The Atlantic published a very interesting article about the latest international test scores by Julie Ryan, and the title is significant.
It says: “AMERICAN EDUCATION ISNT MEDIOCRE, ITS DEEPLY UNEQUAL.”
That’s an apt way of saying that poverty drags down test scores.
This is true of every standardized test, whether it is the state tests, the SAT, the ACT, the NAEP or international tests.
As I wrote in an earlier post, the tests ores don’t predict our economic future.
If we wanted higher scores, we would reduce poverty and foster greater equality.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When A Nation at Risk came out there was a great hue and cry that we were doomed and our economy was in grave jeopardy. I do not remember any of the pundits or government administrators thanking educators when Clinton came in and the economy soared!
So it seems to me that if we “raise the bar” as we are doing with the CCSS, we will ultimately damage everyone. The opportunity gap will widen, our students who are meeting expectations will fail to do so, and we will have very few students exceed. Teachers will lose their jobs and drop out rates will increase. Can you say lose lose!
How I cringe when anyone suggests that the amateurish CCSS in ELA “raise the bar.” They create an enormous amount of bad pedagogy and curricula, and kids do worse as a result, but they certainly don’t “raise the bar.” The authors of these putative standards don’t understand ELA well enough to do that.
The way CC is being implemented it indeed is RAISING NO BARS. In fact, it is lowering the bar for so many reasons. I will mention a few primary ones.. there are of course “ed reformy” high stakes tests to go along with CC (PARCS, SMART) and then there is developmentally inappropriate curriculum so that students can try to “pass” these tests. In NYC the majority did not pass! WRONG DIRECTION because corporations profit enormously while everyone loses… students who have their education taken away from them and teachers who have their profession stripped from them by not enabling them to teach as they deem appropriate then blaming them via false evaluations based on curriculum failure and these hideous tests. WIN WIN for the corporations (very short term in the scheme of things). What will the US look like in about 10 years when there is a growing population of adults who cannot function in society?
I am a library media specialist in an affluent suburb of Syracuse, NY while my son attended and graduated from Syracuse City Schools. Syracuse has one of the highest rates of children living in poverty and very low graduation rates and I have been speaking up for years about poverty and inequitable school funding. I would love to see these scores broken down by school districts within states.
In general US whites do very well in comparison with whites in other countries. Also US Hispanics out-score most South American countries. Mexican-Americans score better than Mexicans in Mexico. Remarkably US blacks are competitive with students in the Middle East. So I agree that the US educational system is among the best in the world.
However nobody in the world has figured out to get blacks and Mestizos to perform at the same level as whites or to get white to perform at the same level as East Asians.
Jim, local results don’t have anything to do with race. They have everything to do with poverty.
Bloomfield New Jersey Board of Education is having a forum on the harms of high-stakes testing on Wednesday, October 30. Refreshments at 6:30 forum at 7:00 PM in the high school media center.
Resisting neoliberalism resist SIMCE
In his brief stint in Chile, renowned British sociologist Stephen Ball made it clear their support for the campaign “Stop SIMCE” as part of his critique widespread the misuse of educational measurement instruments. To the surprise (and dismay) of many, academician of the Institute of Education, University of London (IOE) held its conference in the Faculty of Education at the UC on Tuesday with the sheet of the campaign on his shirt and, previously, I noted:
I come from a system that is also using the measurement and performance to replace educational values. I think the SIMCE is antieducacional. Impoverishes the classroom, focuses students and teachers in things that can be measurable rather than things that are valuable. It is important to try to think what is education, not just ourselves to measure what we think students should do. In this regard, support for “Stop SIMCE”.
But this is not the first time publicly demonstrated Ball stance toward the Chilean educational problems. Already in 2011 participated in a video to support social movements, which stated:
And the professor paused serious presence and know it well: the critique of SIMCE not a reproach to an isolated instrument technician, but a general questioning of public policies that have shaped the educational system ad hoc neoliberal model society promoted from the eighties. A national system, profoundly successful as achieved through the horizon of the “good intentions” of public policy and installed not only in economic, but also social, thanks to the power of a number of devices and tools arising from the knowledge technician under an apparent cloak of neutrality.
