Last week, the New York Times published an editorial criticizing the nation’s public schools for the rate of remediation courses taken by college students. It relied on a report prepared by Education Reform Now, which is part of Democrats for Education Reform, the advocacy group created by hedge fund managers to push charters, high-stakes testing, and Common Core.
Aside from the partisan advocacy of the funders and sponsors, there are basic questions of fact and interpretation, i.e., spin.
I didn’t go into the underlying study, but others did.
Alan Singer posted a blistering critique and suggested that the editorial writer would not have gotten through middle school with such faulty logic and weak evidence. While the editorial promotes Common Core, it fails the most basic expectations for textual analysis.
He reviewed the numerous flaws in the report and concluded:
“I don’t know if the New York Times considered any of these issues before it endorsed the propaganda report by charter school and testing advocates promoting their political agenda. Apparently the Times editorial team has difficulty when it has to “[d]istinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text, “ another area where they failed middle school Common Core. Instead of praising colleges for raising standards and providing support so students can reach these standards, the Times and the testing and charter school people take pot shots at public schools. ”
Russ Walsh wrote about what he called “the college remediation course hoax.”
Walsh explains why remedial courses ballooned and how the colleges responded inappropriately.
He writes:
“With the growing number of students attending college since the 1960s, colleges found that not all students had the skills in reading, writing and mathematics that professors were expecting when they entered the classroom. The colleges responded by creating non-college credit remedial courses that students were forced to take, almost always because of some score they received on a college “placement” test. And so a cottage industry of remedial, non-credit courses was created on campuses across the country, often taught by adjunct faculty of dubious qualifications and most often completely separated from the for-credit courses that other students were taking.
“The results were inevitable. Students began collecting huge tuition debt paying for courses for which they did not receive credit. Often these students had to take these remedial courses over and over again because they could not pass the exit exam, which was frequently another standardized test. The students never got the chance to feel like they were regular college students. Within a year or two these students, frustrated with their lack of progress, dropped out of school burdened with student loan debt and without a degree or good job prospects.
“Colleges, certainly the four-year colleges, I am addressing here, should not have and did not have to go the remedial course route. The schools could have and should have known that reading and writing courses that are removed from the context of a real course have very limited impact. (I will not address math remedial courses here because it is outside my expertise, but I believe the same principles would hold.) Rather than place students in courses designed for writing improvement or reading improvement, the colleges would have been much better off placing these students in the regular classroom and then providing them with the support they needed to succeed in these courses.”
Others have weighed in.
Jersey Jazzman reviewed the data and raised important questions. Why did the report use public schools as a punching bag (what % of the students in need of remediation attended private schools, religious schools, or charter schools)? How credible was it to claim that affluent students had higher rates of remediation at four-year colleges than economically disadvantaged students? Does that mean that the high schools attended by kids in poverty are better than those in posh suburbs? Jersey Jazzman questions the Times’ faith in the idea that high standards and hard tests are the key to college readiness. He threw down the gauntlet on Common Core, challenging anyone to produce evidence that adherence to Commin Core increases college readiness.
Audrey Hill challenged the study authors’ decisions about which families should be considered affluent, middle-class, and low-income. She compares their data with federal guidelines defining poverty and concludes–unlike the ERN study–that only 6 of 100 students receiving remediation come from middle-class or upper-income families.
It seems odd that sensible people have to argue that low-income students are less likely to get a good education than students from middle-class and upper-income communities. If that were true, as the ERN report and the New York Times believe, then upper-income students should be clamoring to get into the schools attended by low-income students. Are the wealthy kids on the losing side of the achievement gap? What a ludicrous claim.
I’m thrilled that someone is looking into it. I’m just curious though- isn’t this what we’re paying the US Department of Ed and state educational people to do?
Why do they all accept these studies and promote them? Should we believe anything they say if they have this agenda?
If the test-makers/technology investors want to make more money, wouldn’t they simply move on to the next phase: Getting the government to treat higher-ed the same as primary and secondary schools by pushing the argument that those colleges which can’t pull off certain technology-tested feats would lose funding?
My comment is why did the colleges accept these students in the first place? If they did not meet entry requirements, then the students should not have been admitted. Let us keep in mind that college is BIG business. It behooves colleges to continue the mantra that there is a college for everyone.
It just seems obviously self-serving for colleges to say this is all due to public schools.
Odd to just accept this without question, like they all did. Wouldn’t one ask if anything else changed, just in an ordinary way of thinking?
