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30 Apr 09

NAEP Results Produce More Evidence of NCLB's Failure; | CommonDreams.org

www.commondreams.org/...28-9 - Preview

naep assessment nclb

"NCLB is demonstrably unable to produce sustained and
significant improvements even on a standardized test in the two
subjects on
which it focuses, reading and math. It also fails to make a real dent
in the
wide gaps between whites, African Americans and Latinos," said Monty
Neill, Ed.D., FairTest's Deputy Director. "It is time to completely
overhaul this educationally destructive law. The Forum on Educational
Accountability has produced a blueprint to rewrite the law to focus on
improving schools not just inflating state test scores." Neill chairs
the
Forum, whose Joint Organizational
Statement on NCLB is endorsed by 150 national education, civil
rights,
religious, disability, parent, labor and civic groups.

Since NCLB, state test scores have typically increased, but
NAEP results have failed to show similar increases. "This is a clear
sign
that schools are pressured to narrow curriculum and teach to the state
tests.
That inflates state test scores but the inflated scores don't mean real
learning has improved," explained FairTest's Lisa Guisbond. "NCLB has
proven to be counter-productive. The Obama administration and the
Congress must
take the necessary steps to craft helpful, not harmful, federal
legislation."

Numerous research reports have shown NCLB has led to narrowed
curriculum, teaching to the test, organizational chaos, educator
resentment,
and other educational damage. Public opinion surveys have shown
increasing
public dislike of the law and strong opposition to the law's emphases
on
testing and sanctions.

24 Apr 09

Gerald Bracey: Getting the Word Out, Countering Fear-Mongers

The best response to the fear-mongers and stats-distorters I've read.

www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.html - Preview

businessroundtable nclb history education assessment statistics

Congressman Miller seems to have forgotten that economic cycles have come and gone in the past independent of what 4th graders were doing in math and science. The economies of developed nations will continue to rise in fall independent of test scores. Japan, with some of the highest scoring students in the world, has been in the economic doldrums for almost 20 years. Iceland, with high scoring students, has become an overnight basket case with national debt equal to 850% of its GDP.
Kids in Wyoming are 70 points ahead of kids in Mississippi. On WHAT? I cannot think of any common test kids in WY and MS take except NAEP and in 2007, Wyoming 4th graders scored 225 and Mississippi 4th graders scored 208. That’s 17 points, not 70, but I don’t think the President misread his teleprompter or suffers dyslexia. Whatever the differences, are they due, as the President claims, to the different standards in the two states? How about, differences in poverty. Thirty percent of the students in Wyoming are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. In Mississippi it’s 68 percent. My forthcoming book has a chapter "Poverty is Poison," a title I stole from Paul Krugman, with credit, and that, along with Dave Berliner’s new monograph on out-of-school factors in achievement should finally shut up the "poverty-is-no-excuse" crowd. (But they won’t).
31 more annotations...
- What about those 13- and 14-year olds, only one third of whom "can read as well as they should?" This is NAEP data. This is one of the critics’ favorite statistics for stirring up anxiety. Roy Romer and Bob Wise use it all the time. About one third of these kids score at the NAEP "proficient" level. When the Center for American Progress, an organization that claims to be progressive, rolled out Leaders and Laggards, its joint venture with the Chamber of Commerce in 2007, CAP executive director, John Podesta declared that he found it "unconscionable" that no state had a majority of its students scoring at the NAEP proficient level. Unconscionable!
  
  But, let’s ask, "If 13- and 14-year olds in other nations sat for America’s NAEP, how many of those countries would have a majority of students scoring at the proficient level?"
  
  The answer, in reading at least is: Zero.
  
  That’s what Richard Rothstein and colleagues found using a method first developed by Bob Linn. The highest scoring nation, Sweden, (Finland did not participate in this reading study) would have about one third of their students at or above the proficient level. The U. S., which scored very high, had 31%. Gary Phillips, former acting commissioner for statistics at NCES and now with the American Institutes for Research made similar estimates for math and science using TIMSS data. Only 5 of 45 nations would have a small majority of their students proficient in math and only two would clear that barrier in science. Further evidence, I would argue, that the NAEP achievement levels are set far too high.
- The 'Fastest Growing Occupations'
  
  What about those 30 fastest growing occupations? I’ve never seen that statistic presented in quite that way, but it also means that half of the 30 fastest growing jobs DON’T require a B.A. or better. But, the signal point about this statistic is that the 30 fastest growing jobs don’t account for many jobs. And the few that do are occupations like personal care aides, home health aides, nursing aides — low-paying service sector jobs needed in and for an aging nation.
  
  Retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing occupations combined. For every systems engineer needed by a computer firm, Wal-Mart needs about 15 people on the floor. The ten occupations accounting for the largest NUMBER of jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection from 2006 to 2016 were retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, registered nurses, janitors and cleaners, bookkeeping clerks, waiters and waitresses, food preparers and servers, customer service representatives, and truck and tractor drivers. I will show the falsity of Miller's and Duncan's linking of education and economic crises in detail later in the talk, but it terrifies me that our new President and Secretary of Education have apparently bought into the old falsehoods.
  
