More High-Stakes Testing Craziness

This from Gerald Bracey in the Huffington Post.

The Degeneration of American Education

The high-stakes testing mania in general and No Child Left Behind in particular have reduced too much of public education to a system to be games. Some people play the game sincerely and seriously. The teachers and principal in Linda Perlstein's Tested are such players. They have doubts about the value of the state test, but they strive mightily to get their impoverished students over that barrier.

After the test is given in late spring, they start acting like real teachers in a real school -- they take the kids to museums and aquariums and to watch the Blue Angels perform. They make art and write poetry. But only in the short time between the state test and the end of the school year.

Some people play it cynically, doing whatever it takes to get children close to the passing score -- the bubble kids -- off the bubble and into the magic kingdom of "proficient." The "sure things" and "hopeless cases" are ignored. Or emphasizing the increasing passing rates on a required test as students enter their senior year, not taking into account the massive dropouts that have occurred along the way.... that a school can have over 1000 9th-graders, fewer than 300 12th-graders and zero dropouts.

Some play it as if they have lost all sense of proportion and common sense. The Texas Education Agency refused to grant a waiver from the state test for a young woman hospitalized after a serious automobile accident that killed her brother and left her memory impaired. Her school dispatched an assistant principal to administer the test in the hospital. Fortunately, one of the girl's teachers overheard what was up, got to the hospital first and told her to refuse to take it. In Colorado, a father, a teacher himself, sought to opt his daughter out of the state fifth grade test. Fine, said the superintendent, but she won't be promoted to sixth grade.

In Washington, a willing testee who simply couldn't think of how to respond to a writing prompt was harangued by his teacher, then by his principal and then by his mother. Unable to respond, he was forbidden to attend a post-test party at which pancakes were served and the movie Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events shown. He was told he had ruined everything for everyone else at the school and suspended for a week.

And some play it desperately. On March, 27, 2008, the Houston Chronicle reported that a middle school principal told a group of teachers that he would kill them and kill himself if the school's science scores did not improve. He was not, the teachers said, joking. "You don't know how ruthless I can be," he is alleged to have said. The incident is being investigated as a "terroristic threat."

At this point we should be asking HAVE WE GONE COLLECTIVELY MAD?

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," said Voltaire. In a world that contains Clear Skies, Clean Waters, Healthy Forests, an Axis of Evil, Iraqi Freedom, Family Values, Patriot Act, and No Child Left Behind, it is a good reminder for our time.

Growing an Achievement Gap

Some thoughts from Gerald Bracey in the Huffington Post, a while back.

The Bush administration has claimed lately that rising test scores and a narrowing black-white test score gap reflect the success of No Child Left Behind. Even if this is true -- and it is not at all clear that it is--the achievement gap, broadly conceived, is growing. Let me explain.

I recently visited an elementary school in Fairfax County, Virginia. Although Fairfax is generally affluent, the homes in this neighborhood are modest. The parents are workers -- in food, in dry cleaning, in construction, in lawn care. The school contains students from 40 nations and its ethnic makeup is 39 percent Hispanic, 32 percent Asian, 6 percent black, 18 percent white, 5 percent other. More than half don't speak English well, half qualify for free or reduced price meals and the mobility rate is double that of the district as a whole.

Yet, because it manages decent scores on the Virginia Standards of Learning Tests, the school is fully state accredited and has met the No Child Left Behind law's requirements for Adequate Yearly Progress.

But all the above doesn't really give you a feel for how the school operates or its successes.

The school burbles. It's a sound that emanates from kids who are content to be where they are. Student artwork covers the hall walls. Classrooms walls are richly decorated. Some students are painting a huge cafeteria mural showing the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids at Giza and other wonders of the world. In a hall, I meet a group returning from "butterfly release day." They had watched as caterpillars transformed themselves into butterflies and had just gone outside to set them free. Science from the real world not from a book. Students sometimes worked in small groups, sometimes alone and sometimes listened to the teacher talk to the whole class. Questions were plentiful.

It's as if the school lives under a shield. As if being part of an affluent district, though not affluent itself, offers cover, a Strategic Defense Initiative, from state and federal dictates.

Unfortunately, in many impoverished districts, no such armor protects the children or the teachers. In such districts children endure an endless diet of math and reading test-prep worksheets. Bubble-kids -- those perceived to be on the threshold of passing the test -- get extra time in reading and math, sometimes in gym class. "Sure things" and "hopeless cases" get identified and ignored. Science, if it happens at all, will happen in the two dimensions of a book.

