I don’t put a lot of credibility in state rankings, except to the extent that it shows state officials where they need to make improvements. I have a hard time imagining any family saying, “Hey, I just saw this ranking of states. Let’s move from Mississippi to New Jersey.”
And then there is the problem of conflicting rankings. The states that Michelle Rhee ranked among the best came in poorly in the Wallethub survey. Move to Louisiana if you believe Rhee, but move to New Jersey if you believe Wallethub.
Wallethub is a financial services company that ranks stuff. In this survey, they took 12 factors into account, such as dropout rates, test scores, pupil/teacher ratios, bullying incidents, percentage of population over 25 with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The survey counts the availability of online public schools as a plus, but this is an instance where greater discrimination is needed to draw a line between genuine online public schools and get-rich-quick online scams.
The reason that surveys like this fall short is that there are good and not-good schools in every state. The reason that a survey like this is valuable is that the State Commissioner of Vermont Rebecca Holcombe could point to Vermont as the third best state in the nation on the Wallethub survey, as a way to resist the pressure from Washington to declare every school in Vermont a low-performing school.
I bet there are many excellent schools in states that fall at the bottom of anyone’s rating.
“such as dropout rates”
Yesterday I saw a PR article at the Hill quoting a PR article from “Moneyballfor government” which claims to be a bipartisan site interested in effective government.
I thought they were doing a propaganda “get on the bandwagon” so I left a comment saying they needed to support their statement on graduation rates.
I know R. Scott former Commissioner of Texas said the governors/commissioners had worked out a uniform statistic that all states would be compared on a similar metric but I just don’t believe that is being reported evenly and from the article at Moneyballfor government there was no citation of where they are getting their figure.
Also , the college attendance rate is affected by geography and the highly compact MA looks good when compared to TX because they have such a vast area with limited access to colleges (when compared to a dense population)… But if I were VT i would certainly want to use the ranking…
On the BadassTeachers today there is a letter from the VT commissioner that I think took noble courage …. Also, VT is the first state to prepare it’s own state Climate Change report.
Texas would definitely rank last if the statistics were based on “products” of our public and charter schools, such as the college drop out rate (50%), increasing juvenile incarceration, increasing teen suicide, increasing mental illness of children, increasing dating violence, increasing drug use, increasing poverty, increasing teen pregnancy, increasing veteran teacher resignations…..to name a few.
These frightening statistics continue while our current TEA Commissioner and politicians continue to live in la-la land.
Agree Madison, plus the sup in Dallas is a Broadie.
It will be interesting to see what the results of his “progress” will be this year… He needs to on TEI as well as his poor teachers.
I consider the test scores of Dallas to be his test scores as he mandated a very narrow style of teaching.
Why isn’t he being held accountable for his awful scores?
“[T]here are good schools and not-good schools in every state”? How can I tell which schools are good and which are not-good?
Hi FLERP!
There is an answer in this article. Here is for you: “Move to Louisiana if you believe Rhee, but move to New Jersey if you believe Wallethub.” Therefore, within a state, you move from region to region; or within region, you move from school to school according to your intelligence or emotion that guides you effectively.
Honestly, to me, my intelligence tells me to to go on with the learning in higher education, but my emotion tells me let’s go travelling around the world. Good school or bad school depends on your need and your available resources (money and intelligence) that support your need.
I hope that my honest idea makes sense to you. back2basic
You know I don’t think that schools dictate the outcome: if a bad parent is traveling around the country, not making an effort to teach their children to value an education, then the best school will still end up a “bad” school for them.
I went to Staples in Westport CT for a year and flunked out of AP English due to no parental supervision/substance abuse at home. I then went to private school and messed up there while my family fell apart. Finally I ended up-due to family issues-in foster care with a wonderful foster family in a working class town/high school who pushed me and tried to help me out. I kind of got back on track, graduated barely, then dropped out of a third tier college, went back to community college ten years later, and then transferred to, and graduated with honors in my major, from Berkeley.
To my mind, parental involvement and inner drive are huge factors. But I was lucky: my mom had been involved in my life when I was younger, she instilled a love of reading, and I read voraciously. I was able to get back on track. Most kids in foster care don’t start in middle class, educated households: they start in poor ones.