  Little wonder that Diane Ravitch said that in education Obama was a third term for Bush and that Duncan was Margaret Spellings in drag.
- The real causes of the current economic mess
  
  I think one of the reasons we see so many such comments is captured a bit in the first two quotes. Neither Miller nor the President could bring himself to actually blame the schools for today’s economic catastrophe, but they laid on them some of the responsibility for any recovery. There is a long history of trying to link test scores to a nation’s economic health. That notion needs to become extinct
  
  Let’s take a moment to reflect on the causes of the current mess. Banks used very little capital of their own to buy extremely risky real estate assets, granting subprime mortgages and mortgages on overpriced houses, often without even making credit checks. Then they used virtually unfathomable instruments such as credit default swaps to insure against loss. But insurance companies that insured those risks, like AIG didn’t have the capital to pay off the swaps when the banks’ bets went bad. The situation has produced a slight reworking of the opening rhetorical flourishes of that landmark document, "A Nation At Risk:"
  
  We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
- Looking again at The Manufactured Crisis, I found all the myths that David [Berliner] and Bruce [Biddle] debunked [in their book The Manufactured Crisis] are still hanging around. They are just overlaid with another 15 years worth of data. I have a different perspective, plus the advantage of those 15 years of data. David and Bruce took each myth and demolished it individually. They organized their debunking around a collection of myths. I take a temporal approach. I organize around time and, while "A Nation At Risk," their signal event, was important, I think it all started earlier.
- Bashing public schools in the USA since World War II
  
  I see bashing schools as a longstanding predisposition that really took its current form just after World War II and I’d like to lay out today how that predisposition became an everyday habit. While Arthur Newman in his 1978 book, In Defense of the American Public School, has a section on “The always abundant criticism,” his reports are largely episodic into the Thirties and then he skips to the 70’s. In so doing, I think he misses the most important period of the rise of scapegoating.
  - So what is that period? Tease! - on 2009-04-24
  Add Sticky Note
- most influential of all at the time, Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools.
  
  Note the use of the word “Retreat.” I think this is the first title ever that suggested that things had once upon a time been better, that there had been some golden age of American public education which we had somehow tarnished. In 1956, Bestor was interviewed by U. S. News & World Report. The interview ran under the headline, "We Are Less Educated than Fifty Years Ago."
  
  Bestor made some remarkable historical errors, mostly by failing to take into account differences in the proportion of students finishing high school in 1906 vs. 1956 and changes in the socioeconomic status of those getting a diploma over that 50-year period. I say remarkable because Bestor was a historian and you’d think a historian would have noticed such things.
- The schools never recovered from the criticism unleashed by Sputnik, and quickly became society’s scapegoat of choice for perceived social crises. Since Sputnik, the driving force behind school reform efforts has been fear of the future with fear often serving as a means to gain power and control over the schools.
- When America’s cities went up in flames in the 1960’s schools once again were blamed. This time, at least one person saw the scam for what it was. Fred Hechinger, writing in the New York Times in 1967 observed
  
  Almost 10 years ago, when the first Soviet Sputnik went into orbit, the schools were blamed for America’s lag in space. Last week, in the Senate, the schools were blamed for the ghetto riots.
  
  In each case, the politicians’ motives were suspect. Their reflex reaction, when faced with a national crisis, is to assign guilt to persons with the least power to hit back. The schools, which are nonpolitical but dependent on political purse strings, fill the bill of emergency whipping boy.
- Earlier critics did not have the hammer of tests to pound schools with. NAEP did not exist until the 1970’s and it remained largely invisible until the 1990’s. SAT scores were stable up to 1963. Most states did not have state testing programs until the 1970’s. All Norm-Referenced tests except the various Iowa’s had floating standards so there was no way to tell if the 50th percentile in 1960 represented the same level of achievement as in 1950. International comparisons began in the 1960’s but the early ones contained too many methodological flaws to make them credible.
- Testing was now firmly cemented in place as THE instrument for measuring kids, teachers, and schools. A report to add steel reinforcement to that notion would come along soon. President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell, hoped for what he called a "Sputnik-like event" to shock Americans about the terrible state of their schools. Lacking such an event, Bell in 1981 reluctantly formed the National Commission on Excellence in Education. One of the driving forces of that commission, Harvard Physicist, Gerald Holton, at first refused the invitation to serve because Reagan was moving to dismantle some science and education programs that Holton supported and he was surprised and dismayed by the makeup of the commission—not a single national expert in education. It was an omen—the control of education would, over the next 20 years be stripped from educators.
  
  But Holton was coaxed in and "Reagan gave us our marching orders: Bring God back into the classroom. Encourage tuition tax credits for families using private schools. Support vouchers. And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education. As we left, I detected no visible dismay in our group. I wondered if we were all equally stunned."
  