I have noticed on at least one occasion that even those who attended public schools feel the need to bash them in front of a group made up of folks who mostly did not attend public school.
At a recent alumni lunch at my alma mater (a small private liberal arts school attended by many graduates of private high schools), an employee of the alum office (also a graduate of the alma mater and also of public schools) said something to the effect of “I don’t think I ever even wrote a paper in public schools.” Which we know is not true or she would not have been able to complete her essays.
There was a time in history when was Imus went down for saying, and Trent Lott and Paula Dean would have been socially acceptable. I’m glad we have come to a point where their flippant and derogatory comments about minorities were called out. I long for the day when bashing public schools will also be something that is not OK.
This is not exactly a new topic. In the first years after the formation of Harvard University (yes, that Harvard), the tutors complained about language skills of the entering students. Thinking that they should not have to teach any language skills to students they were dismayed and reluctantly created a basic English language course. That course, has morphed through the centuries to become English 1A, the flagship language course all students want to “place” into.
California had a master plan for higher education )ca 1960) it never fully implemented and that was to have all students attend community colleges for their first two levels (can’t say years any more) and then have the state colleges and universities handle the latter two undergraduate levels and graduate courses. The state undermined its own plan by paying for attendance rather than success and so the University of California loaded up on freshmen, placed them in high capacity classrooms to maximize the university’s income, and spent the money on upperclassmen.
Such a plan would work, would save everybody money, and allow for remediation as is needed.
PR Watch reported that the Waltons and Rupert Murdoch fund ERN.
If the NYT is part of the 4th Estate, the organization should become aware of and, publish the work of Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal, “The Vulture’s Vulture (harvard-trained): How a New Hedge Fund Strategy is Corrupting Washington”. “The billionaire hedge fund managers are working the halls of Congress with civil rights groups”- perfect cover for Democratic politicians using PR to protect their corporate right-wing campaign donors.
Let’s not forget remedial math classes filled with students whose majors do not entail math beyond what they have already taken. Why have a literature or language student be stuck in an advanced algebra class that has nothing to do with their chosen area of study? Reporters and journalists would ask such questions.
Yes, and perhaps someday we’ll have reporters and journalists, rather than stenographers, covering education.
Don’t worry! As long as you can afford a private college tuition, your humanities oriented child will never be stuck in any advanced math class at all. Rocks for jocks is perfectly fine and they can graduate magna cum laude with their BA from (insert preferred Ivy league college of choice).
NYC pubsch parent – I dug into this a little. At my old alma mater (a fairly large Ivy League U), I found that they’ve upped the ante a bit on math (for Fr Lit/ other langs, my field), but they still call it math/ quantitive reasoning, & there are many interesting options (including adv linguistics).
Comparing to state & reasonably-priced small colleges (in the NJ/ NYC area) it’s really a mixed bag. Our state schools alternate between the unrelated (calculus- my kids would have needed remedial to reach that) & pathetic (a dummy course for art majors, e.g.). Whereas there are small, career-oriented, reasonably-priced privates whose math/qr courses are either directly related to major, or are what Iook to be much higher-qual math summary courses for arts majors.
bethree, thanks for looking into this.
I think the point is that your Ivy alma mater doesn’t force students who can’t pass a placement exam to take an extra “remedial math” course, which must be passed before being allowed to take the required more advanced ones. You can graduate from a top private university without proving any knowledge of Algebra II, let alone Trig or Calculus.
Students who attend community colleges aren’t given the benefit of the doubt. They may have as little use as humanities majors at Ivy league schools for more than basic math, but by golly they are going to have to pass a remedial math class if they want to come to the community college. If they had the money to attend a many private colleges, their lack of math prowess would have been fine.
It is very clear to me that the poorer you are, the more you are forced to be tested and told opting out is bad. Until every student takes the SAME exam, the reformers can keep raising the standards while their billionaire funders and their pals’ kids can “opt out” through graduate school!
The spin can be bewildering if you’re not a political professional.
I listened to the President’s speech to college grads yesterday and he told them how lucky they were and how they should be optimistic. According to his own appointees they’re all mediocre slackers who are unprepared for 21st Century Careers since the vast majority probably attended America’s Failed and Failing Public Schools and this wasn’t an exclusive college.
They might want to coordinate a little better.
Best Generation Ever or barely qualified to work as Wal Mart greeters?
Students probably don’t know what they are this point. They’re dizzy. Maybe they should stop listening to all these people.
Haha, love this post Chiara. If the average college grad is anything like mine & their friends a few short yrs ago, the only listening they do (about future prospects) is to recent grads in their fields.
