But what would happen if they had to be tested the same way students are - say, by taking the 10th grade exams? Well, that's never going to happen, right?
In Florida, it did.
This from Marion Brady in the Answer Sheet and here:
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results.
Turns out the board member was quite a fella.
The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year...Here's his take on the experience.
Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years....
Now in his 13th year on the board, he had considered taking the test for a while as he began to increasingly question whether the results really reflected a student’s ability. He was finally pushed to do it earlier this year, he said, after a board meeting at which the chairman listed five goals, and one of them caught his attention for being so unremarkable.
Roach said: ‘He [the chairman] said that by 2013 or 2014, he wanted 50 percent of the 10th graders reading at grade level....I’m thinking, ‘That’s horrible.’ Right now it’s 39 percent of our kids reading at grade level in 10th grade. I have to tell you that I’ve never believed that that many kids can’t read at that level. Never ever believed it. I have five kids of my own. None of them were superstars at school but they could read well, and these kids today can read too.
“So I was thinking, ‘What are they taking that tells them they can’t read? What is this test? Our kids do okay on the eighth grade test and on the fifth grade test and then they get stupid in the 10th grade?”...
“I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
“It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities....
“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actuall y been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
5 comments:
The only thing board members need to avoid is: sleeping with the superintendent.
I think this story says a lot when placed in context with the earlier story about raising pre-service teacher standards in hopes of cultivating a better teaching corp.
Of course, it also makes one wonder about not only the relavancy of the assessment but also the curriculum in relationship to what is really needed in order to achieve outside the real, non academic world. It would seem that general education requirements, though well intended may be a waste of time and that what we should be doing is focusing folks on specifically what they need scholastically according to their abilities and goals.
This is a great way for people to realize that all of these standardized tests cannot determine how the student really performs. I,personally, do not like these standardized tests because I do not believe they show the students real potential and actually, I always did very well on mine. I feel like it is not fair to some students that have test anxiety or other problems so why make them suffer? We have to look at the students individually. I think assessing their work over the year would be a better way to look at how well they are doing and whether they are on track or not. It would be more accurate and be easier on the students. Yes, it would be harder on the teachers but, as a uprising teacher, I would not mind. To be a teacher you have to believe in and care for every student, no matter how hard those tasks may be. I think that school board members should have to take those tests to see how unreliable they are most of the time.
This type of event opens up a lot of doors and opportunities to poke and prod at the current system of standardized tests and pre-determined futures. Standardized tests are good for one thing, and one thing only: to know if the student is learning the course material. With this said, we have to ask ourself, "Will this course material have a significant impact on the lives of our students?" If the answer is no, then why are we taking standardized tests to measure the retainment of insignificant information? I understand that the goal of our current educational system is to produce well rounded, productive citizens of our country, but if the students go on to higher education without retaining more than half of the information deemed relevant then something is wrong. Children need to be taught lessons and values that can be used to improve everyday life. We need tools that can further our development in whatever field we decide to pursue. There is far too much sitting; far too much listening; far too much call and response-style teaching strategies; far too little engagement; far too little activity; far too little movement. Success isn't achieved by being passive, it takes an active pursuit. Something is wrong with this system, and with the supposedly "educated" people at the head of it all, you would think something productive would have been done. Perhaps the problem isn't with the results, but rather with what is producing the results. Perhaps we, as a nation, need to rethink what it means to be educated. There is a lot more to life than science, math, social studies, and english; there is more to life than academics, far more important things. Too much mind, not enough heart.
This article just goes to show that our education system is failing many people. Most people would say that the board member is at fault and the problem with student performance comes directly from the Board, but this would be an incorrect angle to the diagnosis. We need to tweak the methods and quality of the process in the classroom or we have our children not receiving the quality education that we wish for them to have. our children then grow up to become a very intelligent board member without these basic skills that we are looking for in our children, and the vicious cycle continues. As the board member stated that he has a Bachelors Degree and two Masters, and he knew none of the answers to the math section. What we need is a more individualized assessment based experience in the classroom. This is the only way to really understand what the student is (or isn't) understanding. Though I'm not speaking of one teacher being assigned to each student, requiring smaller classrooms. This would be financially restricting on most school districts, but would be an investment in the long haul. The second necessary action would be to more thoroughly or more frequently evaluate teacher performance in the classroom. This would be less of a financial burden but would cause an already larger load on the teachers and administration. These suggestions may seem unfeasible, but they are necessary for the future of public education.
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