  The report, "A Nation At Risk," did not mention any of Reagan’s "marching orders" and that caused a schism in White House. Adviser Ed Meese and other conservatives implored Reagan to reject it because it ignored Reagan’s marching orders. Moderates Jim Baker and Mike Deaver urged acceptance because it contained many issues Republicans, including Reagan, could campaign on.
- After the Cold Warrior rhetoric came 13 indicators of the risk. All reflect test scores. All accentuate the negative, even when they don’t have to. One of the indicators could have said "Scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and Iowa Tests of Educational Development have risen for seven consecutive years," but that information was not among the 13 pieces of data.
- Some of the indicators were highly selective. For example, one says, "There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U. S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments." If you look at NAEP trends, you will indeed find such a trendline for 17-year-olds. But not for 13-year-olds or 9-year-olds, the other two ages assessed. And the trends in reading and math show no hint of a decline at any age. Thus the commission had 9 trendlines, only one of which could be used to support crisis rhetoric and that was the one it used.
- "A Nation At Risk" brought together two assertions that have become gospel: educational quality can be measured by standardized tests and we must raise our test scores to compete in the global economy. High test scores = healthy economic nation. Those are the leitmotifs of the 26 years since the report appeared. You can hear them reflected over and over again in the quotes from President Obama and secretary Duncan that opened this talk, but they took their current form in 1983.
- Bell dispatched a team of educators headed by assistant secretary Chester Finn to Japan to see if we could import their education system. One of the team members, Herb Walberg, declared to the Washington Post, "I think it’s portable. Gumption and willpower, that’s the key." Otherwise Japan would eat our lunch. In the article, there is no indication that people perceived Walberg’s assertions as absurd.
  
  You remember Japan. Its economy was a miracle. Its students aced the tests in international comparisons. Then, about 1990, the Japanese discovered that the Emperor’s Palace and Grounds really weren’t worth more than the entire state of California, and its economy sank into the Pacific, soon taking the other Asian Tiger nations with it. The Japanese now speak of the 1990’s as the lost decade. They’ve never actually had a particularly good year since 2000 and they’re back in a heap of economic hurt: They officially declared themselves in recession again in 2007 and in 2008, the Japanese economy shrank three times as much as the U. S. economy. Their kids still ace tests.
- In 1987, reviewing a proposal to revamp NAEP, Bob Glaser, writing for the National Academy of Education said,
  
  Most of those personal qualities that we hold dear—resilience and courage in the face of stress, a sense of craft in our work, a commitment to justice and caring in our social relationships, a dedication to advancing the public good in communal life—are exceedingly difficult to assess. And so, unfortunately, we are apt to measure what we can, and eventually come to value what is measured over what is left unmeasured. The shift is subtle and occurs gradually.
- Well, maybe there’s hope.
  
  One way of chasing out the fear mongers, maybe, is to show them that there’s so much more to education than any test can measure. The Sunday, April 5, 2009 New York Times carried a page 1 article about activities that the Scarsdale district is using teach empathy. The hook for the article is probably that it’s in Scarsdale, but it also reports on major efforts in Los Angeles and 18 states. "Empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten."
- The Educational Testing Service is adding a "Personal Potential Index" to the Graduate Record Examination with ratings by instructors on “knowledge and creativity; communication skills; capacity for teamwork; resilience; planning and organizational skills; and ethics and integrity.” ETS says that students need these qualities to succeed in graduate school. Why limit them to graduate school? Somebody should tell Arne about ETS’ plans.
- From my experiences living in East and Southeast Asia and from what I’ve read, I cannot imagine students in any of those nations asking questions, or any employee suggesting to a supervisor that there’s a better way of doing something.
  - After 5 years in Shanghai and three in Seoul, I can attest to that. - on 2009-04-24
  Add Sticky Note
- People, though, especially the media and those who would like to take advantage of one of the largest untapped markets anywhere—the public schools—still make the connection between test scores and the economy.
- The schools cannot buy a good headline. The Progress in International Reading Study gets very few headlines. That might be because the US does well in that international comparison. In 2001, three countries scored higher, 9 were not significantly different, and 23 were lower. In 2006, with 45 countries, 10 scored higher, 13 the same and 30 lower. The U. S. score was 542 in 2001 and 540 in 2006. That difference is the same as a two-point difference on the SAT and well above the international average of 500. But the headline in Education Week, the only outlet I know of that even covered the results at all, was "America Idles on International Reading Test?" Why not "America Continues To Do Well On International Reading Test?" In any case, if America idles, the rest of the world is in neutral, too. Only 10 of the 28 countries that were in both assessments changed more than 10 points in either direction.
- One way of countering the fear mongers is to determine whether or not they are using the right statistic or whether there are statistics that are more meaningful. The international comparisons, TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS, all come to us mostly in terms of average scores and how those scores affect a country’s ranking among other countries in the world. But as Hal Salzman the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown pointed out in a paper in Nature last May, the average scores don’t mean anything. They write "If as we argue, average test scores are mostly irrelevant to as a measure of economic potential, other indicators do matter. To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy. These are students who can enter the science and engineering workforce or are likely to innovate whatever their field of study. Remarkable, but little noted, is the fact that the United States produces the lion’s share of the world’s best students."
  
