When will "reformers" learn that you can't blame "failing schools" for low test scores?

The BBQ Pit
101

SlackerInc, you seem to be working from the idea that we do have tests that determine “academic giftedness” accurately, and that everything else is a kluge to cover up or mitigate uncomfortable truths–that due to genetics or enviroment, some kids have immutable aptitude and that some don’t, and that we can discriminate between the ones that have it and the ones that don’t, and that the rest is spin.

This is simply not true. As I mentioned earlier, I’m at a competitive academic magnet. For context, we’re in the top ten of most of the national rankings–there are maybe three public high schools out there that I would describe as having a more rigorous academic program than ours. We use a battery of assessments to determine which kids meet our standards. Understand, we are in a pretty much all-minority district, so we aren’t trying to put our thumbs on any scales, here–the battery isn’t so we can have alternate assessments to help poor or minority kids, because they are pretty much all one or both of those. We use this huge range of assessments, at considerable cost, because none of them alone is an accurate predictor of how successful students will be in our program, and all of them together give us at best a rough approximation. One of the many kids we sent to the Ivy Leagues last year missed our cut-off by one question on one test as a freshman. And we’ve had kids who tested well across all the assessments who struggled here for four years. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve seen kids transform, develop this “aptitude” thing.

Twenty years ago, those of us that were super-testers at 9 were told we were special, we had “aptitude”, that even if we were slackers that didn’t apply ourselves we had some abstract quality that made us better than other kids, made us special. We railed at an unfair system that lauded kids with an arbitrary talent for athletics not because we resisted the idea of celebrating people for arbitrary talents but because we though the wrong such talent was being rewarded. We were told there were gifted programs with limited enrollment because we were special and deserved more. It was a toxic system for us and for everyone else. The longer I teach, the more I think that the whole idea of aptitude is hoplessly over-simplified and a silly thing to focus on. Teach every child where they are, and see how far you can take them.

Anyway, we know that these assesments are flawed. We know they fail to identify students who will be very successful in advanced academics and sometimes identify students who won’t. Given that, is it really so crazy to think they might be particuarly flawed at identifying students whose frame of reference is different from that of the test maker?

102

For whatever it’s worth, when I integrated focused SAT prep into my English courses we raised SAT scores 190 pts over an historical average that had been flat for at least five years. That moved the school average up from 1760s to 1950s, so we are not down in the bottom range, where gains are easy. I suspect the difference is that I was preping mostly poor and minority students who, despite otherwise excelling acedemically, lacked the frame of reference to have an inuitive understanding of the test.

103

NAGC’s introduction to the identification of gifted students.

104

A recent newspaper article offers a perspective very different from OP’s.

105

Very different? Bullshit. First, from the article:

Now, here’s what I said, in my first post upthread on standards for gifted programs:

It’s fine if people disagree with what I actually argue for, but it’s frustrating to have my position be misrepresented this way.

Robertliguori, you clearly have a great deal of expertise in the area of testing and assessment–thanks for sharing it. Again, it’s what makes me love coming here, even if I have to endure a few assholes in the process.

However, I’m leery of the implications of your last paragraph, which talks about kids “we’d class as academically gifted”. I’d really rather we steered clear of that level of subjectivity in gatekeeping gifted programs.

Can we be assured that arbitrary cutoffs are perfect (also the concern raised by Manda Jo)? Obviously not. She mentioned a student that missed one by a single question; my eldest daughter was initially judged to have done the same, but then they rechecked the test (a good practice in such close cases, just as recounts are a good idea in close elections) and found she had actually made it in by the skin of her teeth.

There is obviously then going to be a greater difference in aptitude among the kids who make it into gifted than there is between the ones who just make it and the ones who just miss. But that’s true in a wide variety of areas in life, and I believe it’s better, fairer, to “de-fuzz” the line as much as is realistically possible.

What I keep thinking of as an analogy will not, unfortunately, likely resonate with those who do not follow professional tennis and its “Hawk-Eye” replay system. But here’s a quick primer.

What I wasn’t able to find in a quick Google search was an example of some of the Hawk-Eye replays that are far, far more borderline than even the fairly close one shown in the photo there. Sometimes the system has to automatically zoom in super close to show that a ball was out, because at the standard zoom level the “mark” looks to be touching the line. In those cases the system is judging the ball to have been out by what has got to be less than a millimeter. But as the above-linked article acknowledges, “no one is absolutely sure” whether it is accurate to that degree. I would submit that it is highly unlikely that it is that accurate.