It is very important what is happening in Chile. Chile is on the one hand, a model, an archetype of neoliberal policies in education, but also a focus of response, a hotbed of resistance, a focus of struggle. And this is something, a place that people should pay attention, people should look.
And the professor paused serious presence and know it well: the critique of SIMCE not a reproach to an isolated instrument technician, but a general questioning of public policies that have shaped the educational system ad hoc neoliberal model society promoted from the eighties. A national system, profoundly successful as achieved through the horizon of the “good intentions” of public policy and installed not only in economic, but also social, thanks to the power of a number of devices and tools arising from the knowledge technician, under a cloak of apparent neutrality.
Thus, through the hegemony of standardized tests and their use for comparison, competitive and internal accountability of schools, has generated an infrastructure that successfully promotes increased financial motives in defining the objectives and education operate, replacing values based education with one based on the (economic) value. Put another way: SIMCE tools like stop being mere instruments of assessment and go on to become mechanisms defining the “rules of the game” of education, a game market that “the results are prioritized before processes, numbers before the experiences, procedures before ideas, productivity than creativity [1] “.
But despite this grim scenario there is hope. That’s the message that brought Ball compromise air and crushed with quiet insistence on the three seminars in which he participated during his visit to the country. Clinging to an extensive analysis of Michel Foucault, the researcher encourages us to open an avenue of thought to challenge and resist what, at first glance, appears to us as given on the basis that the policies are not absorbed and internalized automatically in the daily practices of the subjects, but that these are capable of exercising their subjectivity. I explained through the relationship between what he calls neoliberalism large N (policy level) and neoliberalism n girl (level people) surrounding policies and persistently restrict our day to day, but completely subject us.
And as Ball says, in the context of educational policies, “not all bad, but everything is dangerous”, against which we are able to answer these policies, to reinterpret them and put them in tension. It is a call to action in everyday life, from a place of their own and not from the questioning that we make policies through, for example, school ratings of teachers Teacher Evaluation ago.
So why SIMCE? And for whom? What place do we give this instrument has become the tool of choice to identify “good” and “bad” schools and, therefore, to define what is “good” and “bad” education? Do we want our educational evaluation systems continue to operate as modulators instruments neoliberal education system, or want resignificarlos as tools for schools to observe and learn from their own practices? These are some of the questions that today teachers, students, families, researchers and Chilean citizens in all we are doing and whose evaluation perspective, the perspective of others who are watching from a distance, as Ball, contributes to the understanding of that, far from being crazy, they are more an expression of our human condition.
[1] Stephen J. Ball & Antonio Olmedo (2013): Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities, Critical Studies in Education, 54:1, 85-96.
Wonderful. It’s good to see that there are a few education reporters who do not simply parrot the deformer party line in keeping with the views of the owners of the companies they work for.
It is true that American students do much better on international tests than they are typically given credit for. It’s also true that the performance of American 15-year-olds on international tests has little if anything to do with American “economic competitiveness” (regardless of shrill warnings from the likes of the Chamber of Commerce and the “talented” and oh-so-privileged Amanda Ripley).
However, Julia Ryan clearly isn’t the best source to turn to to verify these things. Ryan is characteristic of what education reporting has become: she’s a newbie from the Ivy League (Harvard) who writes some serious drivel.
Ryan recently reported on the release of this past year’s SAT scores. Instead of actually doing some leg work, some investigating –– you know, some real reporting –– here’s what Ryan told readers:
“For the fifth year in a row, fewer than half of SAT-takers received scores that qualified them as ‘college-ready’.”
All Ryan did was report to readers the pap she got from the College Board. People like Ryan actually seem to believe this nonsense.
What Ryan might have told readers is that the SAT is basically worthless. It is, in a very real sense, a huge scam.
The National Center for Education Statistics tell us this about the SAT: ”The SAT (formerly known as the Scholastic Assessment Test and the Scholastic Aptitude Test) is not designed as an indicator of student achievement, but rather as an aid for predicting how well students will do in college.” The problem, however, is that the SAT is a very poor predictor of college success.
College enrollment specialists find that it predicts between about 3 and 14 percent of the variance in freshman-year college grades (and after that zilch). As one college enrollment specialist quipped, “I might as well measure their shoe size.”
