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I made a few changes, adding a new ending.
Archives for category: Testing
Four years ago, New
York Times’ columnist David Brooks declared Geoffrey
Canada’s charter schools to be miracle schools. The
column was titled “The Harlem Miracle.” He did so based on the
assurances of Harvard economist Roland Fryer and his colleague Will
Dobbie. Fryer said in an email to Brooks that the charter schools
of the Harlem Children’s Zone had produced “enormous gains.” Brooks
wrote: “In math, Promise Academy eliminated the
achievement gap between its black students and the city average for
white students. Let me repeat that. It
eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my
life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal
changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada,
Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the
equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should
be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We
don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so
many of our kids are dying — literally and
figuratively.” Canada is a very charming man, and I
personally like him. We have appeared on various TV shows together,
including a debate on NBC’s “Education Nation.” But I don’t believe
in miracle schools. Not even when they are run by the immensely
personable Geoffrey Canada. And I don’t like it when someone with
the vast resources of Canada, far more than any neighborhood public
school, trashes public
schools because they can’t succeed as his schools do.
(The link takes you to a TED talk where Geoffrey Canada
speaks with his usual charm and passion about “our failing public
schools.”) As this story in the New York Times pointed out, the
Harlem Children’s Zone has two billionaires on its board, assets of
more than $200 million, two teachers in every classroom, small
classes, medical care for students, and an array of resources and
services unavailable to public schools in poor neighborhoods. I
have always wished that every public school, especially in poor
neighborhoods, could offer the same services as Canada’s schools,
and I salute Canada for providing them for the students at his
charter schools. But are they miracle schools, as Roland Fryer told
David Brooks? After all, miracles should not be a one-time deal;
they should go on forever, right? The short answer: No. They face
the same problems as other schools serving poor kids, and their
results are not miraculous. Below are the scores of Canada’s
charter schools on the recent Common Core tests. The city’s public
schools had an average passing mark of 25% in ELA and 30% in
mathematics. The charters of the HCZ have scores all over the map.
Some are higher than the city average, some are lower. Some are
dramatically higher (like grade 5 in math at HCZ 1 at 46%), some
are dramatically lower (like grade 6 in English language arts at
HCZ 1 at 9%). Bottom line: There is no miracle here.
Harlem Children’s Zone 1
3 ELA
22%
22%
3 Math 23%
4 ELA
26%
26%
4 Math 17%
5 ELA
21%
21%
5 Math 46%
6 ELA
9%
9%
6 Math 39%
7 ELA
24%
24%
7 Math 18%
8 ELA
27%
27%
8 Math 31%
Harlem Children’s Zone
2
2
3 ELA 32%
3 Math
56%
56%
4 ELA 12%
4 Math
20%
20%
5 ELA 35%
5 Math
43%
43%
6 ELA 19%
6 Math
31%
31%
7 ELA 45%
7 Math
26%
26%
8 ELA 15%
8 Math
28%
28%
Charles Blow is one of the columnists in the New York Times that I usually count on to challenge the conventional wisdom and to speak up for the powerless.
Sadly, in this column, he parrots the conventional wisdom and voices the opinions of the elites.
Imagine, he calls the Broad Foundation a “reform” organization. The readers of this blog know the Broad Foundation as the source of malicious policies that are privatizing public schools and destroying communities. Some of the worst, most arrogant leaders in US education have been “trained” by the unaccredited Broad Academy. The foundation issued a guide on how to close schools that is a Bible for the corporate reform movement.
As for the international test scores, Blow should not have relied on Time magazine’s Amanda Ripley. He should have looked at the Rothstein-Carnoy study, which demonstrates that the PISA results were misleading, or the recent article in the UK Times Educational Supplement, where test experts maintained that the scores on PISA are “meaningless,” or considered the more recent TIMSS test, where American students did very well. Or read the chapter in my new book on the myths and facts about international testing.
Why in the world would he enthuse about the Common Core tests, which widened the gaps in New York between affluent and poor, between black and white, between English language learners and native speakers, between children with disabilities and those without? Common Core has no evidence to support its claims. As we see it in action in New York, we see that it is deepening the stratification of society and falsely labeling two-thirds of the state’s children as failures.
