Tag: testing

Categories
BLM Domestic Policies Education News Politics teachers

Education’s Dirty Little Secret

The week began with the president saying that there was too much emphasis on testing in schools. 
In the middle of the week, the New York Times published a story about Success Academy Charter Schools that, among other things, noted the following:

The network serves mostly black and Hispanic students and is known for exacting behavior rules. Even the youngest pupils are expected to sit with their backs straight, their hands clasped and their eyes on the teacher, a posture that the network believes helps children pay attention. Ms. Moskowitz has said she believes children learn better with structure and consistency in the classroom. Good behavior and effort are rewarded with candy and prizes, while infractions and shoddy work are penalized with reprimands, loss of recess time, extra assignments and, in some cases, suspensions as early as kindergarten.

Backs straight? Hands clasped? Candy as a reward for good behavior? More homework as a punishment for bad behavior? Any public school teacher who attempted any of these would be severely reprimanded. In addition, this is not the way we’re supposed to be teaching in the 21st century. What happened to cooperative activities? Differentiation? Healthy snacks? Imagination?

By the time the week was over, the entire know-nothing education reform movement was in question.  Not that teachers and others who actually work in education didn’t already know this. Because they lived with the terrible reforms every day and had little influence on whether those reforms should have been imposed in the first place. After all, the political process is slow and those right-wing money machines that were attempting not just to change the schools but also to destroy the teacher’s unions had a vested interest in drawing out the process so that the public could catch a ride on the train as it crashed in Conjunction Junction.

Not so bad, right? At least we only messed up one generation of children.

Yes, friends, education came roaring back as a national priority with the release of both the PARCC and the NAEP exams this week. In a nutshell, students did not perform very well on the tests. The reasons? Well, there’s the rub. According to those who comment on such things, they range from the fact that more students are living in poverty to the truth that the Common Core Standards, which are the basis for the PARCC exams, have not been around long enough for students to have internalized them. As for the NAEP, the answer is even muddier, but the consensus seems to be that last year’s exam asked questions about curriculum that students have not been taught.

Really? If I gave tests on information I hadn’t taught my students, I could be fired. That hasn’t stopped the know-nothings from using tests to evaluate teacher performance and use the information to retain or let teachers go. This year we’re using flawed tests created by people who are not in classrooms based on standards that have not been sufficiently implemented.

But there’s a bigger problem. The NAEP has generally shown that students do not perform well in math and reading. If you want evidence, take a look at this report by the NAEP on the 2009 test administration. Scroll down to page 9, then look at pages 10 through 14. I’ll wait.

Interesting, yes? It shows that students in almost every state, save Massachusetts, do not perform proficiently on the test. Remember; the NAEP is called “The Nation’s Report Card” because it is given in every state, so it gives us an unsparing look at the differences in each state’s curriculum strength and delivery.

Want more stark proof? I knew that you did. Take a look at the 2013 NAEP Report that graphically shows the remarkable differences between student performance on the NAEP with their performance on their state’s end-of-year evaluation. Scroll yourself down to pages 3 and 4. Those graphs tell you the difference between NAEP scores and state tests scores. In every state but two–NY and MA–there was a gap between how students performed on state tests versus the NAEP.  Isn’t it scary enough to be posted on Halloween? Many states were clearly giving easy tests and skewing the results.

And, no, these numbers are not confined to 2009 and 2013. They are similar in every year the NAEP has been given.You could look it up. And you should, because this has been education’s dirty little secret for too long.

The lesson here? There are many. One is that both the NAEP and the PARCC are difficult tests that hold students accountable to standards that require much more reinforcement over time. The PARCC has not been in existence long enough for us to adequately measure its accuracy. The NAEP has been showing us for years that students across the country are not getting a rigorous enough training in content and skills that a truly educated person should have.

More important is that for years, at least since the No Child Left Behind Act began mandating tests in the early 2000s, most states have been giving easy tests based on easy curricula and calling themselves satisfied with their education systems. This is the main reason why we need the Common Core Standards. They will ensure that students throughout the country be held to the same standards no matter where they live. The political opposition to the Core Curriculum has been centered on federal government involvement in what should be a state concern. The state test scores invalidate that argument. Many of the states have been committing educational fraud. National standards will go a long way towards fixing that.

The president was correct in saying that we are focusing too much on testing, but testing is not going away and it shouldn’t. What we need are tests that measure what students know based on verifiable standards and that ask students to perform evaluative tasks that stretch their brains and their imaginations. We haven’t achieved either of those yet. That will require that classroom educators be intimately involved in the evaluative process. It will happen, but we need the know-nothings to step aside and let the teachers take over this process.

