Nora de la Cour writes in Jacobin about the damage done to children by our politicians’ obsession with high-stakes standardized testing. They do not test what was taught; they encourage teaching to the tests; the results come back too late to be helpful; they distort teaching and learning.
Nora de la Cour writes:
When I taught at an alternative public school for kids with exceptional social-emotional, behavioral, and learning needs, one of my students — I’ll call him Dante — got As in every class he took. School staff would frequently elevate Dante’s extraordinary focus and commitment as an example for his peers.
In the spring of Dante’s senior year, his counselor informed him he’d earned the status of valedictorian. His beaming smile of pride after hearing the news affirmed everything I love about public education. When his mother found out, she burst into tears of joy.
Then, abruptly, we were informed that there had been a mistake. Because Dante’s exceptional learning needs made it impossible for him to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) — the standardized tests that Massachusetts requires high school students to pass prior to graduation — he would not receive a diploma. Without a diploma, he couldn’t be valedictorian — even though, according to his grades and the unanimous judgment of his teachers, he clearly deserved the honor. A wave of incredulity rippled through the staff as we tried to resign ourselves to this obviously cruel, unfair reality. For Dante, the news was devastating.
Even before the “giant federal wrecking ball” (to borrow leading education policy analyst Diane Ravitch’s phrasing) known as education reform, evidence from diverse fields had demonstrated a scientific concept known as Campbell’s Law: the more we base social decision-making on a specific quantitative measure, the more likely it is that that measure will become distorted, ultimately corrupting the processes it’s intended to monitor.
Just so, in the two decades since Congress reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), researchers have collected a mountain of data showing that in the long run, attaching high-stakes, or punishments, to student standardized test scores does not improve educational outcomes. Instead, it results in a host ofperverse consequences, with poor, minority, and disabled kids like Dante experiencing the greatest harms. This last point makes a lot of sense when you consider that standardized testing was first developed by eugenicists looking to organize people into racist taxonomies based on perceived ability.
But despite these serious problems — and the persistent, bipartisan unpopularity of the high-stakes testing regime inaugurated by NCLB — our current, Obama-era iteration of the ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA) still requires states to impose inappropriate test-based accountability on students and school communities.
When we sort children into “proficient” and “failing” categories based on test scores, we’re not solving the opportunity gaps that show up in public education; we’re creating new ones. No one is helped, and many people are hurt, when we give students, teachers, and schools an impossible assignment and then sanction them for failing to complete it. Looking forward to the ESEA’s now overdue reauthorization, it’s high time we built accountability systems that nurture the humanity and potential of all kids — rather than placing artificial roadblocks in their way.
Please open the link and read the article in full. FYI, in addition to referring to NCLB as a “giant wrecking ball,” I have also called it the “Death Star of American education.” If left without modifications, it would have caused the closure of almost every school in the nation. No national legisislature ever passed such a dumb law.
NCLB was a disastrous pivot for public education. It introduced the whole deform mythology. It spawned test and punish, test based “accountability,” competency based education, VAM, Race to the Top, ESSA and ultimately the privatization of public education. We remain stuck in the maze of politicized education and downward spiral ever since. It is doubtful that Big Money behind standardized testing will be willing to let go of it since they pay politicians to keep funds flowing in their direction. The whole testing ruse is made easier now that students are chained to screens for a good part of the day, and testing is often embedded in the process. The only hope for genuine change is a groundswell of resistance, opposition and political activism from parents, medical professionals and teachers.
We should ‘thank’ the Bush boys for their role in this gigantic money making scheme. GW starts the steam roller going with test and punish, and Jeb monetizes the fallout through privatizing public schools.
Well said!
Many thanks to you and NPE for your activism and role in providing evidence to counter the baloney often foisted on the public by the so-called reform crowd.
Thank you, RT. You live in the belly of the beast-DeSantisland. Be strong!
Put a stake through the heart of it? Being vampires and all.
As I wrote in my summary of the federal mandated standardized testing:
Standardized testing is a vampire. It sucks the lifeblood from our schools. Put a stake in it.
I may have stolen that through osmosis.
