Public education in America

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
I’m not sure how you arrived at that conclusion when I’m screaming for greater parental communication and involvement in the schools, and advocating smaller schools, smaller school districts, small private or homeschool groups taught by the parents themselves, but…knock yourself out.

Can I use this as an example of how well inductive reasoning is taught in American schools?
[/QUOTE]

Sure if you don’t mind being wrong. Can I use your as an example of not thinking through consequences? If kids are in class ten hours a day, in transit to and from school for 1-2 hours on top of that, and then given homework, when are they supposed to see their parents exactly? Even if parents are more involved with school, then they are raising their children as agents of the state, by proxy thruogh the state apparatus, and not directly, because they will hardly ever actually see their kids.

62

Folks — settle down . Students opinion is a part of the process. Parental opinion is part of the process. It should be considered for what it is and given its proper weight and consideration.

from Whynot

And what evidence have you offered that education is not educating young people? Education does work - very well for very many.

And you know this because…???

I was the union steward at my high school for my final 21 years. I saw up close and personal how easy it was to fire incompetent teachers and saw several of them fired.

And if you are correct… so what? Its meaningless.

63

I have. You still are addressing “most” students - and you have bigger problems on either end than in a traditional classroom. I spent about half my elementary years in schools that did this. Also, the social thing is really hard. A first grader in a group of third graders really can’t cope - and if the majority of kids are third graders - its bullying time. The third grader in a room of first graders doesn’t fare much better.

I liked it and excelled at it - but the social part was really tough and I still carry scars. And the learning was actually much better when they just segregated by ability within the same age group and had a lot of independent learning opportunities at the highest level.

As I said, this was all the rage in the 1970s, and there are only a few places left doing in (in Minnesota there are some charter schools still doing it). If it had worked, we’d still do it more often.

64

Because my mother’s been an elementary school teacher for 27 years, and on dozens of hiring and firing committees during that time. We’ve discussed, at great length, the perils (and pearls) of the tenure system. Because I’ve been part of parent committees pushing for the removal of some teachers and protesting the transfer of others. Because as a high school student, I saw terrible terrible teachers year after year who could or would not be fired outright. Because I’ve studied education, been in education as a student and been a parent of school age children for more than a decade. Because my husband teaches Basic Composition at a major university* and I see the quality of work that these kids are producing and realize that any teacher passing them for this work is incompetent, yet still working. Because I’m interested in this stuff and I read a lot about it. Because I have a dozen friends who are teachers - from kindergarten to college - and we talk about this stuff at parties.

Teachers are *one *cog in the system, and those of us in it with you have just as much right to an opinion about what’s working and failing as you do. Of course I value your input, and Drum God’s and Kolga’s as teachers. I just expect to be listened to in return.

*Kolga, I’m sorry to say, it’s no better at colleges which have admission requirements and competitive entry. If these are truly our “best and brightest”, I give up.

65

Whynot - I have said before your angry post that students and teachers should be heard.

I taught in Detroit. We have what passes for a very strong teachers union. But it cannot protect someone who is incompetent. As I have said, as the school union steward I saw teachers fired and participated in the process to insure their basic rights and due process. In the end, it did not save them. Incompetent teachers can be fired, even in a very pro-union district like Detroit in a pro-union town.

66

I’m hesitant to jump in here without reading the entire thread, but I wanted to address this.

Evil enemy checking in: I am an editor and I work for the company that has a contract with the state of Florida to produce their standardized test. I do not work on the actual FCAT; rather, I work on the interpretive products that educators and parents use to prepare themselves and the students for the testing. The same company also produces TAKS as well as several other states’ assessments.