My point is that “good schools” are to be found everywhere: it depends on your parents and socio economic standing and inner drive a lot more than people think. A working class family can push their kid at a “bad school”. A middle class family can neglect their kid who then nose dives at a “great school”.
The deadly combination is poverty, neglect, low SE, low parental educational level, and throw in a little LEP and violence…sound familiar?
quote: “My point is that “good schools” are to be found everywhere:
I say this about the public university system ; you can find good professors at a lot of the colleges….. And, some of it depends upon the right timing…. I know I got my masters at Northeastern University and it was the right time , right place for me…. My husband flunked out of U. Mass Amherst but then went on and got a master’s at Northeastern later… and then I studied at BU….
you draw the best from the faculty available at the University level … but that is a different issue than the K-12…. where students are not mature enough on their own to make wise decisions (without some guidance from adults)… but since you were sharing your personal experience I just mention that colleges are unique for individuals. The average age at community college where I worked was 28 and by then the students know more what they want, they are often paying for it themselves and have a different set of motivaitng factors (not to mention they often finish their experiment with “substances” by 28 but not all kids do)
My point is that “good schools” are to be found everywhere:
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
Diane, this same limited assessment works its way into schools as well and it is disgustingly inadequate to do what it claims to do and the pictures it paints of how well a school is doing is completely false, lacks nuance and detail, and is so overgeneralized as to be laughable.
I have never been able to understand why, when all teachers are required to differentiate lessons for every single student every single day, the reformists and their minions take the lazy, easy way out and treat an entire school, an entire district, or an entire state as a single entity and get by with it.
Of course I know that this mindset came from the stupidity of NCLB which, as Vermon’ts Education Commissioner pointed out, makes states rate a school as ‘ineffective’ if just one student fails to meet the arbitrary cut scores.
So I face the most basic, low-level, beginning teacher type of ‘professional’ development next week as I return to school because my school is a ‘D’ school. We moved up from being an ‘F’ school last year largely because this is an election year and Gov. Scott wanted to crow about school improvement so the cut scores moved again.
I have been rated highly effective now for 3 straight years by 3 different principals using the ever-more punitive district teacher evaluation program promulgated by my district. Through multiple walk-throughs by hostile state and district personnel and my principal, through several ‘informal’ and one ‘formal’ observation, and through compiling evidence that I had met all 39 targets I was able to ‘prove’ that I am a good teacher.
This year we are moving to the impossible-to-achieve Danielson abomination so at last I guess they will be able to ‘get’ me and downrate me and ‘prove’ that I am a ‘bad’ teacher because I work in a ‘D’ school. They have to do that to me twice before they can fire me, however, and I will be OK because I can retire in 2 years before they destroy my career.
I am treated like a brand new, inexperienced, deeply ignorant worker in every PD I attend because of my school’s grade. No matter that I have 2 advanced degrees, National Board Certification, and 20+ years experience. The people who conduct this PD do not have the years of experience or knowledge that I have and it is obvious yet they are in positions to judge me and my work and they try to tell me what to do minute by minute, despite the fact that not a single one of them has ever taught the CCSS in a real classroom and most have been out of the classroom for the duration of NCLB.
It is all a piece of surrealism posing as reform and improvement and it will, eventually, collapse in on itself from a lack of reality and failure to achieve anything at all but frustration. It is my hope that one day soon the citizens of this country will realize how pointless these rating systems and comparisons really are and begin to trust their own judgement, as we did for so long, about whether they are happy with their schools or not.
Wow, Chris, you really nailed it in this post. I, too, am disgusted with being forced to sit through hours and hours of completely useless and intellectually insulting “professional development” programs and meetings. One would think that there might be just a tiny modicum of thought and planning put into these endeavors, but no – we are treated EXACTLY the way we are warned and threatened NOT to teach – one big group “lesson” for everyone, regardless of where any one member of the group may be on the educational spectrum. I have been agitating for the past 2 years with state legislators that if one meets specific criteria, then one should be completely exempt from the idiocy of “PD” year after year – the criteria being a combination of years of experience, degree completion, NBCT status, and are(s) of certification. It infuriates me year after year to be forced to listen to some kid 2 years out of college telling me how I should be teaching and managing my classes (23 years teaching, 4 degrees including the PhD, NBCT, certified in all core disciplines, and administrator license). I now just take headphones and listen to something worthwhile while the drone goes on.
