and science exams,” said Dorn, who noted 10th graders’ passing rate on the reading and writing exams is more than 80 percent. “We need to be fair to our students and give them time to learn the new standards. It’s simply a matter of doing what’s right.”
This fiasco is happening in several other states as well. The only choices eye-rolling, head-shaking, utterances-of-disgust-making parents have are (a) suck it up and hope for the best, (b) private school, (c) home school, or (d) give the offspring a handbasket each and wish them well on their subterranean journey.
While writing the previous post, I went searching in the archives for relevant previous posts. I found entirely too many to tack onto the end of an already-lengthy post. Here they are, including some Education Reform posts proving I’m not always in disagreement with President Obama.
Last week’s post got me thinking about the kid/achievement/parent dynamic. I may have mentioned, once or twice, my absolute fury toward and lack of goodwill for parents who place volumes of pressure the size of planets onto their kids’ shoulders and tell them repeatedly that only the achievements which can be recorded on paper are worthwhile, and that being anything but the top 5% is as good as failing utterly. I escaped having a mother and a father who put that kind of pressure to out-perform my peers on me, but I did have a few grandparents who made sure I was aware that success was all they were interested in.
As an older and wiser thirty-five-year-old, I’ve had some time to ponder the raising I had, and to figure out which bits made me a better person, and which bits made me wish I’d come from an uneducated, low-pressure family that would have been ecstatic if I’d achieved a high school education and a lifetime of honest work days.
Also, now I’m a parent, and since it’s really better to figure out what your parenting philosophy is prior to raising one’s offspring, I’ve been doing some research. You have a little leeway to screw up, because there’s some time to patch it up later. Plus, it’s difficult to impart much wisdom to a tiny person who crawls everywhere, can’t hold up their end of a conversation, and keeps shoving everything smaller than a tennis ball into their mouth. Keep in mind, though, that the more you mess up when they’re little, the more you’ll be scraping off and re-plastering when they’re older, more angry, and a lot less convincible.
Parents reading this should pay attention, and any kids reading this should make their asinine parentals (whether borderline or solidly inside the dumbass box) read it all the way through. Watch them to be sure they’ve really absorbed it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I was so ready to escape small-town life and be my own person at college, I practically ran across the graduation stage. Sadly, I was excited for college because not only would I be free, I had also convinced myself that college would be similar to high school in that I would be able to skate by on my (slightly) above-average intelligence and my ability to charm every adult in the room. Studying was never something I had had to do very much of, and since I test well (college teaches you your social security number, and public school teaches you how to kick ass on standardized tests), I figured I’d do just as well in college as I had done for the past thirteen years.
It was not to be. Which sucked while it was happening to me, but is really effing funny to look back on and watch cocky little good-grades, non-student me get taken down a notch or three. Academic probation is a painful life lesson to report to your parents over the winter holidays. Even more painful is your very own parents nodding their heads and telling you, their supposed wonder child, that they had known the first semester would end like this. And down I went, five more notches. Ouch.
To be fair, my parents have really good bull**it detectors, and they probably knew the whole time (my entire pre-college career) that I was getting lots of praise for just being me: a slightly charming, well-read kid with a good vocabulary who tests well. Which is to say that my parents knew good and GD well that I was riding my little wave of glory without doing much to actually earn all that praise. They weren’t even all that impressed with my pile of swim team medals and ribbons until I actually started working my ass off trying to be a better swimmer than I’d started out (which I did for me, not for anyone else, and that also made them proud).
When I grew up a smidge and was able to get a little distance on high school and those early college years, it became clear that my parental units were not the types to slobber all over themselves with praise for anything that I hadn’t actually worked hard at achieving. They didn’t even seem to be impressed by place, names, numbers, or ranking; all it ever took was their witnessing of my literal or figurative sweat, and I’d get the look and the hug and the “You did good, kid.”