There seem to be some misconceptions about how the standardized tests are created and I wanted to clear those up. In general, I believe there is a need to assess achievement of learning so that appropriate help can be given to districts that need it. You have to measure something, somehow. For me, it’s the politicization of the results that I find distasteful with standardized testing, not so much the act of assessing learning. For example, I think basing teachers’ salaries or bonuses upon their students’ test results is ill-conceived at best. The reason for that is it’s a misuse of the assessment. Florida’s assessment assesses student achievement; not teacher achievement. If you want to measure how effective a teacher is, then a completely different assessment should be designed specifically addressing teaching standards. You don’t assess student learning standards and then measure teachers by that result. Unfortunately, that seems to be what a lot of states and districts are doing. So I think it’s very important to separate the issue of measuring student performance from measuring school or teacher performance.

In Florida, the Department of Education convenes committees of Florida educators to set the standards by which students will be assessed. These are called the Sunshine State Standards (SSS) and you can read them here. The material on the FCAT is based upon, and designed to specifically assess achievement of, these standards.

They are not unreasonable standards at all. Upthread, someone pointed out that it shouldn’t be unreasonable to expect tenth graders, for example, to be able to construct a basic sentence and perhaps communicate a basic idea in a short essay. The SSS lay out a list, from K-12, of all the skills that seem grade-level appropriate.

The State encourages Districts to adopt curriculum and purchase textbooks based upon these standards as well. So when people complain that educators are spending too much time ‘teaching to the test’ be aware that if the curriculum is based on the SSS and the test is based on the SSS, if teachers teach the basic curriculum laid out by the State of Florida (and designed by Florida teachers), then they are, in fact, teaching to the test. I don’t see anything wrong with that, knowing what I know about what’s in the SSS and what’s on the test.

In Florida, there is no possible way to ‘drill’ students on the ‘right’ answers for two reasons.

  1. The items on FCAT are never released to the public while they can still appear on a ‘live’ test. Florida does release tests occasionally, (which you can see here) as well as sample test materials (here) annually, and when that happens, all of those questions (or items) are considered ‘dead’ and will never appear on a test again. There are also 30-40 different versions of each test at every grade level and in every subject area and all of those versions (called forms) having different questions on them. That means, for your average classroom, each kid in the room has a completely different form of the test from the kid sitting next to him, so there’s no single set of ‘right’ answers. And,

  2. Florida requires performance tasks (PTs) in four subject areas (reading, writing, mathematics, and science) which requires activities such as constructing graphs, reading a passage and writing an 8-line answer to a question, writing a two-page essay in response to a prompt (in 45 minutes), and designing a science experiment and speculating on the hypothesis. You just don’t ‘drill’ kids on performance tasks. No flash card on this planet will teach you how to write an essay or construct a graph. Educators have to teach kids how to write essays, how to read and extrapolate, how to apply basic concepts, and how to think scientifically. If that’s ‘teaching to the test’ then I really don’t have any problem with that.

Students don’t have to do performance tasks in every year of testing, and those PT items are hand-scored, not scored by a machine. ‘Correct’ answers are determined by, again, committees comprised of Florida educators who determine a range of possible correct answers. They train the hand-scorers using rubrics that allow for the students to earn scores for creative outside-the-box solutions. If the students’ responses demonstrate that the students have mastered the material that the question is designed to assess, then the students will score well on that question. The multiple choice (MC) questions are all machine scored. Students get MC questions every year and encounter PT questions three times (from Grades 3–11) in four content areas.

For more information about how Florida’s test is designed and used throughout the state, you are welcome to look at The FCAT Handbook, a project that was near and dear to my heart, because it took about two years of my life to produce. I’m especially proud of the timeline graphic in the first section.

The last thing I wanted to say was that this post is not necessarily intended as a defense of NCLB or of standardized testing. My intent is to remove certain elements of the debate because they are based upon incorrect assumptions, such as ‘the teachers drill kids on all the right answers all day,’ or ‘the material on the test is never even covered in the classroom.’ (And how one could square up those two conflicting ideas, I can’t quite wrap my brain around.) I don’t think NCLB/standardized testing is the end-all, be-all answer to everything. I think it’s just one tool that could be used to decide which districts and schools need attention and to measure how American students are doing in the global market.