Years ago this type of biased, partial journalism, based more on spin than facts, would have cause an ethical stir, especially coming from the “New York Times.” Under our current system of oligarchy, nobody even blinks. The ‘Times’ still has a widespread distribution with lots of readers that can be indoctrinated from the distortions presented. I wonder how many readers can access Singer’s blog in comparison?
Have faith. Current generation gets their info from blogs. All we have to is get them to vote!
Not at all surprising coming from a reform agenda predicated on lies, bogus claims, hyperbole, hypocrisy, psuedo-science, corruption, extortion, threats, punishment, and that all important blank check from the media.
I think the comments and analyses by all these reacting to the NY Times article are right on!!! Of course, when has the Times let valid and insightful analysis regarding education reform stand in the way of their reporting and commenting on education and education reform particularly when it has the opportunity to simplistically bash public schools??? My experience in higher education was that the institutions at which I taught based the need for remedial classes on ACT or SAT test scores. The test score number that requires a student to take remedial classes may be different at different institutions. For example, if a student does not get an ACT score of 19 (which is not very high) then they have to take remedial classes. Now there are a raft of reasons why a stiudent may get a low, in this case, ACT score. Unfortunately for the NY Times, rarely does this have to do with a bad public school. Why? Because if you look at the school you will find students in that school who do get higher than, in this case, an 19 ACT test scores. and do ot have to take remedial courses. Of course, my experience also tells me that if we look at the most reliable general indicator for a low test score – guess what??? Poverty. On the other hand, there are plenty of students who did not come from poverty backgrounds that said that the reason they had a lower score was they did not apply themselves in school – or – they do not test well. (I won’t go into this notion since it would lead us off track).
Now are remedial classes the reason students take so long to graduate? Well – usually a student is required to take either some type of English course (maybe 2 if the score is really low in that area eg. 13) or a math course (maybe 2 if the score is really low eg.in that area). In addition, lets remember, and I think Diane will agree, that there were those like James B. Conant and others, who thought that only 20% or so of the people attending high school had the ability ot go on to do college work. Many of us know about Lewis Terman and IQ tests, and these type people who believed that those with a 110 or higher IQ had the ability ot go on the college. (Don’t get me sarted on this guy!) The point is – some students need to take a remedial course. Unfortunately, these courses are often taught by some type of adjunct. Some are good – and others are _________ (fill in the blank). Long and short – The NY Times needs to quit bashing public schools by relying on shoddy scolarship by incompetent education analysts. I’m also very glad we are allowing so many students to have a second chance to get a college degree! I must say Steve Rus’ insights are excellent!
And as an aside, I have to make one more point, and I say this as an education professor talking about many of my fellow professors in other areas – who I respected! While they were knowledgeable about their academic areas, many would have profited from a good course in pedagogy – and most of them knew about ZERO regarding the history and philosophy of education, as well as the profound and complex world of education policy. One result of this lack of knowledge was that too many simply blamed and complained about students and public schools!
I guess you can tell this NY Times article irked the hell out of me! The folks who often write about education and education policy for the Times are at BEST – tedious!
They will now begin to understand those intricacies as the screw is now turned on them! They will soon wish they had stood up for public schools as they too are now about to be privatized and abolished. VAM for higher education is now on the horizon. They didn’t care about their graduates, now it will be their turn.
Kindergarten through 12th focuses on retaining students, Colleges and universities see themselves as Darwinists tasked to “drown the bunnies”. This is a very different mission. We all know about those “weed out” courses in college that are almost a sense of pride in departments. I have noticed some universities adding support for IEP kids or struggling students, but nowhere near what is expected of K-12 schools. The finger pointing towards “failing” high schools and “incompetent” teachers is misplaced. There are many great university professors and adjuncts, but many also that are frustrated by students they struggle to teach.
Gosh, the faux researchers who make a nice living coming up with reports that make their billionaire funders happy are desperate to convince upper middle class suburban parents their public schools are failing their kids.
First we had Arne Duncan yelling loudly that those parents cared about their home values more than their children’s education.
Boy did THAT backfire on Arne and his boss Bill Gates.
But that was good for those researchers because now they could get a grant to do new research to “prove” that lots of affluent kids were “not ready” for college at all!
I know they are hoping that will turn the suburban parents against their public schools now that attacking their values has failed.