The stupidity of the state level “leaders” apparently is limitless.
Thank you, to the owner of this blog, for letting us know about this.
Knowing that such a rating/ranking system is making the rounds: forewarned. This discussion: forearmed.
Chris in Florida: your second paragraph literally describes what happens when the “tail” of high-stakes standardized testing “wags the dog” of genuine teaching and learning.
The resulting homogenization with its emphasis on the degradation of a quality educational experience doesn’t affect, of course, the schools the self-styled “education reformers” send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to like Lakeside School [Bill Gates], Harpeth Hall [Michelle Rhee], Delbarton School [Chris Christie], U of Chicago Lab Schools [Rahm Emanuel], Sidwell Friends [Barack Obama] and the like.
For the vast majority of public school staff and students and parents, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”
DrSpector: re your last sentence—
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
And
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.s”
[Albert Einstein]
Great minds think alike.
😎
Chris & Dr Spector,
Being ‘professionally developed’ isn’t your favorite activity as a teacher?????
Duane, as I like to point out to fools who drone on to me about the glories of ‘continuous improvement’: the problem with that failed business model is that you can never achieve success.
Since everything can always be ‘improved’, nothing is ever good enough. It assumes a level of perfection impossible for human beings to achieve. Lacking any kind of achievement participants become discouraged and give up and simply comply in order to meet impossible demands.
In other words, it is ridiculous nonsense. That’s why it has been embraced wholeheartedly by everyone from Linda Darling-Hammond to Arne Duncan, I guess, and is the lynchpin holding the whole reformist movement together.
I’m taking a Zen approach to next week’s PD (a day long explanation of how the Danielson abomination will be used to destroy our careers this year) and another day long droning about our School Improvement Plan and how the strangers with next to no experience at the district office fooled around this summer and created a ‘plan’ to turn us from a D to an A through business aphorism magic!
I will be playing bridge on my iPad, most likely. Or knitting a sock.
“I’m taking a Zen approach to next week’s PD. . . I will be playing bridge on my iPad”
I don’t have a cell phone/portable electronic device but I have considered getting one just so I have something half-way constructive to do while they attempt to professionally develop me. I’ve seen that it’s okay to be using an electronic device but heaven forbid if I read a book or during the year grade papers. I do my best to stay awake but sometimes I can’t even do that because it’s all a bunch of bullshit, as you have pointed out, and my Zen/Jedi skills aren’t all that good.
Good luck on the new year, as you will need it to be rated as acceptable by your all’s new Danielson rubrics.
Professional Development courses are nothing more than a modem of justification for ones job. A job in which has zero accountability and zero impact on students. In my district these jobs are performed mostly by teachers who were grossly ineffective and inept yet now these individuals train us on what we should be doing. Those so called professional development courses are nothing more than one of the many layers of bureaucracy within the realm of education that must be removed immediately.
You can learn to knit or crochet, Duane. TONS of teachers in my district do that at our stupid PD days. I can knit but only with a loom, which is more obvious, but I’m considering starting it at PD anyway.
T.Out West…. wasn’t that Madame Defarge?????
Of course, real estate listing services have a lot of the same data on the property they sell. Is is a tacit form of red-lining.
The information is gleaned from multiple sources, almost all of them public records. For a small town in California I found stats on the proportion of residents with various levels of education, the local schools that were in the California testing regime and how the school scores compared to the state average, other info on the democraphic makeup (high American Inidian, low african American), median age, local tax and labor market information, major businesses by employment and type, plus seismic vulnerability, water shortage, air pollution and so on. My local business journal does some post-hoc ratings of school districts with comparisons of dedicated taxes, tax breaks, staffing ratios and so on. There are comparable ratings for private and parocial schools, but none for charters and on-line operators. Ohio politicians don’t want that information.