  I would temper that by pointing out that they define "world’s best" terms of test scores, but that’s the currency of the day and in that currency no one else even comes close. It is very difficult to attain Level 6 on the PISA tests, the highest on the scale. New Zealand tops the world with 4% and Finland is second with 3.9%. But that 3.9% for Finland only translates into 2000 warm bodies. The U. S. has 67,000. Japan is second with about 34,000. The UK has 21,000.
- The bad news is that we have the most lowest-performing students aside from Mexico. So there’s plenty of work to be done on the system, but we don’t have to say, as Duncan just did and as hundreds have across the years, we have a "crisis" in education.
- If test scores were so important to global competitiveness, you’d think our ranks on global competitiveness would be comparable to our ranks in the international test comparisons. But they’re not. There are two organizations that make it their business to rank nations on global competitive, the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland and the better known World Economic Forum which had its annual do recent in Davos, Switzerland. Now it is really going to be interesting to see what the current debacle does to the rankings, but as of 2008-2009 reports, the U. S. was number one.
  
  The IMD ranks 55 nations and the U. S. took over from Japan in 1994.
- The IMD wonders how much longer the U. S. can keep the lead. It notes that Singapore has been rising fast. But who cares? As Sam Dillon of the New York Times observed recently, comparing a diverse nation of 300 million with tiny city states such as Hong Kong and Singapore makes little sense. Which reminds me, seldom do the fear mongers take the cultural context of schools into account when discussing test scores. They seldom mention that everyday thousands of poor Malaysians cross into Singapore to do the dirty work. The long-term “guest workers,” mostly Filipinos, are forbidden to bring their families. These factors save Singapore a lot of work in educating children of the poor.
- What is important about the IMD rankings and even more so the WEF rankings is that they reveal how complex the idea of competitiveness is. Education is only one aspect of those rankings.
  
  The WEF has established what it calls "The Twelve Pillars of Competitiveness." I don’t have time to go into detail, but one way of countering the fear mongers is to try to make them aware of this complexity.
  
  First comes institutions which has to do with bureaucracy, corruption, transparency, trustworthiness, accountability, etc. As I say, it will be interesting to see what this year’s report looks like.
  
  The second pillar is infrastructure. We hear a lot about that these days, but before Katrina blew into town and that bridge collapsed into the Mississippi, I imagine few Americans thought much about infrastructure. Especially in terms of competitiveness. We took our roads, rails, ports, and airports for granted.
  
  Third is Macroeconomy. This is where the US does worst because the WEF hates deficits—that means money that could be used to increase productivity has to be used as interest on loans.
  
  I’ll just name the others, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor market efficiency, financial market sophistication (our financial markets sophisticated themselves right out of business), technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and, most important, innovation. Innovation, where the U. S. is #1, is the most important because it is the only pillar that does not at some point yield diminishing returns. You can only gain so much by, say, making planes bigger and faster, but innovation has no limit. I this connection, I would point out the Bob Sternberg, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts has observed that our obsession with testing has given us our most successful tool for stamping out creativity.
- The WEF ranks 134 nations and the U. S. has been #1 for most of the last decade, occasionally slipping to #2. If the forecasts of A Nation At Risk had been correct and if, as the critics claim, the schools never improved, how then did we get ranked #1 in global competitiveness and enjoy the longest sustained expansion in the world, an expansion that was real—productivity soared in the 1990’s.
  - QUOTE. - on 2009-04-24
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- Finally, let me return to NAEP, but rather than inundating you with numbers of numbers, I’ll just say this: Because of the changing ethnic makeup of this nation, and because of the fact that black and Hispanic students score still lower than whites, analyzing NAEP data simply at the national level makes no sense. In fact, it makes you the victim of Simpson’s Paradox. Simpson’s paradox shows up whenever the whole group analyzed shows one pattern but the subgroups show a different pattern.
  
  In 2002, the College Board lamented that there had been no change in the SAT verbal score since 1982. This was true for the national sample. But when I analyzed the trends by ethnicity, I found gains for all groups, some of them quite large. The reason for the apparent paradox was simply the changing demographics. In 1981, whites made up 85% of all SAT testtakers, in 2005, when I conducted the analysis the figure was 63%. The minorities were improving. But because the scores were still lower than whites and because minorities were making up an ever increasing share of the total pool, their lower scores attenuated the overall average.
- The same thing is true of NAEP. While there have been some areas of gain overall, if you look at the NAEP trends by ethnicity, the only place you see stability is in 17-year-old white kids. Everybody else is up and in groups up dramatically. For example, in mathematics, black 9-year-olds gained 34 points between 1978 and 2004, black 13-year-olds gained 34 points and black 17-year-olds gained 15 points.
- And just as you must cannot speak of "American" scores without looking at ethnic breakouts, neither can you speak of American schools without looking at breakouts by poverty. Yes, other countries have poor kids but many fewer. In one UNESCO study, the U. S. was 20th among 20 developed nations. Here’s an example of what poverty does to test scores taken from PIRLS.
  