Why so desperate to get those parents to turn against their public schools? There are plenty of low-income students to serve, but apparently the “reformers” are finding that they are failing with many of those at-risk kids and if they keep at it, they will actually have to educate ALL of them and not just the strivers they deem “worthy” while loudly implying that the others who their schools so often fail are so psychologically disturbed they need jail or a mental hospital.
There’s far more money in educating the rich suburban kids and the charters are desperate to get their greedy little hands on that market.
Your comment is like a crystal ball. It explains why “reformers” would cast aspersions on suburban schools, they are the ultimate meal ticket for privateers. They’ll have to plow down thousands of soccer moms armed to the teeth to pull that one off!
That New York Times piece ran on their Opinion Page and poorly written Opinions are often riddled with flaws and misconceptions that are not supported with valid evidence. It’s obvious that the NYT ran this piece knowing it was misleading and flawed because they can. All they did was offer an opportunity for others to reveal the lies in that opinion piece. Even though millions of people seem to think opinions are fact if the opinion says what they want to hear, they are not. A poorly written and unsupported Opinion can backfire on the paper.
The New York Times, like many news organizations is fed a lot of easy-to-use press releases with the expectation that the key talking points will be tweaked and published, no independent research or critical thinking needed about the content.
Most of the big think tanks, and many universities, have an in-house press release operations and contracts for the mass distribution of “news” about whatever…
Even the Institute of Education will assign staff to review research based ONLY on the media attention that a “research-like” study has gathered.
So to gather the attention of multiple news outlets, create a “buzz,” the savvy pushers of ideas, including the some of the major foundations, Education Trust, and others pay fees to professionals in distributing their press releases. Among these services are 24/7 Press Release, eReleases, Newswire, Online PR Media, PRLog, PR.com, PRLeap and PRWeb.
You can go to Google, search for the last month using this phrase “college remediation report” and see how few critical commentaries turn up versus who has been enticed to recycle talking points.
And the studies that aren’t underwritten by the billionaires (i.e. “ed reform movement so-called think tanks made possible by their largesse”) get very little press play.
Here’s one about how useful these tests are:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-burdman/the-pitfalls-of-community-college-placement-tests_b_7344850.html
If people want to see some actual research and scholarship, they should go to the Rutgers’ conference on the 20th. I attended many conferences in my career, and most of the speakers came from universities that carried out serious research based on evidence. Now that our government has opened our educational system to the marketplace, every snake oil salesman is an self proclaimed expert with some biased foundation or billionaire pulling the strings. Evidence no longer matters, just hype, spin and sell baby sell!
I suspect that that one reason why stories about college remediation are so popular is because college instructors love to tell them so much.
“And the studies that aren’t underwritten by the billionaires (i.e. “ed reform movement so-called think tanks made possible by their largesse”) get very little press play.”
You mean like Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”?
The most important educational writing of the last 50 years has been totally ignored, not only by the press but by those who should know about it, the education professoriate, administrators, state department educrats and teachers.
It blows apart logically the two main education deforms of the last educational standards and standardized testing, even the “grading” of students.
I do wish that everyone who writes about remedial/developmental education would start to make some distinctions about the students who need remedial/developmental courses.
First, there is a huge distinction between public universities and community colleges. Universities have admissions standards; community colleges are open enrollment. Anyone with a high school diploma or GED can enroll.
Second, some students would definitely benefit from being in a credit-earning college course while getting some help with remediation. This is a co-requisite model that many colleges are trying right now. But there are also many, many students who simply don’t know enough math to take college-level math courses. There are also many who simply don’t read well enough to succeed in many other college-level courses. These students will typically not benefit from the co-requisite model. Instead, they will simply fail the college course, over and over again.
Basically, some of the students entering community college can barely do any math and are close to being functionally illiterate. These students are quite different than those who are simply rusty in math and need a bit more help writing an essay. And, of course, there are many student in between these two extremes. To treat all these students the same is not good policy.
I don’t have the answers to the remediation problem, but to pretend that some of these students, especially at our community colleges, don’t need some sort of serious help before they can take credit-bearing courses is not the answer.
One recent idea has been to use high school GPA instead of, or in addition to, placement test scores in order to evaluate incoming students. I like this idea, but if the GPA required to avoid remediation is too low, then many students will fail their college courses.
The state of Tennessee recently launched a program where the community colleges partner with local high schools to work with high school students before they graduate. This idea seems to be working for Tennessee.
There is no simple answer to what is a very complex problem.
I agree, comments are too broad-brush: ‘remedial courses’ means something different in each context. If the US can show that some college is reqd of everyone in order to acquire a subsistence-level job, the country will have to pony up the dough to breach the gap between hs diploma– for decades, sufficient to enter mfg– & post-hs college-prep. Personally I feel we’ve backed ourselves into this position because of our limited ed system. For a better model, check out Poland (google-image-search ‘Polish education system’ for a chart).
Russ Walsh’s article referenced in the original post is from the viewpoint of four-year colleges. I support his position that 4-yr colleges (be they private or public) are selective, and have no business in the no-credit remedial course game.
Decent expository writing is required in every post-college business field. A credit-bearing general freshman-comp-type course should be sufficient to bring weaker writers up to snuff. ‘Back in my day’ at an Ivy League, the course could prove difficult for some in tech majors. They had to work very hard to pass it, often needing extra help, & some even had to repeat it (losing credit).
Math is a different story. A case can be made for a required credit-bearing introduction to statistics, logic, programming or the like for general lib-arts majors. Arts-tech majors should be getting career-related courses; for-lang majors linguistics, etc. There is no excuse for the state colleges of NJ to be lining everybody up for placement tests and no-credit remedial math to prepare them for a college-wide course in adv alg/ pre-calc!
There’s no escaping the New Nonsense.
It began sometime ago, and like the initial premise of Common Core, it went unchallenged … and now it lives as fact.
College has become the Great Lie of this society.
Across America, high schoolers are being suckered into giving it the old college try … and paying a steep price for it.
Now … college pressure actually begins in the monkey bars’ years … when children are just months out of diapers. It’s a Common Core thingy. Third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers routinely remind the pre-pimple crowd that the future in now … and that what’s happening in the classroom that smells like bunny-turd has college implications. We are such splendid asses.
Telling third graders to get ready for college is such wormy stuff. They have no idea what college is. That’s how early this sick indoctrination begins … lathering 9 year olds in college guilt. I’m surprised fourth graders don’t have pre-college ID cards … or early admission forms crinkled up in their backpacks alongside Little League reminders.
In my own neighborhood, I am surrounded by non-college folks who own their own businesses, work for municipalities, and some who have created mini-entrepreneurial empires of their own. They also live in glorious homes …and drive smart cars … and they enjoy lots of expensive toys and creature comforts.
They lead wonderful lives and, in many cases, they’re the pillars of this community.
Still, local high schools measure their success not by lives well-lived, but by the number who dash off to college … even for a year or two … because, well, that’s become the new yardstick of successful secondary education in America. College-bound kids are the new snoot statistics.
It’s as false as the premise that brought us Common Core … that our schools are failures and in need of drastic repair. College is … for many … the Great Lie. Nearly 50% try and fail. Read that line again, And that’s a very expensive lesson that didn’t have to happen.
If anything about our schools needs fast repair, it’s this nonsense that college is a must. What we need is to acknowledge that lots of kids will go into the trades … or strike out on their own … or seek municipal positions. Then our schools should respond to that reality.
We should never have killed off vocational schools. No one is in more dire straits than a homeowner without heat or stuck with a toilet that won’t flush. We don’t quote Shakespeare or call philosophy majors for those moments … we call plumbers.
We rely on roofers and electricians and masons and carpenters. We’d be lost without sanitation men and snow-plowers or folks who patch our roads or catch drunk drivers. We’d be in constant despair without tradesmen to fix our A/C or our oil burner or our attic fan.
These folks all have wonderful, successful lives … with wonderful families … whose children go to schools their taxes support. What’s so necessary about college to these folks? Or lots of folks?
Let’s talk about a scam. Lots of kids … cajoled by guidance counselors and their high school’s “college for everyone” rah-rah rant … buzz off to college unprepared and unsuited for what waits for them.
They dive into debt … and in a semester or two or three, it dawns on them that, well, college isn’t their ticket … and they drop out. But the debt drops in.
That money … THAT DEBT MONEY … floated those colleges and now those kids (or their families) are in high hock. For a long. long time. And everyone seems okay with that crap. The government loan sharks love this … and so do the colleges that knew these kids would never make it. And the government is now a willing accomplice … as in the criminal way.
It’s wrong. Extra wrong … because they were needlessly misled. And now they’ll pay for years. BUT the lie continues … from the White House on down … that college is essential. It’s the Great Lie of American education.
We’ve gotta shake hands with reality once again. And high schools have to part ways with the scammers.
Denis Ian
The truth hurts…..and I’m glad you have the guts to put it in writing!
NYT data were manipulated to produce a political conclusion that middle class kids were attending failing schools too.
All data are collected with a purpose. The definition of a group whose data are under scrutiny always explains the purpose of the analysis. Who is included and who is excluded are fundamental questions respected editorial boards should ask. Why do professional editorial board members ignore basic research questions? Has the New York Times failed the Common Core of Journalism?
Thank you for posting this. I have wondered about this subject for a while.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I am eternally grateful to California’s community college system back in the 70s. I went to Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria for one year where my fees were like $100 a semester and I received excellent remedial English instruction. I would have gone two years, but we moved to San luis obispo co. and Cal Poly was closer than Cuesta Community College. I still remember my biology class and sociology and anthropology classes at Hancock. The benefits to my education were tremendous!
Lots of good stuff in here, but I’m mystified by Russ Walsh’s comment about “dubiously qualified” adjunct faculty. He’s right about the adjunct part. Many basic and introductory courses are taught by faculty who aren’t in tenure-lines. And he’s right about the cottage industry that sprung around those courses. But he misses the obvious point that the reason those courses generate the revenue they do is that the adjunct faculty who teach them get paid pennies on the dollar that tenure-track faculty get paid.
Their qualifications have nothing at all to do with the argument, and I’m saddened that he took such a cheap shot at a cadre of college teachers who work their [bleeps] off under oftentimes terrible conditions.
Yes. I agree that it was a total cheap shot, and it is quite low to insult hard-working adjunct who don’t have much power. I know eminently qualified adjuncts with Ph.D.’s who teach 10 different courses per semester at 4 or 5 different institutions.
Instead of ad hominem attacks, why doesn’t he propose a solution to overworked adjuncts? No one should be teaching 10 courses per semester. It is not good for the faculty, and not good for the students. That’s the problem. The qualifications are not the problem. This country is flooded with well-qualified adjuncts.
I’m actually not worried about his proposing solutions to adjunct exploitation, although I’m always happy to hear good ideas. I’m more concerned about not propagating myths that make it hard for those of us who are working towards equality for all faculty.
Yes, Seth and Mary,probably a poor choice of words here. The point I was trying to make was that institutions do not invest fully into these remedial courses and that is indicated by the fact that they try to run the programs on the cheap by using poorly paid adjuncts. I, by the way, work as an adjunct.
Appreciate the clarification, Russ, and absolutely agree that institutional commitment to the courses is often weak. That’s one of the factors that enables the kind of bad-faith argument made by the Ed Deform crowd; they attack the concept of remediation without bothering to think about the contexts. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what they do all the time.
It’s important to understand that studies show the ACCUPLACER test, and its typical use as the sole factor for required remediation especially at the community college level, to be a deeply flawed instrument. In some systems throughout the country where test results are used to suggest but not require the applicant to enroll in remedial offerings, both groups, those whose scores where above or below the remediation cutoff number, statistically did about the same in performance and credential attainment. Blame for this situation should be put squarely on the shoulders of the bureaucrats who stand by this broken tool rather that on the secondary institutions and their students who are falsely being portrayed as sub-par.
Yep, it is deeply flawed. However, when it comes to the reform movement, a tests’ flaws are secondary to whether or not the test serves the purpose of showing that public schools are all failing. When it does, the reformers ignore any studies that find it useless.
Diane Complicated issue The tests used to assign kids to remedial courses are often poor indicators. Eric Nadelstern and I had a lot of experience of kuds who failed these tests while getting grades in courses they were not deemed ready for.
Deb
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Totally disagree that the placement tests are poor indicators. They are usually much more accurate in regards to a students knowledge of foundational skills than a teachers subjective grades, especially in traditional elementary, middle and high schools where their goal is supposed to be to retain students. And college professors and adjuncts are left to deal with the fallout from the byproduct of what passes for a solid public education currently. And once students get past the entry level general ed courses the real weed out really shines a light on how the public education system failed even the general ed population as well. Speaking from first hand experiences and from talking to college admission counsellors as well as professors and the college academic support staff.
M,
Again you assume that all teachers use only subjective assessments. But this is often not the case. In fact, many teachers often prefer to rely on objective assessment as a basis for grading. Objective assessment, in contrast, relies on quantitative scales that could apply to description of student work or performance.
But some criteria of achievement, such as complex thinking and contextually-sensitive performance, cannot really be measured with validity by objective ratings; valid assessment of such qualities requires the developed subjective awareness of an experienced professional.