And that, people, is good and decent parenting. Loving your kids unconditionally for who they are, not for their scores and grades; seeing through their bull**it; and praising them not for their high placement or numbers, but for the work they did to get from point A to point B; and, most importantly, being content and satisfied with them when they are happy, not when they’re doing triple back-jumps through hoops on no sleep because they’re killing themselves to achieve awesomely high paper numbers so they can be ranked in the top 5% of some ridiculous and cruelly scored game of life.
Here comes the I’m a parent so I know of what I speak and I practice what I preach so listen up pal part: My daughter is seven, and is currently into gymnastics. At the end of the ten-week term, they have a Show Day and the parents come and watch the kids perform the skills they’ve learned, and at the end the kids all receive an identical pretend gold medal (which 99% of the kids believe is real gold).
After all of the parental applauding, my kid ran up to me, eyes shining with fake-gold-medal joy, hugged me violently and said, “Mommy! Aren’t you so proud of me for getting a medal?!” I said, “Nope.” I told her I was super happy for her that she had a medal because it was obvious that having something that cool and shiny was making her euphoric, but that I was proud of her because she had shown up to every class, had always tried her hardest, had worked to get better at her gymnastics skills, and had tried new things, even the stuff that scared the crap out of her.
I could see the little wheels turning in her head, trying to work out what her weird Mom meant. On the one hand it makes things easier on her: all she has to do is try and actually work at stuff. On the other hand, it makes things tougher on her: she’ll actually have to work because I, like my own parents, have a magnificent BS detector, and will know it when she’s riding the wave of charm and innate abilities.
How horrible a mother would I be if I sat my kids down, looked them in their sweet, trusting eyes, and told them that only the most ass-kicking one of them was going to get funding for food, shelter and clothing, and the loser was going to be on their own? I would be deemed an unfit parent because there is just no way to make it acceptable to have people compete for what are supposed to be basic rights.
I’m a big dumb sucker, and have apparently been suffering under the delusion that, much like food, shelter and clothing for offspring, education was one of the most basic rights an American citizen could expect. Aaah, now I hear it, the big giant buzzer going off in my ear, rudely letting me know that I was mistaken. Crap.
Only the winners get the funding. And how will the “winners” be decided? By data. And since there seems to be only one way to collect and analyze that much data (there are a lot of schools in this country), I’m assuming we’re back to the a**loads-of-standardized-testing portion of education reform. Woohoo! I was just missing that GW guy so much, and now it feels like we’ve got him back. I’m so relieved.
The less-cranky optimist (and usually fervent supporter of Obama) in me is hoping for some really excellent fine print that will prove my fears about this education reform plan wrong. Seriously, someone tell me I’m wrong and this plan isn’t evil. Maybe competition will bring out the best in everyone, and every school will get the money it needs.
President Obama is saying that the testing will be different this time, that it will be better. Let’s hope so. I get it that fixing the education system is probably very close to being insurmountable, and I get it that there isn’t enough cash available to hand out to every school that needs funding. But really with the competition and the data? The American Way bites.
Setting really far over to the side the fact that I think everyone (even the humans I don’t particularly want to hang out, drink coffee, and chat about politics with) is entitled to an affordable college education, here’s a new take on calculating students loan factors. U.S. News and World Report has a piece about the different tools available for students to use for figuring out their potential future earnings and what that might mean vis-á-vis paying back their student loans.
Included in the list of future-salary calculators is the soon-to-be-launched Human Capital Score. It’s in beta right now, and can therefore currently be accessed for free by anyone who’s interested. (Once it’s officially launched, I’m assuming it’ll cost you in some way, shape, or form). Unlike traditional FICO scores, the Human Capital Score figures out a given student’s future ability to pay back the money they borrowed for college using the student’s SAT scores, their high school GPA, their undergraduate major and their undergrad GPA.