…and despite the facts, Chris Christie refers to our NJ schools as drop out factories. Of course, his agenda is to privatize everything while giving immense tax breaks to corporations and casinos (which casinos thereafter go bankrupt) and cost us a fortune also in saving his fat arse from his political bad deeds. But, its the teachers…its always the teachers, at fault.
Diane, I’m surprised you bothered with this. Their “experts” look like a bunch of economcis and B-schools faculty. The “Education Output & Safety” ranking smacks of junk science. Given the huge disparties—here in Maine we’re 12 academically and 42nd in EO&S—this is the sort of fodder that keeps everyone running around in circiles.
The EOS not only reeks of junk science but is. The Show Me State is ranked as one of the worse in bullying. My take is that there had been a few high publicized cyber bullying incidents in Missouri in the last few years, one in which a student killed herself after being bullied. The legislature then had to appear to be doing something and mandated better and more accurate reporting of bullying incidents at schools, setting up a “bullying hotline”, etc. . . .
Is there more bullying now? Probably not, perhaps even less, but there is more reporting of incidents, probably more accurate than most states so it appears worse than many other states.
Devil’s always in the details and these school rankings are not very detailed.
2 more years. How lucky you are! I have 13 to go. My state (MA) recently made me sit through two full day Saturday sessions, 16 hours, about a new preschool assessment, Teaching Strategies GOLD. I knew more than the presenter.
I am a public preschool teacher with 28 years and an M.Ed. in child development. I have trained teachers, been an asst. principal, program director, etc. What a waste of state taxpayers’ funds. I sat next to an 18-year-old day care assistant with no experience. It was infuriating and insulting to waste my personal time. I understand it would be difficult to differentiate, especially for preschool teachers who range from no training to advanced degrees. I think teachers and supervisors should be trusted to work together and decide what kind of PD is useful for each teacher.
Not to mention, I have used a preschool assessment for 28 years that I designed and of course it is better than the one the state is requiring my school to purchase. (Maybe I should sell mine and get rich! I must look up the earnings of GOLD…)
I was a public school asst. principal in England and the assessments they have are used nationally and developed by staff who work for the dept. of education. Not by corporations! So is the national curriculum. As it should be. No one is making money off it.
Our district’s mandated trainings are also a waste of time for most of us.
If I want anything useful I have to do it on my own and pay for it.
Perhaps, with Reformers’ obsession with metrics, we need to expand the parameters to the ranking models:
Cafeteria with the best pizza selection (deduction for pineapple)
Highest percent of teachers lookin’ hot (male or female)
Coolest football coaches who chew gum all day long
Most student field trips to Disney
Easiest “A”s in Comparative Fan Fiction classes
Shop teachers with the most number of fingers
Ratio of air conditioned busses to students sleeping on the bus
Math teachers with most number of pocket protectors or pi earrings
Student restrooms that keep soap stocked up
Biology teachers with the most exotic live animals, with a bonus for box turtles and sharks
Average number of world language teachers that integrate paella, chocolate croissant, and saurbraten into the curriculum on Fridays
Secretaries that … never mind. Never insult secretaries – THEY TRULY RUN THE SCHOOLS AND ARE INDESPENSIBLE!!!!!
Ok, someone stop me! Maybe politically incorrect? But these metrics seem about as valid as any others in the reform frenzy.
We are crepes in French class! I get points!
Oh wait, I was told that it was not a critical thinking activity… Yes I know but I thought it added to the fun:(
Hi MathVale:
You forgot one major category. It is PARENTS who are sided with Rhee and Brown. Parents who do not appreciate teachers, are awarded “parents of the year.” As a result, let Prof Chetty of Harvard U to have a statistic that follows on children of these parents less than a period of 10 years. This specific length of time is according to Bill Gate to know whether his creation of CCSS is an effective failure or success? Back2basic
with the caveat that the parents are mis-informed or poorly informed and the real estate sales people will take advantage of this by pushing the parents into million dollar houses they can’t afford (one parent I know had an interest only loan on a million dollar house to be in the “best”) …. because it APPEARS that scores are better or whatever…. and the rents in Boston are up to $3200 for a two bedroom apartment. A lot of it is sales hype.