  Top country Sweden, score 561
  
  U. S. overall 542
  
  International Average 500
  
  The 14.5% of American students in schools with less than 10% of their students in poverty 589
  
  The 19.5% of students in schools with 10% to 25% in poverty, 567. The 29.8% of students in school with 25-50 in poverty 551—if this group constituted a nation it would rank 4th among the 35 countries.
  
  That’s 64% of American students scoring at the top.
  
  The 21.3% of American students in schools with 50-75% in poverty, 519, still above the international average.
  
  Only the 15.1% of students in schools with more than 75% of their students in poverty score below the international average at 485.
- I fear that there is no way to counter the fear mongers directly. They have an agenda most of which revolves around controlling the curriculum and instruction and/or replacing the public schools with a private system.
  
  They are subject to shame, however. About 10 years ago Alex Molnar put together a loose confederacy of people to act as an underfunded countweight to the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, etc. At the first meeting I looked around at the 25 or so people in the room and said "This will never work." The reason, I thought, was that the people in the room already had very full lives without taking on additional efforts on behalf of the schools. But, ten years later, now co-headquartered at the University of Colorado and Arizona State, there are about 120 "fellows" as we are called engaged in a number of endeavors. Among the more successful, I think, is the Think Twice project known internally as the Think Tank Review Project. The Heritages and Hoovers of the world along with some professors like Paul Peterson at Harvard and Jay Greene at Arkansas had taken to publishing un-peer reviewed papers which, on close examination, presented selective data leading to pretermined conclusion. The Think Twice project hires scholars to review these advocacy research papers as one would a manuscript submitted to Ed Researcher or AERJ and publishes the results. The originals are credited for sound conclusions, faulted for overreaching, which is a common theme in the papers.
- It is said that if you tell a lie often enough people will believe. One can only hope that the same applies to the truth.

Podcast55: High Stakes Testing is the Enemy » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

David Berliner, cited by Gerald Bracey, on out-of-school factors affecting the achievement gap.

www.speedofcreativity.org/...gh-stakes-testing-is-the-enemy - Preview

assessment nclb

Bridging Differences: When Tests Don't Measure Well What They Appear to be Measuring

blogs.edweek.org/...ear_diane_those_were_five.html - Preview

assessment

some readers may not realize that the high-scoring nations that use standardized tests, if at all, use a different kind than those you were describing. They often consist of written and oral cross-examination, with grades determined by well-qualified judges. (The international scores we read about, readers should realize, are the results of low-stakes tests, which were given on a sampled basis.)
As E.D. Hirsch and I both note, such tests also abound in passages that require knowledge to which neither home nor school have equally exposed kids (and which Hirsch and I want to solve in different ways). All of these "faults" are built into the requirement to rank-order along a particular curve. These are not designed as pass/fail tests. Reliable psychometrics could only rank you by percentile—nothing more nor less. X percentage of students taking the test at the same time and under the same conditions got a higher number of "right" answers. There are no statistical methods to arrive at proficiency, etc. Those are "subjective"—i.e. human judgments.
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- Data distortion—as anyone studying our current economic crisis can tell us—is a serious problem. As in economics, so, too, in education. The "way" we report data can also distort it, as the term "grade level" has done. Which is why I am so often baffled about international comparisons: who is quoting what? (E.g. I’m skeptical when I note that China scored high on one of the recent tests, given that a high percentage of kids in China aren’t in schools at all, above all in rural China—which is still immense.)
- The Rhee/Klein/Duncan/et al traveling show would be amusing if it weren’t potentially influential. The capacity of our educational leaders to represent their views with the support—financial resources—of precisely the big-money boys whose accountability to the American public in their own sphere or expertise has proven to be so shamefully inept is immense. Inept at best, and corrupt at worst. They have transferred the same mindset now to a field they know precious little about.
- we could all get higher "scores" as we become a stupider nation.

23 Apr 09

High school exit exam hinders female and non-white students, study says - Los Angeles Times

www.latimes.com/...xam22-2009apr22,0,918646.story - Preview

assessment gender poverty race

skeptical of the "stereotype threat" effect, but that it has been well-established by social psychologists

20 Apr 09

How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools -- Printout -- TIME

www.time.com/...0,8816,1891468,00.html - Preview

standards assessment

How to Build Better Standards

The drive toward common national standards should begin, I think, with math and reading. Algebra should be the same for a kid in Albany, N.Y., as it is for one in Albuquerque, N.M., or for that matter in Beijing or Bangalore. (We can save for later the debate over whether that should be true for more subjective subjects like history.) These standards should define precisely what students are expected to know by the time they complete each grade and should be accompanied by tests to assess their level of proficiency.
The best standards are those that are clear and very specific. For fourth-grade reading, an example would be demonstrating the ability to distinguish between cause and effect and between fact and opinion in a selected text. For fourth-grade math, examples would include demonstrating the ability to calculate perimeters and volumes, multiply whole numbers, represent data on a graph, estimate computations and relate fractions to decimals. Specific common standards would allow textbook and curriculum developers to spend their research dollars achieving clear goals rather than producing various versions for different states. Just because the standards are national does not mean, thank goodness, that they need to be written by the Federal Government.
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- a nonprofit called Achieve Inc
- The Road to Reform
  