Most of us don’t have the time to dig down into polls and figure out the nuances of wording and responses. Fortunately for us, Mercedes Schneider has done it for us.
She here compares the AP-NORC poll which concluded that most parents like standardized testing to the PDK/Gallup poll, which found that only 22% of parents thought that standardized testing improved their school.
How did the two polls reach such different conclusions? Read Mercedes and find out.
By the way, Mercedes pronounces her name with the accent on the first syllable and a soft “e” in the second syllable, not like the car, which sounds like an “a” in the second syllable. Apparently, her renown in Louisiana has spread through her blog, and she is known by that unusual first name, like Cher and Madonna.
Two news stories shine a bright line on the allure and failed promise of AP courses.
Liz Bowie of the Baltimore Sun has an outstanding article about AP courses in Maryland, which has invested heavily on this strategy to lift achievement.
She writes that the expansion of AP courses has not lived up to its claims. “It has not delivered vast numbers of students from low-performing high schools to selective colleges with credits in their pockets, helping to bridge the academic gulf between the nation’s rich and poor. Too often, students who haven’t been prepared in earlier grades flounder in AP classes, or are awarded A’s and B’s in the courses and then fail the AP exams.
“The high grades for course work can lull students into a false sense of security, said Steve Syverson, a board member of the National Association of College Admission Counseling and a former dean of admissions at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Many students arrive at college with AP courses on their transcripts, but with skills so low they must take remedial classes.
“The kids are … doing what society is telling them to do,” he said. “We just set those kids up for complete failure because they just get hammered when they get to college.”
“A Baltimore Sun analysis of test scores showed a troubling discrepancy between grades for AP course work and scores on the exams. In at least 19 high schools throughout the Baltimore region, more than half of the students who earned an A or B in an AP class failed the exam.
“Failure rates of 75 percent on the exam were common at Woodlawn and other Maryland schools with large numbers of minority and low-income students. For the 2011-2012 school year, the most recent available data, about 40 percent of students who took an AP test in the nation failed. But nearly 75 percent of African-American students nationwide failed, and the pass rates for Latinos and low-income students are far below those for whites and Asians.”
In a related story, Stephanie Simon at politico.com reports that the national picture is troubling:
“Taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to nudge more students into Advanced Placement classes — but a close look at test scores suggests much of the investment has been wasted.
“Expanding participation in AP classes has been a bipartisan goal, promoted by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and by Republican governors including Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and John Kasich of Ohio. In the last five years, the federal government has spent $275 million to promote the classes and subsidize exam fees for low-income students; states have spent many millions more.
“Enrollment in AP classes has soared. But data analyzed by POLITICO shows that the number of kids who bomb the AP exams is growing even more rapidly. The class of 2012, for instance, failed nearly 1.3 million AP exams during their high school careers. That’s a lot of time and money down the drain; research shows that students don’t reap any measurable benefit from AP classes unless they do well enough to pass the $89 end-of-course exam.
“In its annual reports, the nonprofit College Board, which runs the Advanced Placement program, emphasizes the positive: The percentage of students who pass at least one AP exam during high school has been rising steadily. Because so many students now take more than one AP class, however, the overall pass rate dropped from 61 percent for the class of 2002 to 57 percent for the class of 2012.”
No matter what happens to the kids, the nonprofit College Board does well indeed.
A reader sent this comment:
“U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued the following statement today in support of Tennessee’s decision to make changes to its teacher licensure policy:
“I want to praise Tennessee’s continuing effort to improve support and evaluation for teachers. For too long, in too many places, schools systems have hurt students by treating every teacher the same – failing to identify those who need support and those whose work deserves particular recognition. Tennessee has been a leader in developing systems that do better—and that have earned the support of a growing number of teachers. Tennessee’s new teacher licensure rules continue that effort, by ensuring that decisions on licensure are informed by multiple measures of their effectiveness in the classroom, including measures of student learning. The new system also adds reasonable safeguards to make sure any judgment about teacher performance is fair.”
“Chicago schools are in chaos, Detroit schools in chaos, Philadelphia schools may not open. What is Arne Duncan concentrating on? Promoting his good friend Mr. Huffman. Last week he was promoting his good friend Mayor Bloomberg.