Part of our obligation is to inform parents in better ways and work with local school boards etc….…. Our biggest problem is the great inequities among/between the school districts (the state funding formula never seems to make up for this); when Romney was Governor in MA he forced the cities/towns to come up with more local money because he held back state funds…. so the parents are really caught in a vicious cycle , too…
Math Vale,
I think some of your metrics, such as shop teachers with all of their fingers, make more sense than what they used. They use the percentage of residents with a BA to assess school quality. But in states with a higher percentage of immigration, such as California and Texas, this is likely to be lower (unless they all have H1 visas) and this has nothing to do with the K12 system.
I got a chuckle out of the “shop teacher fingers” laughed out loud and I live with only a cat!!!!!
There are 2 or 3 things that have been robust over the years (correct me if I am wrong)
(a) mom’s educational level will correlate with achievement scores (b) teacher’s level of vocabulary use (and thus the amount of conversation or dialogue in a classroom ) will correlate with achievement scores …. Everything else is STYLE and you had best agree to conform your style with that of the boss
I have seen one study from Utah recently that shows good health, nutrition, occupational choice of the parents, small family size (where the mom can devote time with the youngster’s language development and other factors) will OVER SEVERAL GENERATIONS of cumulative advantage can show higher scores but this study is only in the biological sciences right now and hasn’t made it into the academic/educational….
Basil Bernstein did early studies on language development and student growth (I hesitate to use the word achievement) illustrating that the factors that identify in the home as socio-economic could be measured as “restricted language” or elaborated language and , although it is an older study, I still refer to it because it did not have the racial pejorative overtones because it was in Liverpool England (yes, but before the Beatles)…. There is current work in northern and southern Italy showing that students test differently based on speed factors (tradeoff with speed/accuracy) and I am not sure which socio-economic factors they controlled.
AND, it depends on what type of test you select to show this kind of reporting of correlations in the data (reminder correlation is not necessary causation)
I think some of your metrics, such as shop teachers with all of their fingers, make more sense than what they used. They use the percentage of residents with a BA to assess school quality.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
Jean,
You are quite correct when you said “I hesitate to use the word achievement”.
Think of Junior Achievement, that business school partnership that has been ongoing since I was in high school (late 60′-early 70s). Achievement is a business term hybridized into educational discourse along the way. ‘Achievement’ focuses on the ends not on the means-the teaching and learning process. Focusing on the teaching and learning process is the key. Teaching and learning are lifelong adventures.
Well Michelle Rhee gave Nevada a C because our Governor paid her a lot of money to union bust. So because teachers can now be fired virtually at any time – we crawled up her list.
And we are the lowest on every list I might value: lowest graduation, lowest teacher retention, lowest limited langauge learner funding, lowest per pupil spending, lowest early intervention, lowest family socio-economics, lowest college graduates and on and on.
I wish it even mattered to a single Nevada politician out there — up to and including Majority Leader Harry Reid. They all claim to be “education candidates” but all I see is heavy campaign coffers filled by billionaires businessmen and non-profits like Students First to permit the legal pillaging of our public schools by fads and scams.
You can really see the problems with constructing this kind of measure by looking at the bullying rate. The study reports that Mississippi has one of the lowest bullying rates and Vermont one of the highest. I suspect what these folks are actually measuring is how much each state is concerned with bullying, and Vermont does a better job of keeping track than does Mississippi.
See my comment above TE.
Cross-posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Wallethub-The-Best-and-Wo-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Financial_Online_School-Reform_Survey-140811-175.html#comment506045
with this comment at the end.
But the conversation should be about what it takes for kids to learn… what are the principles of learning that ARE the real National Standards research? This came out of Harvard and the LRDC (Univ. of Pittsburgh) when Pew funded this third level research in the nineties. 3rd level research demands REAL evidence, and is not the same as the ‘standards’ proposed by Gates had his hand-picked cronies write.
Isn’t it time we talked about LEARNING and what it takes to reach and teach our 21st century, screen addicted kids, with their short-attention span? Or, in what ways the PRINCIPAL must support learning, BECAUSE 4 of the principles of learning from the research was for the PRINCIPALS AND ADMINISTRATORS, whose role it was to SUPPORT THE CLASSROOM PRACTITIONER… who was no mere provider of facts, but a professional who knows what learning looks like and also HOW TO ‘TEACH’ or enable/facilitate emergent minds to acquire BOTH knowledge and skills.
and that i sky 2 cents.