It’s simply the conclusion that a sane person would draw.
So I’ve been waiting for over 20 years for action to end High Stakes Testing. Where are the teacher unions, the parents, students, and public? There needs to be a national march to call attention to this madness. I was hoping that the Network for Public Education would organize one. Post after post on this blog give evidence that High Stakes Testing needs to end. It’s time to organize a national campaign to end it.
Long Past Time
We need the leaders of the Teachers’ unions to call a nationwide strike untilt he federal testing mandate is ended. That’s the only way this nonsense will stop. They could do this, and until they do. . . . Well, the federally mandated standardized testing is child abuse. Until the teacher’s unions call a nationwide strike to end it, they are complicit in child abuse. I’m quite serious about that. It is long past time for them to stop standing aside and doing nothing while our kids are subjected to this abuse and our curricula and pedagogy are distorted to make it test preppy.
Anyone who is read my essay about the problems with the state ELA tests mandated by the feds will, with good reason, ask the following questions: WHY WEREN’T THE PURVEYORS OF THESE TESTS AND OF THE STANDARDS THAT THEY PURPORT, FALSELY, TO MEASURE LAUGHED OFF THE NATIONAL STAGE WHEN THEY FIRST APPEARED? That they weren’t is a shocking indictment of educational leadership in the United States. What level of ignorance is necessary, and how widespread must it be, for something so obviously pseudoscience to be foisted upon our students, our teachers, our schools?
It’s shocking that it wasn’t laughed off the stage decades ago. It’s shocking that it has persisted. And why has it? Quite simply, because of ignorance–because there are too many people who don’t know anything at all about the actual tests and so don’t understand that they don’t do and CANNOT do what people say that they do.
Eliot, in his magnificent poem “The Waste Land” and J. R. R. Tolkien in his delightful Hobbit and Ring novels, drew upon a standard folklore motif that was really big in ancient Greece and in Medieval folklore and romances–that of the miasma (the ancient Greek word for it), the blighted land, the land under a curse that required lifting, expiating. Well, the Common Coring of our curricula and the testing regime are precisely that. They are a blight, a curse, upon U.S. education that have made large swathes of it a wasteland. Devolved, Common Corey curricula, billions and billions and billions of wasted dollars and instructional hours. It is LONG past time to lift this curse.
Always: A national march would be a great start!
AlwaysLearning……Parents were there fighting this with opt outs/Refusals and by showing displeasure at school board meetings, but we were shut down and our children suffered consequences. Please remember that Arne Duncan told parents that we just didn’t like that our children weren’t as smart as we thought they were. BATS was supported by parents, but they got shut down, too. The teacher’s union was taking money from the Gates Foundation and they weren’t about to bite the hand that fed them.
This will continue to go on until there is a “strike” of some sort (en masse) and the teacher’s union will have to negotiate some terms. I don’t see this happening any time soon.
The teacher’s union was taking money from the Gates Foundation
This was a nadir. Sickening.
I agree. It will take a national action to stop this, clearly. Despite all the damage it has done, despite how obviously pseudoscientific the testing is, despite how dramatically it has affected our curricula and pedagogy for the worse, it will just go on and on and on at a cost of many billions of dollars and many billions of lost instructional hours every year. The politicians aren’t going to read my essay about how ELA tests work, even though I have worked in the industry and know it. They aren’t going to read Diane’s books or the essays by the many brilliant guest bloggers here–Carol and Jan and Tom and Peter and Steve and the like. They are going to listen to Bill Gates, who hasn’t a microbe on a nit on a hair on a rat’s tushy of a clue what he is talking about. Why? $$$$$$$$$$$$
So, you are exactly right, Lisa. It will take some national union leader deciding to stand tall and do something really, really important.
I suppose this would be a very efficient way to instantly obliterate the “achievement gap.” No more fretting about group-level disparities in academic performance.
How does one ignore disparities
in academic performance, while
granting avatars based on
academic performance-SCORES?
Flerp, can the snark. The standardized tests that we now give in ELA DO NOT validly measure what they purport to measure. They are pseudoscience. See my explanation of why this is in the link below. And we already have better indicators of student performance, such as grades. American schools functioned A LOT better before we lived under the standardized testing regime.
And people worried about group disparities (in grades, in dropout rates, in college acceptance rates) long before we had these pseudoscientific state standardized tests mandated by the feds.
It’s simultaneously snark and absolutely accurate.
It is NOT accurate because there are many other ways in which “Achievement Gaps” have been and are measured. Achievement Gaps were a common topic of debate and discussion long before these state standardized tests, Flerp, so no, doing away with the testing would not obliterate them. In fact, given that the tests are invalid, are numerology, do not measure what they purport to measure, the gaps would be more accurately revealed.
The tests generate gaps because they are normed on a bell curve. Bell curves always have a top held and a bottom half. They never close.
Imagine if it was the law to grant drivers licenses based on a bell curve. A large % of people would never get a license.
people are fooling themselves if they think that the state ELA scores are accurate, valid measures of proficiency in ELA. They are EXTREMELY CRUDE measures. Basically, ANY TEST that required any reading of any kind would be equally effective, but it would also be equally invalid as a general test of ELA proficiency.
Bob, don’t forget manipulation of cut scores.
Years ago, I did graphs over a couple decades of the cut scores at various levels for the New York State ELA and Math tests. From year to year, these jumped around like gerbils on methamphetamines. LOL. Literally, these HUGE leaps. In some years, the cut off for math proficiency was barely above what one would get by GUESSING RANDOMLY. So, I concluded that they were playing a game with these. In years when they were trying to sell some new Magic Elixir in education, they would set high cut scores and declare that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!!! In years when they wanted to show that their Magic Elixir was working, they would set low cut scores and say OH WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I.
lol
They can set those cut scores anywhere they want. And the feds, to whom they must report these scores, allow this bs. So, what does that say about the use of scores to compare outcomes across time (see Flerp’s contention about that)? Well, it shows that that can’t be done. The scores are hooey.
In 2009, Michael Bloomberg was in a tight race for election to a third term, even though the city constitution limits the mayor to only two terms. Bloomberg made a deal with the City Council—they could run for a third term if they allowed him to run for a third term.
But he needed a big win to make his case. And that win was a jump in the state test scores, which he got because the Board of Degents happened to be run by fellow billionaire and close friend Merryl Tisch.
Another help was that Bloomberg released poll data showing he had a huge lead over his rival. That discouraged turnout among his rival’s supporters.
In fact, the race was close. And in fact, the 2009 scores were inflated. A study was done by Daniel Koretz and Jennifer Jennings, both respected scholars. The tests and cut scores were readjusted and the 2010 scores wiped out the Bloomberg Miracle
Exactly. That’s how this stuff works. It’s a scam.
THIS is why we need historians like Diane. Truth.
Eh.
Last I saw, high school four-year graduation rates where I live—a district with about 2 percent of all public school students in the country—were just a few percentage points apart for white, black, and Latino students. Very small gaps. (Asians of course were out in front of all by a larger gap.) No real cause for concern.
Four year high school graduation rates where I live were only a bit higher than 50% in 2004. Today it’s around 80%. One can only conclude that education has improved enormously during that time!
Maybe it was the federal testing regime that improved things! If you looked at actual test scores, that wouldn’t bear out—you’d see things were basically the same, hadn’t really improved at all. The irony being only the federal testing regime provides the proof that the federal testing regime has not improved outcomes.
The average high school GPA was 2.7 in 1990. In 2016, it was 3.4. Another astonishing story of improved student outcomes, and we know the story is true because GPA is a totally accurate measurement of student learning. Standardized test score would probably show that things were moving along a more or less flat line, like they always have been.
All of these measures are easily manipulated, including standardized test scores. There was a scandal in New York following the release of the 2009 state scores, which showed dramatic improvement. In fact, the questions were used and re-used and became predictable. Also the scoring was toyed with. The next year’s scores dropped.
It’s a simple matter to drop cut scores so that test scores go up with no change in student ability.
It’s not a huge deal to me. I acknowledge the tests are burdensome and warp the way teachers teach. So fine, get rid of them.
But for all their flaws, standardized tests do a better job over time showing trends, or the lack there off.
Grades, graduation rates, and post-secondary school (college and vocational school) acceptance rates do a better job, Flerp. The ELA tests, in particular, do a terrible job. Please read my analysis of these, below.
What’s the proof that grades are a better measure of student learning than standardized testing? Grades are more manipulable, subject to whims of teachers with biases (like everyone has), and have been inflating like dirigibles for decades. You say the ELA tests suck. Ok, fine. I can tell you that with only a few exceptions, every English teacher my kids have ever had were clods who couldn’t write their way out of a wet paper sack.
I’ll read your analysis but I’m very skeptical.
And again, I’m not saying that we should keep the tests. Kill them off, fine.
Read the analysis of the tests.
Various studies have shown high-school grades to be better predictors of college success than are scores on the SAT and ACT (though some studies have shown the opposite). Thanks to Coleman, the new SAT, which I call the SCAT, has been Common Cored and is a lot like the state ELA tests now.
I’ll read your analysis but
And this is the way it goes. I’ve been asking people to read this for ten years now. But very few are willing to do even the minimal effort required to learn about the tests and how they work (or, rather, don’t). And so they just go blithely on, pontificating about something (the tests and their results) that they are actually completely ignorant about. And I am speaking, in particular, here, of our journalists, politicians, union leaders, and district and state educational leaders. Want to talk about gaps? Let’s talk about the gaps between what pontificators about education say about the rests and what they actually know about them.
cx: about the tests
Everyone has an opinion about the tests. Almost no one bothers to learn anything about them. Almost no one bothers to ask the most basic question: do they actually do what they purport to do?
I thought we were talking about state tests, not college entrance tests.
Recent studies have shown SATs are as good or better than grades at predicting college success. The best predictor of all is a combination of SATs and grades. That’s not disputed. And as GPAs continue to inflate over time and compress at the high end, they will continue to lose predictive value.
I know people hate standardized tests. I know why teachers hate the the K-12 mandated tests. Fine, get rid of them. But we will lose granularity on achievement gaps, and long-trend data will lose reliability when we only can rely on highly manipulable metrics.
We are talking about state tests. My point was that EVEN those other tests are not better than are school grades as predictors of success in college. Certainly, the state tests aren’t.
Will you please read the freaking essay? It’s not that difficult.
It’s not data if it is fallacious. Consider “angel numbers.” There are entire Internet communities devoted to the meanings of these. You go through your life, and you encounter a clock that reads 1:11 or 3:33. These are supposedly “Angel Numbers” and have deep meanings. But their meanings are bullshit. Utter bullshit. What I am trying to tell you, Flerp, is that the numbers produced by the state ELA tests are bullshit. And in that essay, I have explained precisely why they are. It’s not a soundbite. It actually requires digging in and learning something.
Bullshit numbers are not “data.” Using bullshit numbers is numerology. It’s quackery.
Angel numbers are not “data.” Gematria does not produce data. The ELA tests do not produce data. ALL OF THESE produce GIBBERISH.
I’ll read your piece later. But I’m not contesting that the ELA tests suck. I’m saying the other data like GPA and graduation rates are even more garbage in terms of identifying gaps and trends. More arbitrary, more susceptible to politics. The data is all garbage standardized testing is the best at showing trend lines.
Again, the irony is that if you looked graduation rates in NYC, you would conclude that education gaps have narrowed to almost nothing while overall learning and student performance has skyrocketed in the last 20 years. It’s the test data that shows that’s bullshit. And it’s the test data that shows the testing regime itself has not helped outcomes.
You have been imagining that the state tests provide accurate granular data. They do not. Read the essay. Then you will know why.
The fact that you saw two 1:11 “Angel numbers” in a single week doesn’t show a trend line. Why? Because these are garbage numbers. The state tests do not show trend lines because they provide garbage numbers. Read the essay. Then you will know why.
Oh, sure. Read it later. LOL.
You are correct, FLERP! It would, in fact, be wise to “instantly obliterate the achievement gap” and stop “fretting about group-level disparities in academic performance.” After all, neither “achievement” nor “performance” is being measured. There is no achievement gap other than the one concocted by the tests. Achievement is the concocted myth of meritocracy, the wealthy blaming the poor for their poverty, and nothing more. There are not achievement but opportunity gaps such as: unfair school funding based on property taxes, housing discrimination, hiring discrimination, banking discrimination, and the tests themselves. That’s not to mention all the discrimination against those with so-called disabilities inherent in achievement and performance measures, discrimination that was sagaciously discussed in the unfaltering Jacobin article posted.
The way to educate young people is not to hold them back. That should be obvious. The way to educate young people is to cultivate their academic curiosity and desire to socialize on an intellectual level. We want every single one of our countrymen and women to be supported and successful academically — to have opportunities. Not performance.
It’s largely because of standardized testing that “achievement gaps” exist. Standardized test proponents think the tests are “measuring” (sic) math and reading. Poor and minority kids do poorly on those tests, so they get more and more and more math and reading. But what the tests are actually measuring is affluence and whiteness, so of course poor and minority kids are going to perform poorly. So those kids get trapped in a cycle of more and more boring, rote, performative “math and reading” “education” because they “do poorly” on “tests of math and reading”, so they end up hating school and, hence doing even worse on the tests. Meanwhile, affluent white kids score very well on being affluent and white, so it’s presumed they don’t need basic math and reading rote education, so they get to learn interesting stuff that’s more likely to keep them interested in education.
Well said, Dienne. There is a high correlation between test scores and family income.
“But what the tests are actually measuring is affluence and whiteness”
Exactly
The point is, Flerp, that we can know and for a long time did know that there were major achievement gaps without having these testing numbers (I will not glorify them by calling them “data” because they aren’t that). The testing numbers in ELA are worse than useless. They are extremely misleading. And for lots and lots of reasons that I explain, clearly and concisely, in that essay. Those numbers do not provide accurate, valid, reliable information about ELA failure, proficiency, and mastery, and they can’t. The tests do not measure what they purport to measure except EXTRAORDINARILY CRUDELY.
FLERP, not sure if you’re just cracking a joke, but I’ll bite. NAEP has followed and analyzed comparative sub-group results for almost a half-century, and continue to do so. The IES research arm of the DofEd has been doing longitudinal studies on cohorts born in ‘90’s and forward based on far more variants than test scores, collecting data for the devpt of ed policies. The data has long pointed to a significant so-called “achievement” gap between black & white. It’s a continuing source for useful papers such as this one http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/FryerLevittUnderstandingTheBlack2004.pdf , which points in a very different direction than NCLB&seq policy.
That policy was obviously not based on any ed research at all. It was a sop thrown to civil rights groups clamoring for govt action addressing the gap.
And a handy tool for the anti-public-school crowd, and a commercial bonanza for the ed industry.
Magnificent
I had a student who led our cheerleading squad to win the state championships. She was extraordinarily popular. She was a born leader. The other kids worshipped her. And she was a mediocre student of English. And she barely passed state tests in order to graduate.
KIDS HAVE DIFFERING TALENTS. We need cosmetologists and cosmologists. Even if these tests did validly measure what they purport to measure (they don’t), they would be terrible for this reason alone. They are too twisted and narrow.
Billy Gates loves them. But I bet his kids never went to a school that gave them.
I once had a 5th grader that fixed my old-fashioned pencil sharpener that broke. My mini-Macgyver took it apart during recess and fixed it. He was an average, slightly lazy student from the Dominican Republic, and today he owns his own mechanic business in NY. He found his passion and makes a good living from it.
Kids vary. The stupid tests do not. It’s like the cartoon in which the snake, the fish, the penguin, and the ostrich are all asked to climb a tree.
And that ought to be obvious enough. And is to all but the thickest among us (Gates, for example).
retired teacher I have often wondered if Gates (and others) have a half-conscious “don’t you wish you were me?” attitude floating around in their heads. CBK
Of course. But they really don’t want others to ace what they have. They enjoy being envied.
Some people who are on the spectrum have extremely limited understanding of how other people tick and what matters in them.
BTW, CEOs of major corporations tend to have been C students. People are complex. They have many important abilities that are not measured by, say, the NY State Grade 9 ELA test. LMAO.
I have heard that Larry Summers, ex-president of Harvard, is on the spectrum. Also Gates.
Such folks, of all people, ought to understand that there are many KINDS OF MINDS and KINDS OF PEOPLE with not one general intelligence level and not five, six, or seven multiple intelligences but literally thousands and thousands of abilities, more or less wonderful in particular individuals. Even a standardized test that is actually valid, which the state tests aren’t, is going to fail dramatically to capture what’s important in this incredibly broad range of possible attributes/traits/properties/accomplishments/capabilities/aptitudes of persons.
I have a son who can tell you exactly how to get between any two points that he has traveled between at any time in his life since the age of say, five or six. Precisely. Every turn.
I long had an almost eidetic memory for stuff I had read. This ability has fallen off some now, alas.
I dated a woman who could tell you that that train whistle was an Eb.
Alas, a kid can have perfect pitch and go through our entire school system without having anyone discover this.
Biodiversity means a society of innovation and creativity. If we could all be measured by a single scale, such measurement would crush biodiversity.
Exactly! xoxoxoxxo!!!!!
Diversity, pluralism = health, that which is organic, living, flexible, creative, innovative, evolving
Standardization = that which is preformulated, inert, inflexible, dead–the dreary sameness of the production quota reports of the Fascist state
<3!!!
An extremely diverse, pluralistic economy, and extremely diverse, pluralistic society, needs lots of kinds of minds, not ones that have been identically milled. What a repugnant, inhuman, inhumane idea that is–that our tests and curricula should be standardized!
Here are the reasons why the federally mandated tests in ELA are pseudoscience, why these tests do not measure what they purport to measure. Please share widely. Thank you.
Pseudoscience, like astrology or phrenology or numerology
But millions of people, including American politicians and journalists, naively assume that these tests measure what they purport to measure. See the comment from Flerp, above, who assumes that doing away with them would enable people to ignore achievement gaps. He does so because he naively assumes that these tests accurately measure achievement gaps, that they provide useful, actionable information about achievement gaps. THEY DO NOT, at least not in ELA. To some extent, they do in Math, but the math tests have their own problems.
IT IS THIS ASSUMPTION–that the tests validly measure what they purport to measure–that must be attacked. People must come to understand that they don’t–that this stuff is pseudoscience, like astrology.
Rod Paige, GW Bush’s first Secretary of Education, vigorously defended the tests because they measured the gaps. He said that people who opposed them were trying to obscure the gaps. Almost 25 years later, the gaps are still there.
The testing has provided no actionable information and has led to no improvement in outcomes. NONE.
“The Death Star of American Education.” That’s perfect. Yeah, that law was insane. It required the impossible and would have ensured, in time, that every U.S. schools was shut down. ROFLMAO!
During my son’s graduation from aero engineering at CU Boulder, I had the privilege of listening to a speech from a former Buff alumnus, Dr. Moriba Jah. Dr. Jah’s background and expertise in the field of astrodynamics now specializes in what he calls space environmentalism. He has won multiple awards (including the MacArthur Genius Award), sits on multiple boards, and has testified before Congress. Part of his remarkable life story included how his entire brilliant aerospace career was nearly derailed by the GRE. He almost didn’t get accepted to the PhD program at Boulder because of his poor scores, but another professor saw the genius within him and accepted him to the program anyway. Others strongly suggested that he take a different path (security guard) based on his former military background. He’s also African American, and while his story was a clear inspiration to others, it is crushing to think how many other Dr. Jahs are out there who will never be recognized or appreciated for their gifts and will have their career paths defined forever by our punitive test-taking machinery. https://www.ae.utexas.edu/people/faculty/faculty-directory/jah
exactly
standardization is for machine parts
Much praise to Nora de la Cour for exposing the damage that this testing does to individual kids.
NCLB is tragic legislation when we are talking about educating OUR children, but it was a success for the extreme-right libertarian-fascist led Destroy Public Education Crime Syndicate.
Once OUR public education system is swept away into a land fill, that is one domino down until they all fall and OUR Constitutionally guided Republic and Democracy is dead and gone.
I should have added to my previous comment that once the fascist thugs are done, what’s left of the U.S. Constitution will be only the 2nd Amendment, the only one they worship, and even that will be revised so it will be a weapon to spread fear and maintain harsh control over the population, just like Putin is doing in Russia.
As usual, i am curious about the difference between individuals who have a high school diploma and ones that do not have a high school diploma. Should individuals with a high school diploma have better reading skills than those without? Should individuals with a high school diploma have better math skills than those without? Is it simply that those who with a high school diploma have more seat credit than those without a high school diploma?
As usual, economist, moot question. In the primary grades, students learn to read. By high school, students read to learn.
LeftCoastTeacher,
I do not think we can assume that “Dante” is literate. The article states that Dante was focused and committed to the work, but says nothing about academic achievement. Perhaps being unusually obedient should be enough to be awarded a high school diploma (a sufficient level of obedience is a necessary requirement after all), but I think most people believe that a high school diploma signals a level of academic achievement like literacy and numeracy.
You do not know what literacy is if you think there is a line you can draw between literate and illiterate, let alone use a test to determine which side of the line you drew in the air a student is on. I am constantly asked whether my students can write essays or not. It depends on what your definition of an essay is. How does one truly measure reading comprehension? Grades measure skills and also effort, and it’s the effort that causes the acquisition of new knowledge. That’s what school is for, not sifting out the chaff of what you economists wrongfully call human capital. Your thinking is too simplistic for this discussion. You don’t know how schooling works.
LeftCoastTeacher,
i am a great advocate for the grey, and that is not typical in the black or white environment of this blog.
Of course every aspect of learning is on a continuum, but qualifying for a high school diploma or not is binary, so once again I ask how you would map academic performance into the binary of qualifying for a high school diploma or not? Perhaps the answer is that academic performance is not relevant to obtaining a degree and only obedience is important.
Teachingeconomist writes:
“I am a great advocate for the grey, and that is not typical in the black or white environment of this blog . . . Of course every aspect of learning is on a continuum, but qualifying for a high school diploma or not is binary, so once again I ask how you would map academic performance into the binary of qualifying for a high school diploma or not? Perhaps the answer is that academic performance is not relevant to obtaining a degree and only obedience is important.”
. . . On point . . . here, here.
Also, in my mailbox this morning from “Edweek Update”: “Private School Choice Programs Are Having a Moment. But It’s Not All Smooth Sailing.”
One of the original ideas about having public schools in a democracy was to provide, from the get-go, a unifying place for hugely diverse people to experience others and to share ongoing learning (in our case now, from credentialed professionals) to perhaps build a vibrant but peaceful field of cultural “common sense” and where children’s intelligence could thrive.
With that in mind, I think that, besides all of the other problems of losing the “public” in public schools (that often gets good treatment here), the loss of that whole idea of a common field of learning (and even the idea of credentialed professionals) is going to “take a hit,” especially if and when the link between the professional fields and students is also battered or lost.
Besides making money on private schools, the object of the “hit” is the curriculum; and the power question becomes: who controls it, and by what principles?
In concrete terms, will it be it generated for the purpose of (as TE says) “obedience,” for purveying propaganda from one ideological group or another, and for hiding history and knowledge from the past but also as it is discovered?
OR will it be generated for the purpose of not only exposing students to vast arenas of knowledge, including knowledge of themselves and their and others’ history, and so to preparing students to live peaceful lives in a democratic political environment.
Pie in the sky? I hope not. CBK
You never cease to amaze, economist. Grades are not a measure of obedience. First of all, in education, we use words like participation and cooperation, not obedience. My students are actual human people whom I actually respect and about whom I actually care. They are not dogs. They are not in obedience school. Stop insulting all of us. Second, grades represent learning. I’m not going to re-explain that. High schools are, for good reasons, accredited to award diplomas based on grades. Grades are earned. They are earned in science and history, literature and languages, not just literacy and numeracy for dummies.
You would not pass my English class, insulting econo-miser. You fail. You do not demonstrate basic understanding of what I have wasted my time trying to teach you, that grades, not test scores, are the better measure of learning. You merely state, read, ignore, and restate. No analytical skill, not even comprehension shown. You econo-missed the point.
By the way, there are some distinguished schools here in California that use neither test scores nor letter grades. They have written evaluations of portfolios of work instead. But that last fact was for the audience at large, not for you, econo-miscreant. I teach obedience, my foot!
Many elite private schools use neither standardized tests nor grades. Students receive written evaluations from their teachers.
LeftCoastTeacher,
Again, the only thing we know about “Dante” is that he had extraordinary focus and commitment and that it was impossible for him to pass the exam required for graduation. I keep asking a simple question and you keep avoiding it: what level of academic achievement is below the standard needed to be awarded a high school diploma? Why not put it in terms of the average level of attainment for students in different grades, something like any student whose overall academic achievement is equivalent to the average sixth grade student deserves a high school diploma.
Of course obedience is central to being awarded a degree. Students must take specified courses no matter their interests or prior knowledge. They must do as the teacher says in all required courses in order to pass. Every parent knows this.
That’s right, Diane, the best schools are far from standardized.
It’s up to schools with teachers, not government, , econo-meltdown, to assess student work. The answer to your repeated, moot, and inane question is D. Or 6. Sometimes S. It could be 1 or 2. In order to be worthy of a diploma, students must achieve a level of P. Silliness. What you really want is for the students to achieve level White, the test-mastery race, standardized level, and no physical or mental differences allowed. Uniform. Obedient. Crypto-fascist.
LeftCoastTeacher,
I am forced to conclude that there is no minimum level of academic achievement associated with being awarded a high school diploma. If a student enrolls in all the required courses, if the student attends the required number of days, if the student turns in the required number of assignments independent of quality, the student deserves a high school diploma.
TE, how is it possible that kids who are in elite private schools are well prepared for college yet never take standardized tests and in many instances, do not receive grades? Does that means that those schools have no standards?
It is up to the teacher, not anyone else to determine the quality of a student’s work.
That is an important rule to follow. A teacher”s evaluation of a student is the only evaluation that has no reason to me motivated by self-interest, corporate interests, or political interests.
What Bob said at 5:00 PM
There’s no need to over-
egg the word pudding.
Like it or not, one is
always leading by the
example of their success
or failure.
Is “Make me stop”,
success or failure?
While teaching high school in the mid 1990s, I had the privilege of coaching a profoundly talented middle distance runner who believed he was going to college. He was special needs with what his teacher described as the greatest intellectual to reading comprehension gap she had ever experienced. This student was profoundly dyslexic and had spent most of his academic career in self contained classes. With the support of our principal, his teacher and I lobbied specific teachers in the core subjects to allow this young man to attend core academic classes while getting oral examinations to determine mastery. The new “ABCs” of education had just been passed by North Carolina that would have only given this student a certificate of participation rather than a diploma upon graduation, thus making him ineligible to attend college. We began this process in the middle of his junior year. The teachers we selected had reputations as experts in their content while focused on relationships that helped students succeed. In the end, this student was able to graduate with a diploma while his students praised his understanding of content shown through his class participation and oral recall. He went on to have a good college experience with his running and his academics, graduating from college. If NCLB had been in place at this time, we would not have been able to help this student athlete. Student capacity simply cannot be determined by standardized reading and math tests. High stakes testing has served as a hindrance to student opportunity through the punitive steps that result in taking resources from schools and individual students. Cherry picking data and a misguided orthodoxy limiting pedagogy has hurt too many students. It’s time we got back to the supporting the teacher to serve students needs.
If you support annual high stakes testing, you are xenophobic. If you are data driven, you are racist. The test is a wall of hateful bias keeping especially English language learner students and special education students out of schools and classes for “gifted” and “high achieving” students. When people say we need to shine a light on bad education using standardized tests, what they are really saying is “build that wall”. The ESSA is a hate law.