  Clear standards, testing and assessments would permit more experimentation by schools and individual teachers. After Hurricane Katrina, a surge of young and creative educators went to New Orleans, led by Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools, the New Schools Venture Fund and successful charter operators like KIPP Academies. Now more than 60% of the students are in charters, and test scores are improving. For such a system of experimentation to work, there need to be clear standards and assessments so that parents and administrators can know which schools are successful. Indeed, the entire national debate about whether charter schools are good or bad could be defused (as Duncan did in Chicago) if both sides accept the obvious: good charter schools are good, bad charter schools are bad, and a system of common standards and assessment is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- A national system of standards and testing would also permit the gathering of consistent data, down to the classroom level, so that we could finally get more rigorous evidence to answer some basic questions: Do smaller classrooms make a big difference, and in which situations? How beneficial is it to have a longer school day or year? It would also help resolve disputes about different teaching methods, like whether phonics or a whole-language approach to reading works best. In addition, we could more easily spot ineffective teachers, and they could be weeded out or offered training resources that have proved useful.

18 Mar 09

NCLB's focus on failure prompts similar attitude in students - Related Stories - ASCD SmartBrief

www.smartbrief.com/...storyDetails.jsp - Preview

assessment students nclb schooliness webroundup

17 Mar 09

Study: European test too flawed to compare U.S., other students - USATODAY.com

Brookings' right-wing challenge is interesting to contrast with Bracey's left-wing one.

www.usatoday.com/...2009-02-26-pisa-test_N.htm - Preview

timms pisa assessment

And he noted the PISA test is not tied to school curriculum. That means PISA doesn't measure what schools teach; it measures real-world application, or what kids can do after schools have taught them.

That stands in contrast to the United States' National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, often called the nation's report card, which is tied to curriculum. Another international test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, also is tied to curriculum.

Loveless is a representative to the group that administers TIMSS and is on the U.S. advisory board for PISA.
The group that runs PISA, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, called the Brookings study disingenuous. Andreas Schleicher, who directs PISA, said it's important to see how students use what they learn.

"You can ask yourself what service school is doing to students if they cannot transfer what they have learned in school to real-life contexts," Schleicher said.

Schleicher also said children's beliefs are measured separately from knowledge and skills.

May 1998: Bracey: TIMSS, Rhymes with 'Dims,' As in 'Witted'

Good demolition of TIMSS soundness. Have they improved since '98?

www.pdkintl.org/...kbra9805.htm - Preview

timss research assessment

The U.S.-Cyprus difference in the structure of schooling is just one
of many problems of differing cultures that afflict these studies and cannot
be solved by taking ever more precise samples. Because of these differences,
international comparisons on test scores can never be very meaningful. (What
can be meaningful is to look at what other countries do in their schools
and decide if it makes any culturally relevant sense for us to do it, too.)
Here's a more noteworthy example of cultural differences: fully 55% of
American students reported themselves working at a job more than 15 hours
a week.1 Research studies have reported
that, for us, jobs and schoolwork exhibit a curvilinear relationship. Kids
who work up to 15 hours a week do better in school than those who don't
work and those who work longer hours. The TIMSS results corroborate this.
American students who reported that they worked 10 hours a week actually
scored above the international average. Those who worked more than
25 hours a week were 60 points lower. (In almost all other countries, very
few students work at all.)
3 more annotations...
- Who knows what other cultural and social factors affect these data? Such
  factors often come to light only by accident. For instance, in the First
  International Adult Literacy Survey (FIALS), the United States did pretty
  well overall. Only Sweden had a larger proportion performing at the highest
  two levels. But our immigrants in the study had severe reading limitations,
  no doubt because of having first learned a language other than English.
  On the other hand, FIALS also revealed that Canada has a higher proportion
  of immigrants who read at the highest two levels (28%) than of native-born
  Canadians (20%). What could explain this apparent absurdity? Turns out that
  Canada has an aggressive policy of recruiting highly skilled, highly educated
  immigrants to come live in the land of the maple leaf. Thus these scores
  that at first glance appear to say something about the quality of education
  are in fact strongly influenced by immigration policy.
- Finally, the official story about TIMSS has not reported that most countries
  did not meet the TIMSS criteria for participation. To have their results
  counted, countries were supposed to have a combined student/school participation
  rate of at least 75% and a sample of students representative of at least
  90% of all students eligible to participate. Only nine countries met the
  first criterion, only 14 met the second, and only five met both.
  Some countries excluded 22% of eligible students (Cyprus) or 30% (Italy)
  or even 43% (Russian Federation). Reporting the results for all 21 countries
  is thus comparing the incomparable, something that is strictly forbidden
  under normal rules of research.
- I say again as I have said so often in the past: there are serious problems
  in American schools, and our poor rural and urban schools need the equivalent
  of a Marshall Plan. But we should attend to problems that actually exist.
  Those that were purportedly revealed in the official story of TIMSS do not.
  Forgione has called TIMSS "rough around the edges." I say rotten
  at the core. The official TIMSS story is an exercise in political rhetoric
  and comes very close to being a hoax perpetrated on the whole world.