Let’s not waste another generation.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Education News Politics teachers

The Test, the Whole Test and Nothing But the Test

At some point, I could see teachers having to not only swear allegiance to the United States and the state in which they live, but taking an oath to uphold the testing mania that is now in full swing across the country. This would be the only legitimate way for tests to become an accepted part of the educational landscape in the form that the know-nothing reformers would like. But when you construct a system that relies on tests and ineffective evaluation measures, I suppose force is all you have to make the system work. Right Vladimir?

This past week in New Jersey, scores of teachers attended the state Board of Education meeting in Trenton with the express desire of bringing some sanity and professional judgement to the issue. Do I think this will happen? Not really, as long as the discussion begins and ends with testing and so-called objective measures of determining teacher effectiveness.

To be fair, I have been evaluated according to the Danielson rubric in my district, and my evaluations have reinforced what I, and my students over the years, have known all along; that I run my classroom according to accepted educational practice and that my students practice and learn the required academic skills. But only one-half of one of 22 components actually asks an administrator to evaluate my content area knowledge and most of the rubric focuses on what the teacher does, not what the students do. This is certainly one way to evaluate teachers, but it’s not the most effective.

Now come the tests. Last week, students in 11th grade took the state’s high school graduation test. In coming weeks, schools across the state will lose valuable instructional time administering elementary and middle school level tests that will eventually be used to evaluate those teachers. Then there’s the pilot program for the PARCC tests, that will take more time and students out of the instructional day.

Next school year, the state’s public schools will virtually shut down in March and May so that they can administer the full dosage of PARCC tests to students on computer hardware and software that must work 100% of the time during the tests. How likely is that to happen? And how likely is it that every teacher will be able to help students who push the wrong key or hit a fatal keyboard combination while legitimately trying to do their best? The tests will not be measuring teacher performance and will barely be measuring student knowledge. What they will be measuring is perseverance, survival, the district’s wealth and ability to buy computers, and how many rooms the school has available for testing.

The coup de grace is that one of the architects of this fakery, Christopher Cerf, stepped down as Education Commissioner last week, but not before penning a love letter to the NJEA, accusing it of double-dealing, hypocrisy and ignorance. I’ve met Commissioner Cerf in a formal professional setting and I can tell you that he doesn’t care a whit what the NJEA says. As long as the NJ state Board of Education supported him, that’s all Cerf needed to legitimize his program. Perhaps his successor, David Hespe, will look at what’s happening and actually listen to educators.

Until then, it’s testing…1,2,3 for students and teachers. Productive school days will suffer as a result.

Register your comments at www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Education

The Common Core Follies

You know it’s late August because the school stories are coming fast and furious. And speaking of furious, how about the reaction to the Common Core standards that are supposed to prepare our schoolchildren for work and college? In New York, where the scores declined in the debut year for the standards, the knives came out to excise the Common Core and implement…well, that wasn’t clear. Teachers, parents and administrators from both sides of the political spectrum were worried about what the test score said about what students learned, and a few were so angry that they threatened charges.

This points to the problem inherent in using test scores to evaluate…anybody. Teachers didn’t have the time, or the training, to fully implement the standards into their lessons. Students didn’t have time to learn the material and were tested on material they didn’t learn in a format that was alien to many of them. It was also the first year of the tests, and in most first years, scores drop.

The assumption, though, is that the Common Core standards are testable, or at least worthy of teaching. Why is it that every student has to go to college, or be college-ready? Clearly, and it is crystal clear to educators, not all students will go to college, and many who are there won’t finish because higher education is not for them. I understand that this is educational heresy and that I am swimming in dangerous waters. After all, the classes that I teach are considered college preparatory. My standards are based on the assumption that students should be analytical learners who can write coherently and synthesize what they’ve learned. In that sense, the Common Core has caught up to me. But unlike the Core, I understand that not all students will reach readiness by the time they graduate from high school and that many of them will not succeed in an institution of higher learning. So, in a sense, I am preparing them for something they will not use. That’s a waste of time and resources.

In addition, the tests will be administered on computers and only computers, the assumption being that all students have the same competency with technology. What of students who don’t (and I know of plenty of them)? What happens when it is the technology itself, and not the student’s knowledge, that is the problem? And what happens when it is the school district’s inability to purchase technology equipment or schedule adequate rooms or provide quiet places for testing that is part of the problem? These concerns have been waved off by some states, including New Jersey where I have been the wavee. How does that help evaluate students and teachers.

The Common Core Standards, like other previous attempts at measuring student growth, are devoted to the essential education problem: that of trying to have every student master the same material by the same date and to be evaluated in the same way at the same time. When are we going to realize that this has not worked and will not work adequately in the future? It’s even more vital that we get this right now, because teachers’ jobs are on the line. Politicians don’t understand this. Teachers do, but unfortunately, we are being shut out of the system for reasons that have nothing to do with pedagogy and everything to do with union politics and the unending search for those terrible teachers we keep hearing about.

There will be more about the Common Core in the school year to come, but keep in mind that any lockstep program is going to have problems. We are experience the latest one.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

Exit mobile version