“The cluelessness is just amazing. I’d say “out of touch” but that may be an understatement. They simply don’t live in the same world we do.”
The new PDK/Gallup Poll had some amazingly good news for those parents and educators who have been fighting the movement to test, standardize, and quantify every last child, as well as to destroy public confidence in public education.
What this poll shows is that the public is not buying what the U.S. Department of Education and the corporate reform movement are selling.
They like their teachers and their schools. They don’t believe that standardized testing has helped their school. They don’t want test scores used to evaluate their teachers.
The message: Corporate reform lacks a popular base.
Here are some key findings:
*Only 22% of Americans “believe increased testing has helped the performance of local public schools.”
*A majority (58%) “reject using student scores from standardized tests to evaluate teachers.” This is a reversal from last year, when 52% approved of this obnoxious idea. The more people see that it mislabels teachers and disrupts schools, the less they like the idea.
*A majority (63%) oppose publishing teacher ratings in the media. This is a reversal from last year, when 51% favored this humiliating idea.
*A decisive majority (72%) “have trust and confidence” in teachers in the public schools. When the question is asked of people under 40, who are likeliest to have school-age children, the proportion grows to 78%.
*A bare majority (52%) supported the right of public school teachers to go on strike.
*A huge proportion (88%) of public school parents say their child is safe at school. Their greatest concern is not intruders but other students.
*A majority (68%) support charter schools.
*A large majority (70%) oppose vouchers for private schools. This is a very large increase from 2012, when only 55% opposed vouchers.
*Almost two-thirds of the public have never heard of the Common Core standards.
*Of those who have heard of the Common Core standards, most say they will either make the U.S. less competitive or make no difference.
*More than 90% of Americans “believe activities such as band, drama, sports, and newspaper are very or somewhat important,” with 63% saying “very important.”
Bottom line: The American people like their public schools, respect their teachers, do not like standardized testing, and do not want teachers evaluated by test scores.
They want their children to have a well-rounded education.
All common sense.
The corporate reform assault on American public education rests in large part on the international test called PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment), where US students rank well behind other nations and have only middling performance. Of course, the critics who brandish these mediocre scores never admit that they are heavily influenced by the unusually high proportion of students living in poverty, and that American students in low-poverty schools score as well or better than the highest performing nations. To do so would be an admission that poverty matters, and they reject that idea.
But what if the PISA tests are fundamentally flawed? So argues testing experts in this article in the (UK) TES.
It turns out on examination that the results vary widely from one administration of the test to another. Students in different countries do not answer the same questions. And there are serious technical issues that experts debate.
The article asks:
“But what if there are “serious problems” with the Pisa data? What if the statistical techniques used to compile it are “utterly wrong” and based on a “profound conceptual error”? Suppose the whole idea of being able to accurately rank such diverse education systems is “meaningless”, “madness”?
“What if you learned that Pisa’s comparisons are not based on a common test, but on different students answering different questions? And what if switching these questions around leads to huge variations in the all- important Pisa rankings, with the UK finishing anywhere between 14th and 30th and Denmark between fifth and 37th? What if these rankings – that so many reputations and billions of pounds depend on, that have so much impact on students and teachers around the world – are in fact “useless”?
“This is the worrying reality of Pisa, according to several academics who are independently reaching some damning conclusions about the world’s favourite education league tables. As far as they are concerned, the emperor has no clothes.”
The article cites the concerns of many testing experts:
“Professor Svend Kreiner of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, has looked at the reading results for 2006 in detail and notes that another 40 per cent of participating students were tested on just 14 of the 28 reading questions used in the assessment. So only approximately 10 per cent of the students who took part in Pisa were tested on all 28 reading questions.
“This in itself is ridiculous,” Kreiner tells TES. “Most people don’t know that half of the students taking part in Pisa (2006) do not respond to any reading item at all. Despite that, Pisa assigns reading scores to these children.”
“People may also be unaware that the variation in questions isn’t merely between students within the same country. There is also between-country variation.
“For example, eight of the 28 reading questions used in Pisa 2006 were deleted from the final analysis in some countries. The OECD says that this was because they were considered to be “dodgy” and “had poor psychometric properties in a particular country”. However, in other countries the data from these questions did contribute to their Pisa scores.