04 Mar 09

Flypaper: Education reform ideas that stick, from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

A Fordham post I actually found valuable.

www.edexcellence.net/...-constraining-charter-scale-up - Preview

teaching assessment charters

First, America’s elite colleges do not accurately reflect America. Students from privileged backgrounds are drastically overrepresented at these schools. As this invaluable paper found, fully 74 percent of students at the nation’s most selective colleges come from families in the top income quartile. Only 10 percent come from families in the bottom half of income, with only 3 percent from the poorest quartile. In other words, if you meet a student from an elite university, he/she is 25 times more likely to come from a rich family than a poor family.

It is tempting to assume that this means that only rich high school graduates are prepared for elite colleges. Not so, shows this great report from the Education Trust. There are plenty of highly talented low-income students; they just don’t have equal access to the top colleges. “High-achieving, high-income students are five times more likely to attend a highly selective college and nearly twice as likely to attend a selective college than are similarly accomplished students from the bottom three income quartiles.”

So obviously there are many highly talented students at second-, third-, and fourth-tier universities. Given that we don’t have any reliable measures of colleges’ value-added, particularly their ability to improve a student’s ability to teach disadvantaged K-12 charter students, why the explicit bias in favor of graduates from elite universities? Why not recruit, say, the top 10 percent of graduates from all colleges or the top 20 percent from the top half of colleges?

27 Feb 09

City will spend $1.5M to extend judging of teachers via test scores | GothamSchools

gothamschools.org/...ng-of-teachers-via-test-scores - Preview

unions assessment

Mike Rose's Blog: Portraits of Thinking: A Test Taker

Great post on the trickery of standardized mc tests.

mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/...ts-of-thinking-test-taker.html - Preview

assessment reading

Education Secretary Duncan Highlights Budget Proposals to Increase College Access and Affordability

www.ed.gov/...02262009.html - Preview

duncan assessment teacher_certification teacher_retention webroundup

Make college loans reliable, stable and efficient, thus eliminating uncertainty families have experienced due to the turmoil of the financial markets. All new student and parent loans would be provided directly from the federal government through the same electronic system that colleges use for Pell Grants. Taxpayers would save more than $4 billion a year in reduced entitlement subsidies, and those funds could be reinvested in more aid to students seeking a higher education. Private sector companies would continue to perform loan collection and related services through performance-based contracts with the Department of Education.
Stronger Standards and Assessments

The department's 2010 budget also will help states develop and implement rigorous, college-ready academic achievement standards along with improved assessments, including assessments for students with disabilities and English language learners, to accurately measure students' knowledge and skills.
2 more annotations...
- More Effective Teaching and School Leadership
  
  The 2010 request will support a wide range of efforts to strengthen the education workforce, including greater accountability for teacher and principal preparation programs; improved systems and strategies for recruiting, evaluating, and supporting teachers; and incentives for rewarding effective teachers and encouraging them to teach where they are most needed.
  - Sticky. Details? - on 2009-02-27
  Add Sticky Note
- Scaling Up Success
  
  The department will continue to use the Innovation Fund to identify and replicate successful models and strategies that raise student achievement, including comprehensive approaches such as Promise Neighborhoods that aim to improve college-going rates by combining a rigorous K 12 education with a full network of neighborhood-based social services.
  - Sounds good. - on 2009-02-27
  Add Sticky Note

Content vs Concept: The winner is… « Organic Classroom

Well-written and -argued.

organicclassroom.wordpress.com/...ntent-vs-concept-the-winner-is - Preview

nclb assessment webroundup

Standardized testing changes the whole argument. Over at Change.org Clay Burell talks about “spoons for feeding or spoons for digging”. He wonders if teaching less content but in a more meaningful way helps a students to learn more. I feel it does. The problem comes when the students sit down for a content based test and have only covered 50% of the content. Sure, the students might have a deeper understanding of the content that they did cover, but the students are at a huge disadvantage when they encounter test questions that contain content that was never covered in class. Maybe the type of testing is the problem.

When I was going through university in the 90’s the state of Maryland school system had just put into place something that seemed to me quite groundbreaking at the time, performance assessment. The big state wide tests were not grading content, but asking students to demonstrate problem solving skills and a deeper understandings of subject areas. The hope was that changing the test would change the way in which schools instructed. Maryland stopped administering these performance assessment tests in 2002. The tests were replaced with tests that met the requirements of No Child Left Behind. We need more tests that show what a student can do, not just what a student knows.

So who is the winner, content or concept? I think if our tests focused more on thinking and doing and less on knowing ’stuff’ we could all start getting our students ready for the information age.

