Fifth grade teacher’s view here: I have students in my classroom reading at different levels…anywhere from 1st-9th grade. The ones that read below grade level are not all in special education. They’re just “low”. So, they get no special help…I can’t spend the whole day getting one student up to speed when I have 22 others…and they fall further and further behind. I believe most of my “low” kids could learn to read at grade level. But they should have been caught at the end of first or second grade.
In my perfect world, if a child isn't reading adequately by the end of second grade (and they don't qualify for special education)... they wouldn't repeat a grade, but their third grade year would be spent with intensive reading instruction...they'd be pulled out of class and worked with in small groups. This instruction would end when they improved in reading.
There are a lot of reasons why a child gets behind in reading - they miss a lot of school in their early years. Or they are more immature and don’t pay attention. Or their parents themselves don’t read and don’t think it’s important. And the kids get behind. But they still get passed on. These kids begin to believe that they are not good at reading and they don’t get better. They get tested for special education, but they don’t qualify. And, if you don’t qualify for something, you don’t get any extra help.
Nobody wants to fund a program that isn’t helping a child with a proven disability.
Meanwhile, the average and high achieving students get the shaft too. They are drilled to death preparing for the standardized tests. As a matter of fact, that’s what education has become----test prep.
Fifth grade in Nevada has a big writing test in January. So our principal has decreed that between now and the test, our fifth graders are going to be writing (probably personal essays) an hour a day, everyday. I was going to teach the approved science curriculum…“Mixtures and Solutions”…chemistry in fifth grade…science experiments galore. But I have to put that on hold. Now I’m getting depressed because I think kids need to do science experiments…they might be excited about learning again and want to come to school. They might want to learn more about science and read about it on their own.
This is my take on what’s wrong with the current education system.
I teach math classes at a University. The classes I teach most often should be high school classes (Algebra, etc). The students are woefully unprepared to take even these basic math classes. Almost every student brings a calculator along despite the fact that no test I give requires the use of a calculator; anyone who can do basic arithmetic will not need a calculator. So, I’m already far more generous than I want to be. I’d rather ban calculators altogether.
That’s just background. Here’s the interesting bit: I have gotten in trouble with the new Dean of our school because too many people fail my basic classes (or withdraw from the class because they would otherwise fail). As it happens, my failure/withdrawal rate is similar to that of the senior faculty (I fall right in the middle). However, I may be denied tenure because I won’t pass people who can not be bothered to learn the material. The math faculty is already considering how this may affect their future hires, if they have to make sure to hire people who will pass all the lazy and stupid students.
I think you are incorrect. I think that what many want (rightly or wrongly) is to ensure that all students acheive a minimal competency, and whatever happens over that is gravy.
You’re telling me. I took a maths class where in one tute, I listened to the tutor explain to some guy that “x” meant cross product, not multiply, and multiply was scalar product. This was halfway through the course.
That’s a really good question, Tevildo, and one that I asked many times over the last semester.
What I ended up teaching was how to take the TAKS - Texas’ yearly standardized test. In seventh grade, one portion of the test is an essay in response to a prompt.
I was responsible for teaching the students:
how to read the prompt
how to brainstorm to the prompt using a specific formula
how to write a flowchart on their selected topic
write a first draft
edit and revise
write a final draft
The procedure for responding to the TAKS prompt is incredibly narrow and almost impossible to apply to any other writing situation. Basically, I spend (or would have, as I am no longer employed be DISD) the better part of the school year teaching my students how to take a test. In that time, I haven’t been able to conver any of what I’d consider a normal language arts curriculum. In comparison to my last teaching job - where I’d covered memoir, technical writing, short story, research paper, persuasive essay, business letter, and three other major writing projects, as well as vocabulary and grammar - this past semester, I haven’t been a teacher. I’ve been a jail warden with a really lame manner of torturing the inmates.
This is a bit of a driveby post, as I’m going to be away for a couple of days, but here it goes anyway.
There is a problem with slamming the recent reliance on standardized testing. Namely that these tests were created largely in response to poor educational performance. We did not have a smoothly running system that got attacked by NCLB. NCLB is an attempt to fix the problems that were rampant in our schools. It may not work, but I think it’s unfair to imply that it is the cause of poor education.
In the spirit of NCLB, my company is instituting a “No Chip Left Behind” program. We are going to require our fab vendor to move to a situation where every chip they make for us hits our minimum speed requirement. If we have products at say, 600, 800 and 1,000 MHz, we won’t care about the distribution, just that each and every chip hits 600.