But what it definitely is, is fair (unless there is some kind of deep conspiracy going on, I suppose). When it comes to the very closest calls, it’s most likely essentially random whether a ball gets called in or out. But it gets a definitive assessment, and everyone has to live with it even if it is match point of a Slam final, with literally millions of dollars on the line.

So in testing, I’d like to see a similarly fine line drawn–with the caveat that I do think someone who just missed should have another bite or two at the apple, and qualify if any one of their scores is high enough. That should dispel the concern about someone having an especially bad day. If it means a few kids are able to have a lucky day guessing and make it in, so be it. [A personal disclosure that will no doubt be juicy fodder for my antagonists: when I was ten and tested into gifted for the first time, the gifted teacher met with me and my parents and marvelled at the fact that she had never before encountered a student who did so well on the section of the test that involved shapes and patterns. I didn’t say anything, but found this quite surprising. I had found that section very difficult, mystifying even, and had felt that I just guessed at the answers. Years later as a young adult, I took an IQ test administered by a psychologist, and he also marvelled at my results, but in a different way: I had scored extremely high on the portion of the test that was essentially like a combination of the old SAT-V and SAT-M, but had scored far lower–103, 105, something like that–on the other half of the test that used those shapes and patterns. He had never seen, or even heard of, someone showing that great a disparity between the two halves of the test.]

I also want to make clear that I’m hardly advocating that those bright students who don’t quite make the “gifted” cutoff just be written off and left to while away their time with unchallenging and unfulfilling coursework. There should be gradation all along the continuum, just as Manda Jo suggests. I’m not sure, however, that truly individually tailored education is feasible (outside of homeschooled kids or those whose families are rich enough to have them taught by tutors, like child actors or princes) within the budgetary constraints of the school system. Nor is it realistic to expect those constraints to change dramatically any time soon.

106

I don’t think you understand what I was getting at. It’s not just that the line is fuzzy–it’s that the whole range is fuzzy. Kids who barely make the cut-off can end up at the top of the class, and kids that are at the mid range may struggle to even stay in the program. Kids near the top often finish with middlin’ academic results. And that’s with like 8 very different tests–if we look at the data from any one of them (and we do!) it’s even more screwy.

Given that we know the tests give, at best, a very imprecise picture of what they are trying to measure, why does it seem so implausible to you that some of that imprecision might be cultural bias?

107

I guess I have to say that I have trouble swallowing the claims you are making there. They do not ring true to the experience I’ve had, as a student, a parent, a substitute teacher, and now as the husband of a teacher whose wife discusses her job in endless detail.

Obviously underachievers exist–I was one of them. And there are people of middling intellect who are very organized and study hard, do all their homework, and get good grades. But–and maybe here is the root of our fundamental disagreement–I don’t consider the people in that latter category “gifted” in an intellectual sense. And in fact, I think schools mostly make it too easy for those “worker bees” to get high grades just by keeping their noses to the grindstone. But this is perhaps getting off on a tangent…

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So a kid who, say, fucking knows AP chemistry because they worked hard and studied and learned it is somehow not “gifted” and stuff is made “too easy for him” but the slacker “gifted” kid who could have learned chemistry, had he bothered, well, he’s somehow special and should get the designated special services?

Our results are not grades, or your impression sending kids to a comphrehensive high school. This is a high stakes academic environment, and external test scores are all anyone cares about. And I’ll tell you right now, lots and lots of kids bloom at 16 who were, on paper, nothing special at 14, and lots of rock stars fizzle out.

109

How about neither of them gets the services, and reserve them for the ones who are exceptionally smart *and *work hard? I’d go further and say the whole grading system should be rejiggered so that those are the only kids who can get higher than a B+ in any subject.

Here’s a rundown on all the nonsense “reform” one teacher saw come down the pike over four decades. What a waste of time, energy, and resources. Boondoggle after boondoggle. And despite the modern reform movement (or series of movements) beginning in the 1980s with the Chicken Little report “A Nation at Risk”, he rightly points out that “the system it maligned played a major role in producing the leaders of the digital revolution and in sustaining a military and an economy that are the envy of the world.”

110

I swear, as I was listening to this NPR story yesterday, I was super impressed and was ready to come here and deliver a mea culpa. “Wow, the reformers really have finally found a way to get test scores in poor urban schools up, way up–get a new principal! Who’da thunk it?” But then I got to the end of the story:

Impressive! Make a wholesale change in the student population, and voila: dramatically improved school. It’s so simple, why didn’t I ever think of this? :smack:

Several people in the comments noted that this neighborhood has rapidly gentrified in recent years, and one added this snarky summation:

:dubious: