Justin Parmenter, an NBCT teacher in North Carolina, decided to stop test prep and focus on relationships instead. The results were rewarding, to thestudents and to him.
He writes:
When the individual score reports came back, I experienced the usual roller coaster of emotions–elation over students who showed tremendous progress, disappointment with results that were lower than I knew my students had wanted. It wasn’t until I looked at overall numbers that I could see the real impact of the changes I had made. Students passing the state’s End of Grade reading test had increased by nearly 12%, and my value-added growth measure was the highest I’d ever received. From a testing standpoint, it was the best result my students have achieved in the 23 years I’ve been in the classroom.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is no surprise to me. Relationships matter, particularly when teaching very poor or emotionally traumatized young people. When I started working with ELLs in my district, I was told by the vice-principal that I would be sending him my “bad Haitians.” I never sent one student to him. He used to pop in all the time, and then, he stopped his unannounced visits when he saw that the students were behaving themselves. Students were behaving and learning because of “a relationship” built on mutual respect. Most students were woefully unprepared for the academic rigors, but they needed to feel capable and understood.
When I taught elementary ELLs, I was lucky to have more time to prepare students as these students from poor, unstable countries mostly from Haiti, Mexico and Central America. Students benefit from a curriculum that has both depth and breadth. They need understandings that connect the dots, and then they will blossom. Although our ELLs had to take a test at the end of the year, we never spent much time on prep other than explaining the format. Also, the tests did not have the high stakes that have been attached to tests today.
My grandson is in third grade in Texas. He gets about an hour of homework based on the CCSS test he is required to take. My daughter, a college graduate, has been helping him with the work. I do not know what the parents of other students, many of whom are Spanish speakers, do. Frankly, the school has a high rate of poverty, and they are running scared. The preoccupation with testing occupies far too much time in the school day.
An hour of homework a day for a third grader to prepare for tests is pure child abuse. No one has ever had a fond reminiscence of standardized test prep and how it impacted their lives in a positive way.
I agree. The school is trying to get off the “naughty” list. Fear is a strong motivator, but it does not make for good school policy.
Fear is never a motivator unless you’re hanging by your fingertips on a high ledge. Certainly should never be applied to education. Never could understand the term God fearing.
Politicians in Texas are eager to toss schools into receivership. School districts with high poverty numbers are at risk, and they know it. Test and punish is all about fear mongering. It’s bad policy.
and receivership is all about opening public money to private interests
Quite correct Ciedie!
The newest thing in the ed reform echo chamber is “unbundling” educational services.
The vision is to give each child a stipend and they go out and hire various educational contractors. It’s their fragmentation/privatization idea taken to it’s logical end- all children are just purchasers of services and all teachers are contract providers.
Not one of them have asked if kids can build relationships and community when they’re solo agents purchasing a set of services.
The hubris and recklessness just blows me away. There is just no recognition that their “disruption” experiments carry HUGE risk. They have no earthly idea how replacing schools with a set of contract services will affect children- what it will do to their relationships at schools, their communities, nothing. In the echo chamber it’s ALL upside.
When Betsy DeVos said education was just like food trucks, I thought that vision was unique to her because she’s so far to the Right that she’s well outside the norm.
She’s fringe, so I thought “well, that the far Right in ed reform”
Turns out DeVos is mainstream in the echo chamber. They ACTUALLY BELIEVE schools are like food trucks.
I’ve been to the food trucks right outside Betsy Devos’ office building. At most, there were four of them, two offering roughly the same menu. If you didn’t want what they offered, you were out of luck, as the next nearest food outlets were so far away that you couldn’t get there and back on your lunch break.
Is that what she wants for children? If you don’t fit into the few choices offered, you are SOL? Of course, we know that the choice always lies with the school who chooses the students and not the parents who are just choosing which school’s waitlist they will be on.
“Students have more opportunities today than ever before. This week is an opportunity to celebrate the many #SchoolChoice victories, and to continue to fight for the students and families who remain limited. Parents and students simply need more education freedom”
It’s a shame that none of the public employees in the federal government can manage to find a single public school to celebrate or promote, in a country where 90% of families attend public schools.
I hope the public doesn’t accept their skewed, anti-public school agenda as fact or somehow informed by anything other than an ideological agenda.
Of course they flew. If you want to teach a SKILL…any SKILL practice is required., it is the prerequisite for achievement.
I never gave a test when I was the teacher of the entire 7th grade at East Side Middle School. THE objective, for june, was that my students could master the reading and writing skills that would transform their writing from elementary school, to that needed for high school.
Of course, THINKING skills are crucial for both hose outcomes… see we read and we talked, we wrote and we talked, I talked a lot, in the early months as we read literature and compared what we read to what we knew.
They wrote, and the wrote, and they wrote in the weekly letters to me, where I could actually see how they were thinking and progressing.
Those letters made me famous, when Harvard and Pe asked, how I did it… what did I do to get my kids to ace all the city-wide tests.
Well, we read, and we read and we talked and we talked and we wrote and we wrote.
But he’s still “measuring” his “success” by test scores….
Beat me to the punch again, Dienne! 🙂
He’s still captured by the beast–bragging about the completely invalid test scores as if that is something to brag about. The supposed gains in scores and value-added “measurements” are based on those invalid test scores and even were they to be valid one cannot assume that the changes can be directly attributed to change in pedagogical methodology and not other factors.
The goals that he set up for the year, well, let’s just say if those weren’t a part of his pedagogical practice before he wasn’t doing all that needed to be done in implementing a teaching and learning process.
But perhaps he is beginning to understand that being a GAGA Good German implementer of educational malpractices is not in the best interests and actually harms all students. If so, great. Now, when he refuses to give the tests, I’ll applaud. Until then, no!
I had a conversation with a teacher that went pretty much as you say. He claimed he went away from his methods and watched his scores drop. He went back to his methods and they came up. I suggested that his clientele changed in ways he could not perceive, and since I knew him to be a wonderful instructor, he did not need VAM to prove it.
We cannot argue using test scores when it is convienent if we believe they are not valid logic.
Good to see that good teaching shows up in higher test scores of the students.
Not necessarily. Depends on who is in your class
The point of the post is that stopping test prep results in better teaching which is reflected in the higher test scores. Are you suggesting that the utility stopping test prep depends on who is in your class?
If your students have cognitive disabilities or if they don’t understand English, the instructor might not get high test scores.
We do not know if Justin Parmenter’s students received a high test score or not. We only know that the test scores, on average, were an improvement over previous test scores. Perhaps the students went from extremely low test scores to moderately low test scores.
No, it’s not good to see because those “higher test scores” are completely invalid. Why would one use error and falsehood to attempt to determine anything?
Duane,
Even though my backyard thermometer measures the temperature with “error”, measures it in a particular time and place, measures it on a scale based on nothing in particular, I still find it useful when deciding to wear a coat in the morning when I leave my front door.
But would you continue to use that thermometer if it told you that it was 90 degrees out when the actual temperature was 25 degrees?
I doubt it!
But that is how inaccurate standardized test scores are for determining teacher effectiveness. When the data is completely invalid as with the broken thermometer and standardized test scores used for teacher evaluation (or anything else for that matter) it is not wise to use said data for anything. Yes, the standardized test process is that broken!
Duane,
My thermometer is not broken, but it does measure temperature with error. Do you think establishing the size of that error is important? If so, should it also be important to discover the size of the error in standardized testing?
Yes, error parameters in measuring anything are important.
I never hinted that your thermometer was broken. I gave a hypothetical example as a way of showing how insane, idiotic, rationally challenged using an error prone measuring device is. And those error parameters in standardized testing are so onto-epistemologically egregious that it renders the usage of the data to be completely invalid.
Not to mention that standardized testing is not a measurement. In order to have a measurement one must have an agreed upon standard unit of measurement. What, pray tell, is the standard unit of measurement that standardized tests are based upon?
Hint: There is none. Which means there is no need to even worry about the supposed “measurment error”.
Duane,
Which unit of temperature do you use? Is it degree Fahrenheit, degree Celsius, or degree Kelvin? Which is the correct, agreed upon standard unit of measure that temperature is based on?
Living up to your reputation as a pest
All are “correct” as all are agreed upon a standard unit of measure. Living in the USofA, I use Fahrenheit. I certainly do not understand your point here.
Duane, he thinks you don’t know how to read a thermometer
Duene,
My point is that there is not an agreed upon standard unit of measure of temperature. There are many different units of measurement. Does that mean temperature can not be measured?
Yes, there are agreed upon standard units of measurement of temperature. Are there different scales, yes. But each scale is agreed upon. And that there are different scales does not mean that one can’t measure temperature.
But you haven’t answered my question: What is the standard unit of learning that is used in the supposed measurement of student “achievement” or learning in standardized testing?
VAM showed improvement when kids’ scores improved – what a coincidence!
I wonder whether he also switched from whole language to phonics.
The biggest problem is that it’s really hard to form relationships with kids when you have 40 students per class. Utah struggles with this, but a lot of other states have ludicrous class sizes, too.
It’s one of the reasons that small class sizes are so important.
A minor correction/addition TOW:
“It’s one of the reasons that small class sizes are so important AND IS THE ONLY REFORM THAT TRULY MATTERS.”
Several teachers with whom I worked had similar success. We taught test construction and thinking skills for around two weeks. The remainder of the time we just taught our courses.
“Similar success”???
When success is defined by test scores false accolades are the norm.
I think that is interesting, that when the test prep was ignored, test scores went up. My son improved his English and Reading test scores more for the ACT when he just read classic literature than my daughter did when she studied test prep books. I think I am going to have my daughter read classic literature now as preparation for the ACT.
Chasing higher test scores is like a Manx cat chasing its tail.
What you said, Duane, & so is comparing thermometer readings to “standardized” (neither valid nor reliable, thus NOT standardized!!!)
test scores (this, to teachingeconomist up there).
Don’tcha know, te, that thermometers are instruments, & children are NOT!!!
Retired,
You might recall that Duane and I had a long conversation about Wilson and trying to figure out what to wear when the thermometer in my back yard gave a reading and some moments later I left the front door, an entirely different place and different time from the reading.
I am not comparing a thermometer to a child, I am saying that if Wilson is correct, a thermometer is no more useful in determining how I should dress in the morning than a standardized (or teacher written) test is useful to know what students have learned.
No, not at all. Wilson is correct but it doesn’t follow then that “a thermometer is no more useful. . . .” Your conclusion makes no logical sense.