It’s interesting in so far as HCS is utilizing a different set of variables when calculating student loan factors. However, while I do appreciate it when the system tries new and exciting approaches to measuring people’s potential, I still tend to take issue with the obsessive need to measure people in the first place, especially when it comes to deciding who deserves how much education based on test scores and possible future earnings. Again with the standardized test scores meaning more than they should and the in-it-for-the-potential-to-do-good careers getting shafted.
Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier write an insightful blog for Education Week called Bridging Differences. They write their posts in the form of letters back and forth to each other, arguing like educated, rational humans about topics in education.
Recently up was a letter from Diane Ravitch to Deborah Meier about merit pay for teachers: What’s Wrong With Merit Pay. Ravitch had some excellent points about the teacher compensation reform issue, most of which are along the same lines as my own view on the subject, but she adds a whole extra layer of nougat-y goodness to the argument against merit pay:
There are several reasons why it is a bad idea to pay teachers extra for raising student test scores:
*First, it will create an incentive for teachers to teach only what is on the tests of reading and math. This will narrow the curriculum to only the subjects tested.
*Second, it will encourage not only teaching to the test, but gaming the system (by such mechanisms as excluding low-performing students) and outright cheating.
*Third, it ignores a wealth of studies that show that student test scores are subject to statistical errors, measurement errors, and random errors, and that the “noise” in these scores is multiplied when used to make high-stakes personnel decisions.
*Fourth, it ignores the fact that most teachers in a school are not eligible for “merit” bonuses, only those who teach reading and math and only those for whom scores can be obtained in a previous year.
*It ignores the fact that many factors play a role in student test scores, including student ability, student motivation, family support (or lack thereof), the weather, distractions on testing day, etc.
*It ignores the fact that tests must be given at the beginning and the end of the year, not mid-year as is now the practice in many states. Otherwise, which teacher gets “credit,” and a bonus for score gains, the one who taught the student in the spring of the previous year or the one who taught her in the fall?
Sometimes I wonder why the decision-makers are so backward in their thinking, and then I wonder which one of us non-decision-makers was responsible for putting them in charge in the first place. Outdoor recess and unstructured, in-classroom play time have been decreasing so as to make time for the fully structured knowledge-absorption parts of the school day. The yahoos in charge of how much time is spent learning vs. playing in elementary schools need to spend an afternoon finger-painting and remember what it was like to be a kid.
Alternatively, they could read all the research backing up the idea that kids who are given time during the school day for physical activity (the crux of the recess invention) and to play in the classroom during free choice time (they learn while they play indoors, too) are better able to sit down at their desks and absorb more info when it comes time for the focusing.
I’m a big recess fan, so I’ve always been cranky about the slow but sure disappearance of primary school recess times. But there’s also an entire portion of in-classroom free time, also known as child-directed educational play, which is being squeezed out in favor of fully structured, sit-still-and-absorb-the-information learning.
The traditional kindergarten classroom that most adults remember from childhood—with plenty of space and time for unstructured play and discovery, art and music, practicing social skills, and learning to enjoy learning—has largely disappeared. The results of three new studies, supported by the Alliance for Childhood and described in this report, suggest that time for play in most public kindergartens has dwindled to the vanishing point, replaced by lengthy lessons and standardized testing.
The studies were conducted by researchers from U.C.L.A., Long Island University and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The researchers found that
• On a typical day, kindergartners in Los Angeles and New York City spend four to six times as long being
instructed and tested in literacy and math (two to three hours per day) as in free play or “choice time” (30 minutes or less).
• Standardized testing and preparation for tests are now a daily activity in most of the kindergartens studied, despite the fact that most uses of such tests with children under age eight are of questionable validity and can lead to harmful labeling.
• Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared from the 268 full-day kindergarten classrooms studied.
• In many kindergarten classrooms there is no play- time at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not
incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.
Kindergartners are now under great pressure to meet inappropriate expectations, including academic standards
that until recently were reserved for first grade. At the same time, they are being denied the benefits of play—a major stress reliever.
