Big Education carries a big stick?
In our school district, “weeks” begins in third grade. Before that it’s just “days and days”. In early grades, the students are often pulled aside one by one while the rest of the class is given busy work.
It varies by district and state. Ours (Chicago) is actually one of the shortest. The Roots of Teaching-Bashing (Opinion)
Clickers are great, and have been around for some time. You’ve described their use beautifully. They allow the teacher to rapidly see what every student in the class is absorbing about the material (assuming the teacher is asking good questions, of course) and adjust accordingly. The teacher gets instant feedback on how she’s doing, and can help the students improve in the subject. It’s a win all around.
They have little or nothing to do with standardized tests though, except insofar as they are by nature multiple choice. Standardized tests don’t help improve instruction or outcomes. The students are taking the tests near the end of the year, don’t get any feedback for weeks or months, and their instruction cannot be adjusted to improve their skills and knowledge. Because of that, the students don’t have much stake in the tests, and have no incentive to do their best (at most, a passing score may be required for advancement). The teacher typically gets only aggregate information and so can’t easily determine areas for improvement in instruction. Pace college admissions tests, standardized tests are of no use to students, and punish teachers and schools without providing any guidance.
Mostly, standardized tests are a good way for Pearson and the College Board to make big piles of money.
If test scores are your best criterion for choosing a school, you needn’t bother to look at them. They are a proxy for the socioeconomic class of the student body. Just find out the percent of students on free or reduced-price lunch, or look at the makes of the cars driving the kids to school or the house prices in the area, and you’ll know where to send them.
I have a fourth grader and a fifth grader who, I think, take standardized tests every year with no stress or drama. Know why? Because as their parents, we approach the tests with no stress and no drama. “Oh, your TCAPs are next week? Well, that’s no big deal. You’ll do fine. Just do your best.” When the scores come back, we give them about as much consideration as their art homework. “Oh, a 92 percentile? Great job honey. Do you have any spelling words we need to go over?”
No big deal for us or them, yet there is value in knowing that they are (or are not) performing at the expected grade level and that our school is meeting state targets.
If the kids are throwing up on their tests, it’s not the test’s fault. It’s the adults in their life who are stressing them out.
No big deal for you, no big deal for us. You sound like attentive parents that are aware of what your kids are doing in school.
I’d argue that the two pieces of information you say the tests give you, whether your kids are at grade level and that the school is meeting targets, are things you already know. You see the work your kids do, and you probably go to back-to-school night and parent conferences so you know the teachers and see the school on a regular basis. Your kids also probably go to school with a bunch of other kids whose families are like yours. If your kids are in the 90+ percentile, probably most of the school is, too, and you can be pretty sure that its a decent school (or at least that the population is high achieving by measures that track with income and parental education).
You are also assuming that the tests are good measures of the things you want to know, and that is far from evident.
But think about this at a higher level because I think this example is illustrative. In what way is the federal department of Ed able to assess how a school is doing? How would an outsider assess whether Normandy High School in Missouri is failing or not without a way to measure it against other schools? I agree, the students and teachers do not get timely or any feedback regarding the tests at an individual level, but they are not the audience. It’s not a criticism that the results are not useful to the classroom teacher. When it comes to the tests as compared to the clicker, the school itself is the one using the clicker and the Dept of Ed is the teacher. The way they get information is through the tests.
At a larger scale, can you think of a different way to assess academic achievement across a large body of students?
Graduation rates, trade school and college placement rates, job placement rates, average income 1 year after graduation…
I’m not sure why the feds need to monitor elementary schools. They feed into junior high and high schools, so those schools can monitor student readiness when they enter.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m actually in favor of Common Core for the most part. I think they’re good, age appropriate standards (mostly) and I think it’s a good idea for kids in Indiana to be learning the same thing as their grade level peers in Wyoming, so that kids who move from Indiana to Wyoming won’t be ahead and bored or behind and overwhelmed. But I’m not a fan of the testing that came packaged with Common Core. I think we should hand the teachers the standards and get out of their way to be the educators they’re trained to be, using observation, benchmark assessments, student portfolios, rubrics, and progress monitoring tools (including classroom testing). Then we let the principals evaluate their teachers, using observation, interviews, portfolios, and rubrics, as the administrators they’re trained to be.
I’ve only been observing for 30 years or so, but it seems to me that the more state and federal “oversight,” the worse the schools are getting. It’s just bloated layers of bureaucracy at this point. And if the feds want to run things, then why do we need school districts and superintendents and principals at all?
This does hinge on making academic rigor in schools a real thing again. No social promotion to protect fragile egos (mostly of parents), clearly defined standards for students to meet at each grade level (Common Core is good for that) and the ability to fire teachers who don’t meet standards after remediation - as measured by their principals, backed up by documentation, just like in any other job.
