Deja Vu All Over Again . . .

Education Week:  Panel Finds Few Learning Gains from Testing Movement

Maine and National Standards

Maine Voices: Maine should think twice about adopting national educational testing

The public has only until Friday to comment to the state about the Common Core State Standards.

Forecaster Forum: Connecting the dots in public education

 

By Beth Schultz

Marion Brady: Education Reform: An Ignored Problem, and a Proposal

"The most useful thing Congress and state departments of education can do is abandon authoritarian, centralizing initiatives and legislation that dictate what’s taught. By propping up an obsolete, dysfunctional curriculum, they’re making a very bad situation much worse.  ~ Marion Brady, Truthout, June 25, 2010

"The 'standards and accountability' education reform effort began in the 1980s at the urging of leaders of business and industry. The reform message preached by Democrats, Republicans, and the mainstream media is simple. 1. America's schools are, at best, mediocre. 2. Teachers deserve most of the blame. 3. As a corrective, rigorous subject-matter standards and tests are essential. 4. Bringing market forces to bear will pressure teachers to meet the standards or choose some other line of work.

Competition - student against student, teacher against teacher, school against school, state against state, nation against nation - will yield the improvement necessary for the United States to finish in first place internationally."  ~ Marion Brady, Truthout. 

Read the rest of the article.

Clipart Credit

Follow the Money . . .

Who controls education in the United States of America?

"This group of very rich people ignored this body of research that shows that the single most powerful factor in education gaps is poverty and not standardized testing.

Did they forget that the United States has the second highest rate of children in poverty of any industrialized country in the world?" ~  Cindy Lutenbacher, ajc . . .  READ MORE

Poverty and Test Scores: A Critical Analysis ~ Orlich & Gifford, Phi Delta Kappan 10/20/06

Poverty and Education: Overview

Poverty and Learning Wiki

USAToday: More Than 1 in 5 Kids Live in Poverty

We Want Kids to Think, Right?

By Pam Kenney

Diane Ravitch is a distinguished scholar, a professor at NYU, the author of the recently released The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, and part of a two-member team that writes the blog “Bridging Differences.” I love reading “Bridging Differences”, and my views on education frequently align with those of Ravitch. Lately her focus has been on testing and teacher accountability.

In her June 15, 2010 post, Ravitch chides elected officials and education honchos for creating accountability policies that are so unrealistic they generate teaching to the test, circumscribed curricula, lowered standards, and outright cheating. Yes, I’m thinking as I read, that’s certainly true. She goes on to discuss and disparage how states have improved their students’ results on standardized tests by lowering the tests’ “cut” scores. For example, in New York in 2006, a seventh grader was rated “proficient” if he got 59.6% of the points correct on the annual state mathematics test. By 2009, the cut score for proficiency on the test by a seventh grader was 44%. In other words, “proficient” has been manipulated to such as extent that it has become meaningless. Yep, that’s a problem all right.

Next she cites and praises “some whistle-blowing teachers” who alerted the New York Post that the scoring method for this year’s standardized math test had been changed. Lo and behold students were given partial credit for some answers when they were incorrect and for some questions where no answer was supplied at all. Two of the examples that Ravitch gives the reader are from the fourth grade scoring guide:

• “A miscalculation that 28 divided by 14 equals 4 instead of 2 is ‘partially correct’ if the student uses the right method to verify the wrong answer.”

• “A child who subtracts 57 cents from three quarters for the right change and comes up with 15 cents instead of 18 cents still gets half credit.”

Ms. Ravitch says she hopes the children taking tests with this type of scoring never become engineers or choose other careers that require mathematical accuracy.

What??

Accustomed as I am to nodding my head when I read Diane Ravitch, I was dumbfounded by her criticism of awarding students partial credit for understanding a math concept. Isn’t that what educators have been working toward for 25 years or more? Aren’t we trying to deemphasize rote learning and replace it with strong problem-solving skills? Of course, accuracy is an important skill, but I want my students to be able to analyze a problem, understand the math concepts that elucidate it, and choose the strategies and steps needed to solve it. If they make a careless computation error or forget how many inches are in a foot, so what? I can accept it and am thrilled to give them partial credit for their answers because they’ve earned it. It’s clear to me that they understand what they’re doing, they're building on previous knowledge, they’re thinking. Isn’t that what we want?