As a retired teacher of 40 plus years and educational researcher for most of the time, when evaluating state’s K-12 academic performance, why not use the KISS ( Keep it Simple Stupid) model. Most everyone agrees on two basic assumptions related to the K-12 system’s top performance. (1) each grade is incrementally more advanced than the previous grade; and (2) students are to be promoted by the mastery( proficiency) of the subject taught at each grade level. If one accepts these two assumptions then all one has to do is evaluate the states’ school quality is to critically and empirically evaluate the states NAEP( National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores, our national report card at grades 4, 8 and 12 in the critical areas of math, English, science, etc.. Then, if the individual states would correlate their states proficiency standards to the NAEP, then the individual district, school, classroom and student could be evaluated and compared fairly with each other, regardless of social- economic, ethnic or gender considerations just as the NCLB law mandated by the 2013-2014 school year. The model would also form a meaningful “national report card” for the states, schools, and students All the NCLB law mandated was that all students in math and English grades must be promoted by the state’s proficiency requirement, just as the second assumption mentioned previously suggested. Unfortunately, the K-12 school ADMINISTRATION did NOT promote students by proficiency, as students moved from grade to grade. The result was that by 8th grade math, for example, the mean non proficient student was four years behind where the student’s skills should be. In other words, the 8th grade math teacher was attempting to teach 8th grade math skills to the required proficiency level to many students that had fourth grade math skills. A strong argument could be made that by not promoting the student by proficiency, so that the student has “direct effective instruction” on what is to be taught and learned, a form of “student and teacher academic abuse” is occurring, as neither the teacher has a “choice ” of effective teaching nor the student having and effective “choice” of learning the material.
A simple solution is to evaluate and promote K-12 students by proficiency levels as the student moves from grade to grade by “proficiency” independent of attendance. In the model, a student could be in 3rd grade by attendance but could be placed, evaluated, and promoted based upon the student’s proven readiness at the academic levels of 1,2,3,4,5. The academic levels would NOT necessarily equate to the traditional attendance grade. However, much cooperation and coordination must be defined, implemented, and evaluated among levels, disciplines, teachers, administration and counselors to implement an effect “academic level” model. Once again, all the K-12 system must do is to KISS the obviously solution to educate students to their ability by proficiency that is currently ignored and viewed as politically incorrect at the federal, state and local educational levels.
By the way the current Common Core State Standard is only a list( in California ) of what is to be taught, just like in a textbook index. A true standard has three parts that includes (1) the list of what is to be taught; (2) the levels of mastery ( generally five levels); and(3) verification that the student is being promoted by the stated mastery criteria. If additional documented research is needed to support these comments, contact me including a fax # at ekangas @ juno .com.
Ekangrs2014,
While your plan does have the advantage of simplicity, I do think there will be pushback if you actually require students to be proficient at the material for one grade level before they are promoted to the next. Poster Lloyd Lofthouse recently reported that the exit exam in California is designed to be passed by a student reading at the ninth grade level and the exam in Texas is written at the fourth grade level. This suggests to me that many students would fail to advance under your proposal.
quoting T.E. “and the exam in Texas is written at the fourth grade level.” I would like to see proof of this and a Texas Department of Ed or a substantial university document that describes this and how the grade level is assigned. You are talking out of your hat or following some phony ideas that cannot be substantiated. I want to see the actual document with an author’s name on it (so I can view the credentials and don’t give me anybody out of the Walton University of Arkansas or the Fordham Institute (which is definitely NOT connected to Fordham University)…… Have you seen this described in a publication from the Department of Education in Washington and exactly what formula did they use to assign a grade level. Have you ever seen a New York regents reading exam? Would you know how to assign a “reading level” to that? You make me exceedingly angry ….
Jeanhaverhill,
It is not my clim, it is Lloyd Lofthouse’s claim. I took it at face value. Perhaps he could verify it.
I do not live in Texas and have not seen the state test. This is what is published in the literature to describe the Texas test.