If teachers were in charge, I can guarantee there would be more free time in the classroom for the kids to engage in child-directed, imagination-saturated, problem-solving, cognition-developing play. Anyone who has learned anything about the psychology of kiddos and their brain wiring knows that they are learning even when they are playing, and that they learn better during the in-desk formal learning part of their school day if they’ve have a chance to blow off some steam and decompress a little.
Someone with a conscience and the proverbial balls to use their powers for good needs to get some official documentation of their qualification to tell the powers that be what it is, exactly, that kids require to be happy and healthy. (The answer is: More play, on and off the monkey bars.)
I think educational psychology carries some excellent potential for bureaucratic ass-kicking. Educational psychologists understand the whys and hows of who is learning what, how they’re learning in any given situation, and who is teaching and what makes those educators tick, and why the curriculum is or isn’t working for all parties involved. They’re the ones who grok the whole educational picture of a school and can use torrents of gorgeous vocabulary to explain to the policymakers why recess matters. Someone go to it and save our kids.
While I’m usually one to veer away from technology, I have always maintained that it does have its place in the education realm. Kids these days (is there any way to avoid sounding like my grandmother when I use that phrase?) rarely separate themselves from technology, and as much I adore a Ticonderoga #2, they tend to see paper and writing implements as inefficient and old-fashioned. It’s fortunate that I’m a confident enough girl to not take umbrage at what that may imply about me and my doddering 35-year-old-ness.
Technology is not my favorite item on the menu, but I absolutely see its usefulness, especially in terms of educating the tech-savvy younger generations. Kaplan has just launched a Facebook application for their SAT prep tools that melds nicely with the whole education/technology/whippersnappers-glued-to-their-laptops era. It saves trees, and users can challenge each other with the “Challenge a Friend” feature.
I’m not a proponent of standardized testing, but as long as the tests are being used, the technologically adept teenagers of today may as well have access to as much digital test prep as possible.
It is hard to write while doing the Happy Dance. Or, it would be if I were a dancing girl. Which I’m not. I’m pretty much only graceful in the water, so I’ve never felt compelled to express myself in a River-Dancing-ish manner. I am dancing on the inside though, and this is not only more conducive to typing, it also avoids getting me into trouble with the Grace and Coordination Police.
Many smart, powers-that-be types in the realm of higher education are having an open-to-the-public conference on April 15th and 16th, 2009 to discuss building a better College Admissions mousetrap. It’s been somewhat biased and lacking over the past few decades or more, and it would be grand if they could make it a little spiffier.
One of the items on the agenda is standardized testing and the good, the bad, and the ugly wrenches it throws into the college admissions works. See? Happy Dance. Progress, forward thinking, and not putting everyone into boxes—all good stuff.
On April 15 and 16, 2009, Wake Forest University will host top admissions officers and leading researchers from Berkeley, Duke, Harvard, Ohio State, Princeton, Texas, Virginia, Yale and other universities along with the director of data research for U.S. News & World Report for the Rethinking Admissions conference. Participants will present papers and discuss the latest research on standardized testing, diversity, creativity, college ratings and how to evaluate success in college. The two-day event will be followed by a public lecture on April 21, featuring Robert Sternberg, Dean of Tufts University, who will report on Tuft’s experiment with essay questions as predictors of success in college.
I remain wary of Obama’s teacher compensation plan, but here are two articles on the subject. As I opined previously, the idea of paying the good teachers well is wonderful and I would wholeheartedly say “yes” if the world were more with the logic and the black-and-whiteness and less with the grey areas and red tape.
Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic, but I worry that somehow, even the great teachers who are doing the best they can with what they have will get screwed because they don’t have the resources available to them to do the proper job of educating that they’d like to do. Also, it strikes me that the only way for the powers that be to know which educators are improving/ being wonderful teachers is to test the students. That brings us right back to standardized testing and kids being caught in the middle and that always just pisses me off. Sometimes I wish I were brilliant think-tank fodder so I could solve problems like this.