Stupid, right? And the desire for minimal competency for all is stupid also. (I think you are correct that this is the goal.) There are outliers with kids just like with chips, and drawing a line on the curve and saying that no one should be below it shows an ignorance of statistics and distributions. A decent goal would be raising the mean and/or median of the test curve. That would let schools balance the resources they put into helping the average and gifted kids, and not have to overspend on the bottom half or face losing money and control.
But this is probably too sophisticated for the nitwits in Washington of all political stripes.
Many years ago when I was on my local school board, one of the members was distressed at some of the test results. The kids had also been given IQ tests, and an effort was made to compare the aggregate results of achievement tests to the aggregate results of IQ tests. (Note: we were NOT looking at individual students’ tests.) One of the board members was very distressed that so many of the kids had IQs from the 90 - 110 range. “Isn’t that awfully low?” she asked. “No,” I responded, “That’s average.” “But we should aim higher than that!” she replied. “ALL of our children should be above average.” She wanted them to all be above grade level on the inter-school comparisons, too. :smack:
It was very difficult to explain to her that it was mathematically impossible for all the members of a given population to be superior to themselves.
So it’s not just “nitwits in Washington.” Nor is this a recent phenomenon.
I don’t think it’s the cause of poor education. I do think, though, that standardized testing and the associated school incentives/penalties are dragging everyone down the to lowest “acceptable” level.
The gradeschool where I used to live was quite innovative. We had a lot of hands-on teaching, including getting the kids out of the classroom for field work. I was just talking to one of the teachers, and she told me that for two months out of the year, they do nothing but prepare for standardized testing. If it isn’t on the test, they don’t study it. No field trips. No labs. No guest speakers. No extra projects, essays, art classes, school plays, or creative lessons.
Obviously, you need to teach the three Rs (well, the R, W & A), but that shouldn’t be the only thing taught. I think the quality of education in that school has decreased significantly.
Those are good points. I think the NCLb can be improved. I admit that I have a major problem with many of its opponents (read: Teachers’ Unions) who seem to be keen on avoiding any kind of standards, no matter how loose.
I disagree with placing emphasis on “passing the test,” but that’s a state failure, nor a problem with the NCLB. And yes, we do know there will be an incentive for some to cheat; that incentive should be weeded out by making the tests diverse and comprehensive, and not for the states to try and create incentives. You can’t “cheat” the SAT, either.
I agree with Farmwoman. Sure, I was a good student, but I could do those tests blindfolded in my sleep. Even the class clowns never failed one in Indiana. I attended Catholic school in Indiana, but it accepted “disruptive students” who’d been kicked out elsewhere. They all passed ISTEP, no problem, and that was considerably tougher than most standardized tests.
When I came to Tennessee, my public high school had a very, very low failure rate, and that was not due to low standards. I was, however, amazed by how ridiculously easy the test was. Course I took it a year late.
One of my “favorite” school problems is Zero Tolerance. What’s surreal about is that no one actually seems to support it. Parents dislike it; even the most law-n-order Red State Rpublicans (like me) can’t stand it. It’s caused all kinds of problems.
I think it exists soley because the school board finds it easy. They’ve done similar things to insitute Block Scheduling, all for their own convenience, regardless of the idea’s merits or flaws. Zero Tolerance means neither they nor anyone else has to create a comprehensive and thoughtful policy, nor defend it
Kinda my point. The SAT has been around longer than many sate-run standardized tests, has been doing it better, and only takes (has to take) up one day in the life of a student. A good number of students already need to take it. Why don’t we just say, “Hey ETS, we’re going to require all juniors to take your SAT 1” ? And then require, oh, I don’t know, 1000/2400 (or something) to graduate highschool. US DOE works out a deal where ETS gets the cost of one test per student (two, if the student retests a failing score), the students can then pay for additional tests if they feel they didn’t get the score they wanted for college admission.
Don’t like the SAT? Fine. Use the ACT’s. Don’t like those? Ok, take NY’s regency exams and slowly spread them out into adjacent states.
Problem frickin’ solved! GGGGRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! :mad: :mad: :mad:
Regent’s Exams. Which are nothing new - I took them in the late '60s.
However, as all the test tutoring companies seem to indicate, you can “cheat” on the SATs. They seem to work by teaching test taking strategies, not the material. My daughter teaches for one of them, and has access to their course material. She found a list of vocabulary words that might be on the GREs, studied it, and got a perfect score on the verbal part. I think this shows that there is no practical test in the world that can’t be taught to.