RttT, Florida, and Diane Ravitch

I've been reading Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, and been following both Deborah Meier and Diane on Education Week's Bridging Differences blog. This week she speaks on what is going on in Florida as a result of the RttT initiative. Is anyone listening? Scapegoating of teachers continues across the land. Standards are being written by corporations and testing companies in anticipation of huge profits. Does anyone really care? Is this what education should be about in a democracy?

Diane Ravitch: Outrage in Florida

Washington Post: Florida's Terrible Teachers Bill a Test for Duncan

The Nation's Report Card - Math

By Pam Kenney

The results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) in math were released December 8, 2009. 18 school districts across the country participated in the study, and the scores allow the public to follow over time the progress of our students' math achievement.

At Nation's Report Card, you can view national, state, and district results for grades 4 and 8. The graphs and tables are excellent and allow you to compare scores from 1990 through 2009. You can look at the information adjusted according to gender, race/ethnicity, type of school, family income level, student disability status, and English language learners. Also, there are links to a press conference about the TUDA Mathematics report card and a narrated presentation on the major findings.

Everyday Mathematics is credited by Washington, D.C. public school teachers and Chancellor Michelle Rhee as one reason why students there have made significant gains in math achievement at both the 4th and 8th grade levels since 2003: "... an increased focus on the use of games, calculators and written responses -- to help students demonstrate their reasoning in solving a problem -- helped drive the gains in scores in the national assessment, known as NAEP." While I agree that deepening children's concept grasp and understanding of problem-solving is vital to success in math, I continue to be unsettled by the relative unimportance of practice and mastery in "reform math" curricula like Everyday Mathematics. My questions, then, are these: Are schools, such as those in D.C., using supplemental materials to fill in the gaps in EDM, thus contributing to the rise in scores? Or - are tests like the NAEP also so focused on the "whys" of math that even studying their results won't tell me whether my fourth grader knows 6*7=42? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'm going to find out.

The Brady Brothers Series: " Race to the Top"

Race to the Top: Passive or Active Learning

Race to the Top: The Unaddressed Problem

Race to the Top: Information Overload

Race to the Top: Looking at Standards

Race to the Top: To What End?

Download Connections: Investigating Reality

"How the Test Was Won"

eHow: How to Do Well on Standardized Tests
Great Schools: What Standardized Tests Do and Don't Tell You
Wikipedia: Standardized Tests
Standardized Tests: What Parents Should Know
The Use of Standardized Tests in Maine
Maine Schools Move to Use Regional Standardized Tests
MEA (Maine Educational Assessment)
David Silvernail: Maine's Laptop Program: Creating Better Writers
David Silvernail: Cost and Characteristics of Maine's High Performing Schools

Is it on the test?

Not on the Test
FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing
Process Skills

What is not on the test?

What should be on the test?

Standardized Testing in Maine

Listen to Episode 18 - "Stop. Put Your Pencils Down." at Wicked Decent Learning

DOE - Maine High School Assessment - SAT
Maine Educational Assessment (MEA)
Wikipedia: SAT

What are your thoughts on standardized testing in Maine?

Educating a Democracy

"A distinguishing characteristic of our nation — and a great strength — is the development of our institutions within the concept of individual worth and dignity. Our schools are among the guardians of that principle. Consequently . . . and deliberately their control and support throughout our history have been — and are — a state and local responsibility. . . . Thus was established a fundamental element of the American public school system — local direction by boards of education responsible immediately to the parents of children. Diffusion of authority among tens of thousands of school districts is a safeguard against centralized control and abuse of the educational system that must be maintained. We believe that to take away the responsibility of communities and states in educating our children is to undermine not only a basic element of our freedoms but a basic right of our citizens. "

~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"We have been awash in accountability and standardization for a very long time. What we are missing is precisely the qualities that the last big wave of reform was intended to respond to: teachers, kids, and families who don’t know each other or each other’s work and don’t take responsibility for it. We are missing communities built around their own articulated and public standards and ready to show them off to others."

~ Deborah Meier - Education a Democracy - Standards & the Future of Public Education

Meier's Six Alternative Assumptions to High Stakes Testing

Deborah Meier Homepage

Agree or disagree with Meier?