You may now resume bashing standardized testing.

67

For what it is worth - here is what I think would be part of the solution.

On the first day of the first grade you teach the kids that one plus one is two. All those who successfuly demonstrate mastery of the concept then move on to one plus two. Those who fail to master it by learing in the same way as others are removed from the area, different teachers or approaches are utilized until they do achieve mastery.

Repeat with every lesson, repeat with every skill, repeat with everything until the child completes their education.

Some will do it in eight years. Some will take ten or twelve. And some will take 16 or more. And they will learn.

68

Dogzilla… thank you for that information.

Does the tests you create dovetail into the actual things that students are learning?

In other words, everything you place on a test, is it then taught in the schools?

69

According to the teachers I met with last week, yes.

We are currently working on a report of student scores on writing from 2001–2008. The idea is to show improvements in performance as well as to identify areas requiring more instructional emphasis. The reports for reading, mathematics, and science have all been released and you can view those here. Lessons Learned - Writing will be published in about a year.

Last week, I participated in three days’ of meetings with Florida’s writing educators at Grades 4, 8, and 10 to look at the data analysis, compare it to the items on the test, and contrast that with their observations on the ground in the classroom. Students’ scores in writing appear to have improved, although achievement is very high in Florida (in this subject), so the degree improvement is small. The educators offered their observations about skills at which students have been successful as well as the skills needing improvement, and they also offered recommendations for other educators for how to best stress the new skills still needing attention, i.e., implications for instruction.

You’ll have to read the book. :wink:

Caveat: I cannot speak for the assessment programs in the other 49 states. YMMV.

70

In Florida, do you have a statewide education system?

Local districts do not set their own standards and their own curriculum?

71

Let me add, also, that you have the chicken and the egg reversed, for Florida. It’s not that what is placed on the test that’s taught in schools. It’s what is taught in the schools that is placed on the test. (See Also: FCAT Handbook, linked above.)

Rather, what is supposed to be taught. The State approves a range of curricula (upon which the test is based). It’s up to Districts to implement the State’s recommendations. It’s up to the teachers to do what the District dictates. The other 49 states’ mileage may vary, but I’m assuming that in most states, it basically works the same way, details notwithstanding.

72

Now that I think about it, NCLB almost requires that all states have a statewide system. Each state is required to report on its Annual Yearly Progress (AYP), but the federal government does not want 75,000 individual district reports (no clue how many districts there actually are in the US). The feds want statewide data, equated for demographics, and god knows what else. There is no other way to provide that data aside from statewide assessment. If you give all the kids in the state the same test, it stands to reason that the curriculum must therefore, necessarily be the same material.

The States also report on comparisons of their statewide scores to national standards-based assessments, such as NAEP.

If I had to take a WAG, I’d say that there’s two really huge problems with NCLB at the moment.

  1. Underfunding. Duh.
  2. The states were given x number of years in which to implement a statewide assessment before AYP and NAEP reports are required. So each state is in its on stage of development of their assessment programs. I believe the larger states have been doing this longer; I know that Florida began assessing writing across the state back in the 90s, long before NCLB was ever a gleam in GW’s eye. So some states are having to completely rethink their approach to standardizing curricula, maybe, and others already had a system in place and may be further down the path.

And then again, the big gorilla in the room is what districts, administrators, and politicians do with the scores and the federal funding––that is a wholly separate issue and possibly not germaine to the state of public education in America, IMHO. (Maybe it is when you follow the money.)

73

I have not finished reading your post, but I wanted to say that I stopped here and stood up and cheered. CHEERED!!!. This is exactly right. Would you mind running for some high office and yelling this from the highest pillars of power?

Now, I will return to the rest of your post.

74

Er… yes. I would mind, in fact. Not so much a politician. I don’t have the testicular fortitude for it (and I’m a chick).

Let’s just hope the power of the interwebs combats a little ignorance.