“Achieve experts coded each item on all six state tests using ACT’s six levels of demand. They then compared the levels on the state tests with the levels found on the ACT tests…..The Texas, New Jersey and Maryland tests are more demanding and line up more closely with the ACT 10th grade test..”
I can guarantee you that the tests in Massachusetts and new York where my grandchildren are enrolled are of the highest caliber (MCAS and regents test). I am not speaking of the PEARSON/PARCC TESTS here as they are totally experimental at this point. In order to conform with the experimental tests, teachers are asked to take the 5th grade bookshelves and deposit them in third grade as “the new standard” and this is absurd.
In one school year I was the administrator in charge of reading student essays (prior to MCAS) and our expectation was a 5 paragraph essay that was graded on four levels (using analytic scoring and holistic scoring). Since that time the process has improved greatly to what is acceptable to the requirements for our state. We read close to 50000 essays in that one year in building the standards (with training from ETS following the ETS standard setting manual.) I have since retired but for someone as yourself to offer gratuitous comments on the work of my professional colleagues is insulting.
I don’t know if you are speaking as a parent or in what role ; but it seems that you have been mis-informed or you are uninformed, or you don’t live in Texas and have no knowledge of their test other than what you read in the newspaper or what you are reading in literature that is aimed at attacking the public schools. On every point that I have made you have found some picayune detail to dispute. If you are sincerely wanting to understand public education as a parent that is one thing but if you are just going through here setting “mines” to blow up the issues into some conflagration or other??? It is very difficult to fathom your purpose other than to say you attack every perspective other than your own narrow, rigid and simplistic views gained from dilettantes.
quote: ” I took it at face value. ”
yet, you take nothing of “value” from people unless it is derogatory about education and public schools….
Jeanhaverfill,
Generally posters here trust each other’s empirical claims. The has worked well, with the notable exception of the unfortunate K. Spradling incident several years ago.
if you are interested in learning, we could show you some mathematic formulas that are used to establish grade level; however, they are rudimentary at best. When you are expecting critical analysis of literary materials it is next to impossible to assign a formula or “grade level” to that……
Jeanhaverhill,
Is your comment addressing me or poster ekangers2014? It is ekangers2014 suggestion that students “are to be promoted by the mastery( proficiency) of the subject taught at each grade level.”
Do you think that poster ekangers2014’s plan impractical?
If If you were interested in anyone’s opinion other than your own you might care to read how Kentucky has attempted to equate their early version of the state’s test, with their most rent test they are using and the NAEP tests ….. to build validity. Because Pearson/PARCC is not releasing the tests we are unable to equate the previous tests in use with the experiments being proposed by Arne Duncan et al.
Jeanhaverhill,
I have posted Kentucky’s CCSS Math publication with much approval in the past and suggested that the blog look at Kentucky’s efforts.
T.E. al of my last 5 or 6 comments have been directly to you….and no one else …. the study from Kentucky that I am referring to shows how they are changing tests and attempting to equate across different tests in use with the NAEP…. any older study on math I have not read and cannot respond to. Helen Ladd in North Carolina end Jack Hassard in Georgia are showing the impact of these rapid changes in tests from year to year and the impact on test scores with data. It will take a while to compile across the different states to understand the full implications ; yet, there are many of us in the field who see that the policy is wreaking havoc in the school systems in addition to treating the students as “guinea pigs”….
Jeanhaverhill,
Because some posters use email notification, replies may be inserted between your post and the one you are responding to. For example, if I have comment A and you respond with comment B the two will start as AB on the list. If someone else responds to my post A using the email system with comment C and I respond to C with comment D, and the poster of comment C responds to my comment D with a comment E the order of posts is now ACDEB, and your comment looks like it was made about E when in fact it was a comment about my post A.
T.E. and http://www.riosmauricio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Taleb_The-Black-Swan.pdf
Read Chapter 15…. The Bell Curve: the intellectual fraud
Jeanheverhill,
Again it seems rather irrelevant to the discussion here.
t.e.
as far as what is “relevant here” I don’t think you are the one who gets to decide that; please see my comment Sunday about your use of the “Imperial WE” when I was asking you about the democratic process for decisions about policies and budget priorities.