For instance, when I was teaching (1975-2005), my objective assessment was often based on the detailed, directions and/or prompts of assignments and essays that students were provided as a guide after the lesson was taught. Of course, I taught mostly English lit, grammar and mechanics in addition to journalism. And even for journalism there was an easy to follow objective assessment and my students could stand next to me as I graded their work and pointed out the connection between what they wrote and the objective assessment that was linked to the journalism textbook the student editors had selected for the class to learn from. In journalism, the students bought their own class set of textbooks with money they earned from selling ads in the school paper. The senior student editors wrote to publishers and requested sample copies for journalism texts and from those, they selected the one they wanted to learn from. Textbooks often provide a foundation for objective assessment.
Detailed directions for an assignment designed to prove students learned what the teacher taught and/or understand what was read and/or studied, are often the same as a rubric, and most if not all of the teachers I knew and worked with used objective assessment based on the directions and/or rubrics they used in their lessons.
When translating grading policy into specific assignments, teachers want to ground their subjective judgment in a rubric and/or the detailed directions provided for the assignment that are consistent with their general criteria and also clear enough for students to understand, perhaps with feedback and chances to apply it themselves.
When I corrected student work, the directions/rubric that was also part of the lesson and written so students could understand how they were going to be graded, guided my grading so it was objective and not subjective to some whim. That way if a student asked why he had earned a C instead of an A on an assignment, the teacher can point to the directions/rubric and explain to that student in detail why.
In math, ass assessment is objective based on the student proving they learned the math skill taught. Easy to objectively assess when students demonstrate their thinking as they use what they learned to figure out the correct answer. Math teachers often required students to show the work that led to the answer.
Science and history is about the same as math and leads to easy objective assessment.
Personal experience shows that teachers grades mean nothing when it comes to proficiency of literacy & numeracy skill sets. It’s not always an objective measurement of a students skill levels.
Grading students in public and private schools today is “highly creative” and has risen to “an art form”; no longer are students graded on their abilities in reading, writing or math, but instead on their level of participation and effort, which should be taken into account, but what should be taken into greater account is the students ability and mastery to communicate and accurately comprehend and write about the material they have been studying. The majority of American high school students graduating today are not able to read, write or do math proficiently in their primary language of English! That is factual. That is why so many colleges have had to create programs around supporting these students and providing assistive technology and other accommodations, because public and private schools are churning out students that are not always literate or able to even figure out sales tax or how to make change!
Skills that were once standard baselines for success in the world of employment or post-secondary education are no longer the baseline and the bar has been lowered. But instead of providing proper and effective instructional methods to remediate those students with obvious academic struggles, instead teachers today ignore the deficits and pass the kids thru year after year without ever successfully bothering to even try to close their areas of academic deficits. Instead they state they “meet the student where they are – and then leave them there – to languish and fall further behind with each passing year!” That’s not where their responsibility to their education is supposed to end. That’s where they are supposed to supplement AND REMEDIATE them from!
(If Campbell Brown and David Boise want to see effective change and better instruction provided to students in this nation, they should be ensuring that teachers are mandated to remediate students using proven methodologies based in Orton Gilingham and similar methodologies that work with all but the most severely learning disabled students. They should try using methodologies that are known to work for the MAJORITY of students, not just those that they are now teaching to. Then you’d only have those with the most severe cognitive deficits identified as needing the more costly “Special Education” services. Universal design should be built into the general eduction system and all students should be allowed to have access to alternative formatted materials if they need it. It’s been known that assistive technology benefits many nonverbal students and unlocks their potential as well.
Actually the placement tests are not poor indicators of their current skills. You all can repeat that mantra, that test results are useless information and innacuarte tools for measuring students, but it’s not true. Those placement and standardized tests are more accurate than teachers grades. When you are using normalized objective and measurable data points of a persons skills as tested in those areas you’re basing it on a statistically documented population and known averages that have been determined to provide one with a meaningful endpoint.
What the placement tests do not necessarily measure though is the areas of knowledge that a person might also have in another area (such as explaining knowledge verbally or picking up concepts better through listening comprehension versus reading printed text in isolation, etc) but that is not what those placement tests are testing for.
They are testing for a baseline of skill sets in foundational areas of literacy and numeracy. Placement tests are not testing for advanced placement skills. They are testing for basic, everyday foundational skills in reading, writing and math (such as in drafting a letter for an employer or calculating sales tax, or reading MDS/Safety Data documents.).