Princeton Review does a lot of test prep work. Here’s what Princeton Review founder John Katzman said about the SAT: “The SAT is a scam…It has never measured anything. And it continues to measure nothing…does it measure intelligence? No. Does it predict college grades? No. Does it tell you how much you learned in high school? No. Does it predict life happiness or life success in any measure? No. It’s measuring nothing.”
Author Nicholas Lemann –– whose book The Big Test is all about the SAT –– said this about the SAT’s severe limitations: “The test has been, you know, fetishized. This whole culture and frenzy and mythology has been built around SATs. Tests, in general, SATs, in particular, and everybody seems to believe that it’s a measure of how smart you are or your innate worth or something. I mean, the level of obsession over these tests is way out of proportion to what they actually measure.”
The thing that the SAT measures best is family income. Colleges use SAT scores for two purposes: to make themselves “look good,” and to leverage financial aid. As Matthew Quirk noted in The Atlantic, “schools make thousands of decisions based largely on [SAT] test scores…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions.”
As I’ve noted previously, the College Board is “all in” on the Common Core. It says it’s products (PSAT, SAT, Advanced Placement) are “aligned” with the Common Core. Its president, David Coleman, helped to develop Common Core.
So, if educators are opposed to the Common Core (and its eventual massive testing requirements), they will have to divorce themselves from all of the hyped-up, faulty products it churns out. Are the ready and willing to do that?
Meanwhile, don’t look to writers like Julia Ryan (or the “talented” Amanda Ripley) for any insight or help.
One problem with using standardized test scores to predict college success is that a given college often has students within a narrow band of standardized scores and each college adjusts their grades to fit the students they have.
I will occasionally have a class with a student who has scored a 36 on the ACT exam sitting next to a student that has scored a 16, something that would not happen at elite schools like MIT. The student who scored 16 is far less likely to earn a high grade in the class, far less likely to graduate in 4 years, and far less likely to come back the next semester.
We’ve known the SAT was not only racist, but inaccurate,
and we’ve known this for over forty years. Thank goodness my life’s
decision were not based on how I did in middle school as they do in
other countries. A mediocre student at twelve, was an honor student
in college graduating Magna Cum Laude, and Alpha Beta Kappa. To do
well in college depends on your perseverance and attention to
details. Smart students used to sliding by doing as little as
possible are doomed to fail if they don’t mend their ways. Those of
us who needed to work hard and earn their high scores are primed to
use these talents for a successful four years and a degree. It is
the intangibles, the attitudes towards learning which cannot be
directly measured, that are important. As a school librarian I
taught a love for the library and a love of books. How did I
measure this – by my relationships with my students over numerous
years. Many are in their freshmen year of college and they still
call me a mentor as I lightly give advice to their angst on
Facebook. Our mutual love and respect for one another is not a
question on any exam, but it is an indication that I have taught
them well.
To Robert Sheppard –
One of the most interesting phenomenon in all of sociology is the enormous success of Han Chinese immigrants where ever in the world they emigrate. For example about 1,000
Chinese indentured laborers (mostlu Hakka peasents) were brought into Jamaica in the 19th cdentury to work in the sugarcane plantations. They started out at the very bottom of
Jamaican society. They faced legal discrimination for many years and anti-Chinese violence such as the 1918 Anti-Chinese riot. But by the time of the 1965 Anti-Chinese riots the descendents of these 19th century indentured laborers had according to Wikipedia “a virtual monopoly on retail trade in Jamaica, controlling 90% of dry goods stores and 95% of supermarkets, along with extensive holdings in other sectors such as laundries and betting parlours.” At that time the Jamaican Chinese were less than one
percent of the Jamaican population.
It is a very similar story in places like Malaysia, Burma, the Phillipines, Brasil etc. Chinese immigrants originally very poor rising to the top level of economic/educational success despite being a very small minority in all these places.
Robert, I realize that you have your racial equalitarian ideology but the history of the Han Chinese since the time of the Shang Dynasty strongly suggests that ideology is not in accordance with reality.
It is interesting that although Japan and Korea are very close to China, Chinese immigrants to these countries did not become a dominant group. The probable reason is that the native populations of these countries are also East Asian with an average IQ of 107-108.
Two corrections to the above – I misspelled “Brazil” and the East Asian immigrants to Brazil are mostly Japanese.
“. . . the tests ores don’t predict. . .
No, but they can be mined (double entendre intended).