Or, read the article by Helen Ladd on the North Carolina tests and how they have a differential impact on students depending upon context and conditions. Or, go to the blog by Jack Hassard and see how he describes the testing data for Georgia .
quote: “Generally posters here trust each other’s empirical claims. The has worked well, with the notable exception of the unfortunate K. Spradling incident several years ago.”
I have no knowledge of Spradling….. I trust the sincerity of most of the people writing and in particular I asked you to look up Duane Swacker’s citation of the Neil Wilson article that will present the issues around “psychometric fudge.”
Jeanhaverhill,
I read some of the work that Duane cites several years ago. Unfortunately it is word Salad. I have used the same argument to prove that the thermometer in my back yard is useless as guide to dress in the morning.
T.E. you are deflating my comment while taking a swipe at someone else…. that is disingenuous. I specifically offered the citation of Neil Wilson, “psychometric fudge” , and wanted to give Duane the credit for pointing it out to me and you took that as an opportunity to insult someone again (who is not even in this conversation yesterday or today )
Jeanhaverhill,
As I said, I looked at it several years ago. Not everything that is self published is well thought out.
cx
I typed deflecting and autocorrect made it deflating but I prefer the deflecting because it is more precise and describes what you are doing
when I see something that looks like a “fluke” in the data or a “red herring” I try to go to the source and verify it in two or three different places where there is a substantial body of work that has contributed to the R&D efforts. Today there is a major campaign that is purposeful that is bent on disinformation; I don’t see that here at all on this blog or if it were represented here it would be refuted.
http://www.artofteachingscience.org/georgia-8th-grade-crct-scores-2008-2014-what-do-they-mean/
this is one of several pieces where Jack Hassard explains the Georgia test scores
T.E. here is the abstract from North Carolina
The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8
Charles T. Clotfelter*, Helen F. Ladd, and Jacob L. Vigdor Duke University
Abstract
Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on successive cohorts of students who stay in the state’s public schools for all six years, and study both differences in means and in quantiles. Our results on achievement gaps between black and white students are consistent with those from other longitudinal studies: the gaps are sizable, are robust to controls for measures of socioeconomic status, and show no monotonic trend between 3rd and 8th grade. In contrast, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress through these grades. Looking beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while racial gaps between high-performing students have widened. Racial gaps differ widely across geographic areas within the state; very few of the districts or groups of districts that we examined have managed simultaneously to close the black-white gap and raise the relative test scores of black students.
T.E. the abstract for the Wilson article
Wilson
School of Education
The Flinders University of South Australia
Abstract
This study is about the categorisation of people in educational settings. It is clearly positioned from the perspective of the person categorised, and is particularly concerned with the violations involved when the error components of such categorisations are made invisible. The study establishes the centrality of the measurement of educational standards to the production and control of the individual in society, and indicates the destabilising effect of doubts about the accuracy of such categorisations.
Educational measurement is based on the notion of error, yet both the literature and practice of educational assessment trivialises that error.
In particular the notion of validity is examined; the notion of invalidity has been reconceptualised in a way that enables contradictions and confusions to be highlighted, so that more genuine estimates of categorisation error might be specified.”
In particular I referred to the discussion of “psychometric fudge”
T.E. I’ll bet you didn’t bother to look up the “Black Swan” either because you would have to throw away your slide rule or some of your metrics because it is talking about diversity and variation.
Jeanhaverhill,
I have read Black Swan and it is sitting on my shelf as I type this. It does not seem particularly relevant to the discussion here.
It must be neat to live in a world of smug superiority…. congratulations!
T.E.
Chris Matthews plays a game with the interviewees “tell me something I don’t know” and in him I think it is funny /precious because he went to Holy Cross while i was struggling at the teacher’s college across town… but with you ? it isn’t all that funny… as my grandkids would say “it gets old”…..
T.E.
N. Wilson is published in EPAA.
EPAA is an online journal editor: Gene Glass (who has a substantial record in the field of educational research)
and it is peer-reviewed.
Your argument about self-publishing was debated throughly in the past and Michael Scriven wanted everything peer-reviewed ; with the advancement of technologies that issue has become “an old bone” to kick around….