“In short, the test questions used vary between students and between countries participating in exactly the same Pisa assessment.”
Professor Kreiner says the methodology renders the results “meaningless.”
“The Rasch model is at the heart of some of the strongest criticisms being made of Pisa. It is also the black box within Pisa’s black box: exactly how the model works is something that few people fully understand.
“But Kreiner does. He was a student of Georg Rasch, the Danish statistician who gave his name to the model, and has personally worked with it for 40 years. “I know that model well,” Kreiner tells TES. “I know exactly what goes on there.” And that is why he is worried about Pisa.
“He says that for the Rasch model to work for Pisa, all the questions used in the study would have to function in exactly the same way – be equally difficult – in all participating countries. According to Kreiner, if the questions have “different degrees of difficulty in different countries” – if, in technical terms, there is differential item functioning (DIF) – Rasch should not be used.
“That was the first thing that I looked for, and I found extremely strong evidence of DIF,” he says. “That means that (Pisa) comparisons between countries are meaningless.”
Please, someone, anyone, send this article to Secretary Arne Duncan; to President Obama; to Bill Gates; and to all the other “reformers” who want to destroy public education based on flawed and meaningless international test scores.
What does it take to be a hero educator? It takes brains, courage, integrity, and a deep understanding of education and children.
Steve Nelson, headmaster of the Calhoun School in Manhattan, is a hero educator because he has all these qualities. He wrote a brilliant article about why the Common Core won’t work.
He knows that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, now heads the College Board. He knows that Coleman wants to align the SAT to the Common Core, so no one can escape his handiwork, not even students in prestigious private schools.
Here is a sample of Nelson’s article.
“Actual children, as opposed to the abstraction of children as seen in policy debate, are not “standard.” Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of child development knows that children learn in different ways and different times. Some children “read” (meaning a very limited ability to recognize symbols) at age 3 or 4. I have known many students who did not read well until 8, 9 or, rarely, later. The potential (or ultimate achievement levels) of these children does not correlate with the date of reading onset.
“It is rather like walking. Children who walk at 9 months do not become better runners than children who walk at 15 months. “Standardizing” the expectation of reading, and setting curricula and tests around this expectation, is like expecting a child to walk on her first birthday. If she doesn’t, shall we get our national knickers in a knot, develop a set of walking tests, prescribe walking remediation, and, perhaps inadvertently, make her feel desperately inadequate? In the current climate, Pearson is ready to design walking curriculum and its companion tests. The Gates and Broad Foundations will create complementary instructional videos.”
And he also writes:
“If policy makers and test writers had even rudimentary knowledge of rich individual differences, they would know that any standard test is unfair and, ultimately, useless. Just as children learn in very different ways, they express mastery in many different ways. The Common Core tests (and I’ve suffered the experience of wading through the many samples provided in the media) assume that all its takers process information in the same way, have the identical mix of cognitive and sensory abilities, and can, therefore, “compete” on level ground. This is nonsensical and damaging. Some of the most brilliant people I know would grind to a suffocating halt after trying to parse the arcane nonsense in a small handful of these questions. Even the math questions assume a homogeneous ability to understand the questions and a precisely common capacity for reasoning and concluding.
“I could go on: Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.
“I have been accused of complaining but not offering solutions, so here’s a solution: Properly fund schools and allow good teachers to select the materials and pedagogy that serve the actual students in their care. The rest will take care of itself.
“And we can take the billions we’re wasting on NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and other nonsense and spend it to improve the lives of the shameful number of children who live in poverty in the “richest nation on Earth.”
Steve Nelson, welcome to the honor roll as a hero of American education.
Please someone, anyone: send this article to Bill Keller and Paul Krugman at the New York Times.
EduShyster here describes Kevin
Huffman’s relentless campaign to demoralize Tennessee
teachers and make Tenessee the worst state to be a teacher. She
suggests that the time is soon coming when Huffman will be held
accountable. Not by the state board, which rubber stamps his bad
ideas even when they aren’t informed of the details. No, he will
face the accountability of angry parents, teachers, and other
citizens who have grown tired of his destructive tactics. That day
will come, rest assured. Even his membership in Jeb Bush’s Chiefs
for Change won’t save him from the wrath of
Tennessee’s Angry Moms</a, who created their own Facebook
page.