26 Feb 09

Test case: Cramming for a sociology exam w/o taking the class

Passes the test without taking the class. Just crams for two weeks.

www.guardian.co.uk/...schools.aslevels - Preview

assessment

23 Feb 09

So I'm The Valedictorian

Powerful. More resonant in 2009 than when it was given in 2000, in many ways.

www.newdemocracyworld.org/annelise.htm - Preview

assessment schooliness students activism

Umm yeah, so I'm the valedictorian. Number one. But, what separates me from
number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, or 120? Nothing but meaningless numbers. What really
is the difference between 3.8, 2.9, and 1.5? All these randomly assigned numbers
reflect nothing about the true character of an individual. They say nothing
about personality. Nothing about desire or will. Nothing about values or morals.
Nothing about intelligence. Nothing about creativity. Nothing about heart.
Numbers cannot and will not ever be able to tell you who a person really is. Yet
in today's society we are sadly becoming more and more number oriented. Schools
today are being forced to teach to the numbers. Children are no longer learning
because it is interesting and fun; they are learning to pass the test so that
the school will continue to be funded. New mandates across the country and in
our own state incorrectly correlate test scores with the worth of teachers and
schools. Not once do these new mandates take into account that schools in low
income areas will never have as many books, long term students, parent
volunteers, or state of the art facilities. How can anyone call these tests fair? Just as class rank and
SAT scores say nothing about
the true worth of a person, a child's or school's score on a test says nothing about the worth of the school or teachers.

It is disturbing enough that throughout high school, GPA and grades are pushed as the most important things, while learning, the real reason we
are in school, falls by the wayside. The MCAS serve as just another set of meaningless numbers that add one more reason to focus on scores and
forget learning.

The already teetering learning process, made difficult by the social dynamics of school cliques, disrupted by a constant lack of funding and
misplaced values, has been further torn apart by a few meddling politicians and yuppies who were bored and felt the need to create what
they call a standard.
How are we supposed to grow up to be thinking individuals when the examples set for us are those of greedy politicians bought out by money
in a corrupt democratic system where only the rich are allowed to participate? A corporate world where our parents whore themselves out
to heartless companies that are only out to make a buck. A clothing and manufacturing industry that moves to the third world so that it can
freely underpay and abuse its workers in order to make the most profit. A world where our education is reduced down to GPA, SAT, and MCAS.
Maybe our society should worry less about the three R's and more about the morals of future generations, and leave the teaching to the
teachers.
3 more annotations...
- There are some who have managed to grow beyond the memorized facts and formulaic thinking. Those who were in Seattle at the WTO conference.
  Those that are in Harvard Square today protesting the Gap's labor and environmental policies. Those that will be protesting at this year's
  republican and democratic national conventions. Those that are trying to make a difference. But they are a miraculous few. They could be and
  should be so many more. We do community service and plant a few flowers but are never given the chance to truly understand what a community is.
  We participate in a student government but never learn what it truly means to be an activist. We are taught history but are never truly
  taught about the history that we have the chance to make.
- We hear GPA, class rank, SAT, test grade, midterms, finals, scholastic achievement but never once do we hear
  "never mind the grades, think about
  the learning, think about activism, think about life." We celebrate those who have earned good grades but don't bother to consider if they
  are at all worthy of the praise. Does anyone care about the human beings behind the numbers?
- Perhaps I am bitter, but I have every right to be bitter and angry about the world that I see around me. My responsibility lies in that I must
  do something constructive with my anger. And I suppose that in the end I have school to thank for making me so unhappy, inadvertently giving me
  the fuel to take a stand in life and do something with what I have been given. And so I stand here today and forever, and refuse to be defined
  as a number.
  
  Annelise Schantz
  
  June 4, 2000

20 Feb 09

Bridging Differences: We Need Schools That 'Train' Our Judgment

blogs.edweek.org/..._diane_thanks_for_nailing.html - Preview

nclb assessment

There’s been a lot of talk on the business pages of our media about the “data problem.” It ought to give the “data-driven” school reformers pause to reconsider. Maybe we are just creating a bubble that too will burst if we continue to base our actions on the belief that scores on standardized instruments are evidence of success.
Some folks (Diane?) think that my skepticism about tests should make me a fan of a single national test. All of these dilemmas are even worse, after all, when we are dependent on data collected from states using 50 different tools, each reporting scores in different ways, and on and on. I think I’d be a sympathizer if we could go back to the old NAEP tests, developed in the 1930s, which tried to use sampling in the interest of collecting better data—standardized prompts and open-ended tasks—that opened the door to more authentic responses. Such an instrument could provide some common data out of which we might develop uncommon responses and interpretations. But NAEP went from a promising beginning to being another standardized test. In our eagerness for simpler data, when only complex data will do, we lost a useful research instrument.

17 Feb 09

Education Sector: Research and Reports: Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

www.educationsector.org/...research_show.htm - Preview

21stcenturyskills assessment research technology

15 Feb 09

Think and Dream in English: Dr Douglas Reeves - Toxic Grading Practices

dreaminenglish.blogspot.com/...glas-reeves-toxic-grading.html - Preview

assessment

03 Feb 09

Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed

www.insidehighered.com/...grades - Preview

assessment education change

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Think and Dream in English: Dr Douglas Reeves - Toxic Grading Practices

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