Actually, several studies show that those test-tutors don’t help much; on average the improvement is not much greater than any other re-take, and they had the advantage of long hours of organized study.
That’s a really big list, and the verbal section isn’t actually very hard, either. Little on the GRE is. If you read a lot, you should do fine anyway.
Exactly. Except this lady was dead serious. Very sad.
Responding to another point made earlier:
People are distressed because the schools seem to aim at average or below average as a goal, and some seem to think this is a new thing. Not. It has been thus for decades at least.
I learned to read as a pre-schooler (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth) and my parents caught all kinds of heck from my first-grade teacher, who opined that she had “taught me wrong.” The school was somewhat prepared to deal with slow learners, liked the glorious average best, and were completely flummoxed by anyone much above the norm.
Much later, during my school board years, I fought to combat this still-prevalent attitude. It took the better part of my 9 years to get some semblance of a program for the gifted. This was widely criticized as “elitist.” It was perfectly fine to spend thousands, if not millions, on programs for a small cadre of athletically gifted young men, but extra funds for the intellectually superior were unfair and exclusionary.
FWIW, I also have found that many, if not most, private and parochial schools around, acclaimed at providing a quality education for a lower cost, did so by excluding anyone other than average to slightly above average. No special needs kids, thank you, and no smart alecky nerds who ask too many questions, either.
I know there are studies showing it doesn’t help, and ETS would rather that it didn’t (when I took them they hadn’t released the tests and there were no such classes) but after all this time, and the guarantees of higher scores, I rather suspect there is something to it. I wouldn’t be suprised if this is due to the cluelessness of the average test taker and not some magical training. The point is, however, that teaching people how to answer SAT-like questions is a far thing from actually teaching them anything of use in real life.
I spent the last five years as an officer in the gifted child advocacy group in our district. We even have a district level staff person just for GATE students, and we usually had about 300 dues paying members, so we were ahead of most districts. But lots of parents, and teachers, and principals object to special support for GATE students, and lots of elementary schools have too small a GATE population to have any sort of pull out education.
When I went to school, in the '50s and '60s, New York schools were “elitist.” Elementary school classes were sorted by ability, in junior high the SP (special progress) students had our own home rooms and classes, and our giant high school had two levels of honors classes. I don’t know how it worked for everyone else, but it sure worked for me. I pretty much never felt oppressed or different, and I don’t think I ever felt held back or bored in a class. A vast majority of my teachers were excellent. I’m sure smaller schools can’t differentiate quite this much (my graduating class was 1500) but I think current educational philosophy (differentiation inside a classroom) is unrealistic.
I’ve never understood why the football team, most of whom will never play again, get so much press, while those who are the academic equivalent, who will keep doing good work, get nothing.
Does your district have GATE identified kids, or haven’t you gotten that far?
Yeah. This one frosts me. We have a whole culture in our schools built around raising athletes up as school heros and subjecting the intellictually gifted to ridicule. A teacher made a big deal about my daughter getting a perfect score on a test, and she was harassed by the other students for weeks (“geek”, “nerd”, “showoff”…). She had to ask the teacher to never mention her scores out loud again.
Parents donated thousands of dollars to buy sports equipment and uniforms, but I didn’t see any of them sending in checks for new math books.
OK, either I don’t get what you are saying here, or you don’t understand how IQ tests work.
Average for test results on IQ tests (and SATs and so forth) are calculated within a large group. If you take a small group, a subset of that larger group, you certainly can aim to have that group have an average higher than the average for the larger group. You can also aim to have everyone above the average. It would be a lot more difficult, of course, but not impossible if you had a very demanding school (say, one that required excllent test scores as a prerequisite).
Don’t confuse average for the entire population with average for a group within the population. Unless the makers of the particular IQ test used those exact tests and only those tests to normalize the scores on the test, it’s not the same thing at all.
By your rationale, there’d be no difference between the average test results at any school in the country, regardless of regional and other differences. This just doesn’t happen.
I would hope you know this, but your responses to the person’s comments fail completely to take that into account.
No, I understand IQ tests pretty well. The comparisons were between tests in the various schools in the town vs. the average for our town. The person in question wanted every school to be above the average for our town.
Additionally, ours is a pretty ordinary place, with some obviously below-average housing (“the projects”), some developments, a few spiffy McMansions. It would not be at all surprising if the IQ in the whole town averaged 100. There is no way that all our children could be above average.