TCAPs, eh? Another Tennessean? My daughter is the same. She’s in 4th grade and the tests last a week but are only a couple hours long. She dreads them because they’re boring but they’re not stressful.
It’s pretty high stakes in NYC, where the opt out rate is 1.4% according to the Times article. In NYC public schools there are dozens of middle schools in each district that students can apply to and the test scores are used in varying degrees to determine entry. Some schools have a hard cut-off below which an application won’t even be considered. Middle school admission is based on the 4th grade test so the pressure for that is huge. High School is the same and is based on the 7th grade test.
In a lot of places including where I grew up, students just go from one school to the next so testing wasn’t so big a deal.
I heard of a middle school in Kansas City Missouri that had this principal all the teachers hated. To get rid of him they deliberately told the kids to do bad on the tests. Yes, he was soon gone.
Thinking back on it, one way some students could have made their teachers or school look bad would be to deliberately fail the tests.
But that’s less likely to be the parents than the teachers, prodded on by administrators.
That would be if staff are worried about losing their jobs or their pay is based on how the kids do on the tests. No, I dont want tests to be used for that solely.
The only one I took in seven years of higher education was a gatekeeper test to become a teacher: I had to show some basic knowledge of pedagogy. The next closest I’ve come to a standardized test was a three-hour, six-question essay test taken at a testing center as part of my National Boards. Other than these, standardized tests have been blessedly absent from my life.
But then what do you do with that knowledge?
Two example kids, a few insignificant details changed to make them unidentifiable:
Garner comes from an upper class family. Both parents are attorneys who worked for the state department. Garner went to embassy schools or private schools until first grade. He came to third grade reading middle-school chapter books like the full Harry Potter series, writing cursive, and completing fourth grade math books for fun. My quiver of extra challenge activities (“Let me show you how to create Pascal’s Triangle, and you can look for patterns! What’s the relationship between each perfect square in the series? Model the square-cube ratio!” etc.) was quickly exhausted with him: things that kept other kids occupied for days would be solved by him in five minutes.
Rodney’s dad was in jail, and his mom was going to prison in September. He lived with his aunt while his mom was in prison. He saw his uncle get shot during the beginning of the school year. He lived in a high-crime neighborhood. His aunt’s work and parole schedule meant that he was up till 11:30 many school nights, babysat primarily by an iPad with an unrestricted Netflix account. He regularly showed up at school an hour after the tardy bell rings, sleepy and angry.
Come end-of-grade tests, Garner scored in the 98th or 99th percentile on the tests. Rodney scored in the lowest quintile on the tests.
What do you learn about my pedagogy from these results? What do you learn about my school from these results?
Sure, you could say, “Dorkness is ineffective at teaching children living in poverty.” But what would Rodney have scored if he’d had a different teacher? Higher? Worse? You might say, “Dorkness is effective at teaching upper-class kids.” But maybe Garner would have been in the 98th percentile with a truly terrible teacher.
If children were commodities, standardized testing would make a lot of sense. As it is, it’s extraordinarily difficult to design a fair system.
If I’m clear on what you’re saying, you’re saying teachers will tend to teach what is easier to test than what is harder to test, right?
And yes, that’s correct.
The problem is that what’s baseline knowledge, and what’s easy to test, and what’s vital to know, aren’t always the same.
What you’ve almost certainly learned about City A and City B are the respective poverty levels in those cities. That’s an overriding factor in student achievement on pass/fail tests.
As for whether there’s a different way, I’d suggest that no data is better than bad data. If we use standardized test outcomes to draw conclusions about teacher or school efficacy, that’s worse than drawing conclusions based on a dartboard, because the tests give the illusion of accuracy, when they provide no such thing. It’s better to draw subjective conclusions than to draw objective conclusion based on inappropriate data.
I’m torn on the testing thing. On the one hand, I don’t see teaching to the test as being the best may to have a child grasp subject matter. On the other, I think it serves us well to know which schools are doing a good job and a bad job. And a horrendous job. Is there an alternative you would suggest that would allow us to determine which schools are effective teaching environments and which are not? From what I can tell, large scale testing at least does a fairly good job at that. Would you agree?
Definitely not. In North Carolina, EOGs were used to assign schools grades from A-F. Every single school with a D or an F was a high-poverty school.
Teachers matter, make no mistake. But a mediocre teacher with a bunch of high SES students with involved parents will beat the pants off a very good teacher with a bunch of low SES students with parents who don’t know how, or aren’t willing, to prioritize academics.
You probably took more prior to higher education though, right? In any event, it may not be applicable to all persons, but it certainly is to a great many people.