They are looking for the foundational skills required in the work force or that’s needed to attempt to ensure a minimal foundation to build upon (because as we personally heard from teachers in public schools year after year, it’s not my job to ensure that the student has the foundational skills already in place; therefore by college it’s definitely not a professor’s responsibility to ensure students have that baseline in place since the P/K-12 public schools were responsible for providing and ensuring that foundation was solidly in place already.
And college instructors can also provide their own leeway for grading students. In college, instructors do not have to lower the requirements for students. They can choose to accommodate them to whatever level they deem appropriate, but if there is a licensing test required at the end of that training, a student will still need to be able to pass that dang standardized test you all hate so much and think are useless.
Just saying you can’t keep ignoring that there are tests out there that many students need to be prepared to take and test successfully in as that’s just the reality of life in many professions that require licensure.
Hence the importance of students having the proper literacy & numeracy skills solid before they are dumped into the land of reality and virtually unprepared for finding employment in the real world without them. And you wonder why there are so many people that me up on welfare or in prison.
Welcome to reality for your students if you don’t ensure they are able to read and write proficiently after leaving your classrooms!
M said, “teachers today ignore the deficits and pass the kids thru year after year without ever successfully bothering to even try to close their areas of academic deficits.”
I think you are are wrong. This is a stereotype that has been promoted by the corporate, for profit at any price public education carpetbaggers for decades. Some teachers might do this because they are burned out or don’t care, but thirty years in the classroom taught me that the overwhelming majority don’t. And students are not passed through without evidence of learning.
I taught from 1975 to 2005, and if anything has changed since I left teaching it is the top-to-bottom rank-and=punish Testocracy movement (No Child Left Behind, the Common Core crap, Race to the Top, etc) that focuses on teaching to the test —- and that is not the fault of the teachers.
When I was teaching, students who were behind were moved into remedial classes during the school year, were offered one-on-one tutoring after school, were told about adult and local two year community college classes that would help them catch up. Even summer school offered remedial classes to help these students catch up. In addition, there is no assembly line where students spend 13 years from K – 12 and then graduate automatically. Students must meet specific requirements to be eligible to earn a high school degree on time. Students that do not meet those specific requirements do not graduate on time from high school. Instead, they have to take night classes through adult education or through community colleges until they earned an equivalent high school degree.
But outside of the mandatory school day, these students could not be forced to do what it took to catch up.
That is why for decades the average on time high school graduation rate was about 73%, but by age 25 more than 90% of Americans have earned a high school degree or its equivalent, an equivalent that is going to become almost impossible to attain thanks to what David Coleman is doing as president of the College Board who now controls the SAT exam and Advanced Placement tests.
*The Atlantic* reported that David Coleman is an idealistic, poetry-loving, controversy-stoking Rhodes Scholar and a former McKinsey consultant who has determined, more than almost anyone else, what kids learn in American schools. *Al Jazeera America* reported in 2008 about David Coleman’s plan to ruin education, and said, “Coleman’s vision will end up harming the U.S. economy and our democratic culture.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/common-core-collegeboardeducation.html
Click the next link and learn from the chart for the percentage of U.S. Population, age 25 to 64 with a high school diploma, etc.
Click to access Educational%20Attainment%20and%20Achievement.pdf
The on time HS graduation rate is 10 to 15% lower than the total adult high school graduation rate. This is move evidence that students who are behind for any reason are not automatically promoted every year until they graduate on-time from high school.
On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 9:22 AM, Diane Ravitchs blog wrote:
> M commented: “Personal experience shows that teachers grades mean nothing > when it comes to proficiency of literacy & numeracy skill sets. It’s not > always an objective measurement of a students skill levels. Grading > students in public and private schools today is “” >
Ok so why then has nothing changed in more than 15 yrs even with the advent of CC/PARCC?
It’s been no secret that the once gold standard in education (a NYS REGENT high school diploma) has been meaningless for decades now? It no longer equates to proficiency, let alone mastery of subject material even with teaching to the exam for decades? (Hey, they’re a breeze :
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Regents-Hey-they-re-a-breeze-619833.php?cmpid=email-mobile )
And to top it off, there’s been well documented test inflation right alongside of this race to the bottom in public education in NYS even to stoop to manipulation of the grades as well.
Click to access regents.pdf
But go ahead and keep ignoring that the emperor has an ongoing wardrobe malfunction problem… All is well …. and the only problem is that those pesky standardized tests are still a thorn in the side of educators …. The test results are all worthless and there’s no problems with literacy and numeracy in the public schools and no need for accountability when after 13 yrs or more there are still children unable to read and write and do math (foundationally in basic skills va college placement skill levels ….)