Well, first I learned what the word “pedagogy” meant - I had to look it up 
I don’t know that you learn a lot about an individual teacher, student, or any particularized data. But what you can learn is data on a macro level. You learn trends, additional data to do analysis, etc. The ability to compare schools, districts, etc. that cuts across the other variables and has one standard measure across the population is valuable. My support is two pronged:
[ol]
[li]I think students should demonstrate a minimum academic level of achievement before advancing. Tests ensure that minimum.[/li][li]I think data can provide insight as to which schools and districts at a macro level should warrant further examination.[/li][/ol]
You would refer to the circumstance outside of the school, be it socio economic background, or other demographic factors that make the system unfair, is that correct? I think the nature of the standardized test is that it is inherently fair in that the questions are the same for all students. It’s only not fair in the sense that life isn’t fair - but the test itself is neutral.
Then the test should be modified - unless you think it impossible to craft a test to focus on what is vital to know? These things can be assessed by some method. But that’s not a problem with the testing process, but the test material.
But the results of the test data will not simply be pass or fail. The degree to which students pass or fail, individually and in aggregate, can tell more than poverty levels. Assume you control for poverty, and see different results across schools, or other various outliers, isn’t that valuable information? I think it exaggerates the criticism if you say no information can be gleaned. If I look at a school with high rates of free and reduced lunch, am I to assume that the students will perform poorly? What if there are schools that have those high rates but perform well? Wouldn’t that be valuable information?
I don’t know if no data is better than bad data. It may be. But bad data can be subjected to rigor and other analytics, hypothesis, and further testing. What do you do with no data? Rely on the individual educator to determine what the best course of action is? That person may know best for their class, but are they going to propose wide ranging efforts across the country and be able to implement them?
I don’t know if you can determine teacher or school efficacy from the tests, but at a minimum you can draw conclusions on the ability of the students to demonstrate their ability to pass, or not.
And are we to assume that these schools can never overcome this, that until the poverty is eradicated the schools are doomed? How would you measure that a school is improving? And even if those D or F schools spent their entire curriculum teaching to the test, if the students then pass, wouldn’t you think that’s a positive outcome? I would.
“Fair” in the sense that it measures actual quality of teacher pedagogy.
I’m unconvinced you can make a standardized test that accurately, precisely, and objectively measures a student’s ability to conduct a short research project, or to write a persuasive letter, or to design an experiment using valid scientific procedures. These are things much better assessed through observing students as they do them.
Sure, you can design test questions that address them. But if classroom A has impoverished students who conduct research projects and write letters and do experiments, and classroom B drills the students all year on how to answer multiple choice questions that address these standards, classroom B will probably see better results on the test–even though their students would bomb a performance assessment. If the stakes are high, principals are going to ask for classroom B.
Sure, it might be interesting. It might point to a classroom B. If you use results to decide where to focus your qualitative assessment, I’m not too chuffed. Unfortunately, a lot of folks use the results to draw conclusions.
I don’t have a great answer. I know that the current use of data, the cargo cult surrounding data, is leading administrators and educators across the country to make educational decisions that I believe are very harmful to their students.
Really, you would? School A has impoverished students who read novels, who have art and music and science and social studies, who do math in real-world contexts. School B has eliminated all extra activities, spends all day drilling students on multiple choice reading passages and multiple choice math tests. If School B gets more students to pass the end of grade test, that’s a success?
Okay. Then what do you think is the best way fro us to know which schools are doing a good job and which aren’t?
I don’t remember exactly. My friend was telling a group of us about the tests, and we were just all shocked about hearing how bad everything was. I did look online to see if I could find the instructions, and I couldn’t find them, but I did find this article written by a teacher saying that they wrap it in a plastic bag and send it in, so I guess that’s part of the instructions.
Like others said, it’s probably the teachers and administrators that are freaking the kids out unintentionally. Parents could be the most relaxed, supportive parents ever, but if the kids go to school hearing every day about how big a deal these tests are, a lot of kids are going to get stressed out.
I’m not whole-heartedly against standardized testing, I just think how much they’ve expanded and how much emphasis is placed on them is bad.
I think first before measuring what schools are doing a good job and which are not, I would try to get resources more equitably distributed amongst schools. I know that there are some schools with an excess of resources, and some that are hurting. A school with up to date computers, calculators, textbooks, and enough desks, pens, teachers, and other resources, is going to do better than schools where teachers have to pay for everything in their classroom and are stressed out about the school supplies being lost or stolen.
I’d keep standardized testing, but work out what would be a reasonable amount of it. I don’t know how much would be reasonable, but do something so that so much emphasis isn’t put towards teaching towards the test.