Thinking about those butterflies, I was reminded of a California superintendent's retort on being asked why her district wouldn't be making any more whale watching field trips: "Kids are not tested on whale watching, so they're not going whale watching." Music? Art? Social studies? Plays? Chess club?

In some such schools today, principals patrol the halls listening to make sure that the teachers are all following the exact sequence laid out by the scripted reading programs. One teacher who gave a creative answer to a question while using the highly programmed Open Court reading series was severely reprimanded by her principal. "But it was a teachable moment," she said. To which he replied "There are no teachable moments in Open Court!" Some principals have contracts specifying that test scores must show a certain increment each year. They administer copious "formative evaluations" which are merely mini-tests to see if the kids are making progress towards the big tests at the end of the year.

The outcome of this gun-barrel focus is the gap I mentioned at the outset. It was described well recently by the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Chester Finn, a longtime public school critic, and initially a supporter of No Child Left Behind. "It's increasingly clear that making schools and teachers focus narrowly on test results, especially in basic skills, squeezes a lot of the juice out of the curriculum and out of the educational experience itself...America's true competitive edge doesn't come from producing more engineers than India. It arises from the creativity, rebelliousness, and drive that result from a broad liberal education and the values and convictions that accompany such teaching and learning."

Kids facing an infinite series of phonics exercises are not enjoying that broad liberal education. They're not growing butterflies or watching whales. If the reading and math scores in the drilled schools rise, some people will claim success. Others will say, "At least they're getting more of an education than they used to." Somehow, I don't think so.

The Zero Percent Change of 100 Percent Success

By Gerald Bracey in the Huffington Post

"There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target," said Bob Linn at the March 13 joint House-Senate hearing on the No Child Left Behind law. The Washington Post identified Bob as the co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA and the University of Colorado. He had actually shown the impossibility of getting 100% of students to be proficient years ago by using wildly optimistic assumptions, to project 100% proficiency in12th grade mathematics166 years from now.

The article did not say that Bob is the most respected living psychometrician, a former president of both the American Educational Research Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education. But that is true. He's perceived as fair and objective. I can't imagine anyone accusing him of grinding an ax. I've known him since 1967 and the only negative thing I have heard in those years is that when he gives a speech he speaks too slow. In any case, those legislators damn well ought to have been listening closely.

"But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant," Bob went on, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard. They don't want to be accused of leaving some children behind." Indeed, US Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon actually said "We need to stay the course. The mission is doable, and we don't need to back off that right now." The Post article did not say if the audience groaned as Simon intoned these painful Iraq war slogans. I wonder if he also said "We can't cut and run."

What Bob didn't say is that behind that rhetorically brilliant title was a strategically brilliant plan to transfer huge sums of taxpayer money to the private sector through vouchers and the takeover of public schools by private corporations. Teddie Kennedy blocked the vouchers but compromised by permitting them to be replaced by Supplemental Educational Services. The SES deliver only a meager $2 billion of public funds each year.

"Are we going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence and say that only 85 percent of men are created equal?" This lame analogy from Lamar Alexander, mister-run-for-anything and currently a Senator from Tennessee. Of course, African Americans can tell you a thing or two about that, stemming from their 3/5 of a human reckoning in the Constitution. (For that matter the phrase' author, Thomas Jefferson, rejected it in matters academic, setting up a plan for education in Virginia whereby "twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually"). In any case equality was something we're endowed with by our creator, not something we attain by bubbling in answer sheets properly.

The whole proficient-or-left-behind dichotomy is, of course, phony. Achievement, reasonably defined, is a continuum, not part of an either/or. If we set the standard for "proficient" as a score of 80, would a student who scores 79 be "left behind?" To say so would be absurd, but that's how NCLB operates.

Moreover, the whole debate focuses on the wrong thing. From Jefferson's time through the 1940's the schools' function was civic. Jefferson argued that all governments degenerate and to prevent this, the people themselves needed to be educated. It is only in the post-Sputnik years that the focus has shifted, mistakenly, from education as necessary to preserve democracy test scores uber alles as necessary to get a job and keep America competitive in the global economy.
But test scores tell us little in the long run. A 1974 paper from the American College Testing Program stated, "We conclude that academic talent as measured by test scores, high school grades and college grades is not related to significant adult accomplishment. Though a certain level of academic talent may be necessary to complete medical school, for example, the grades of medical students appear unrelated to later success as physicians."

Thus, high-stakes testing as represented in NCLB, Texas' TAKS, Virginia's SOLs, Florida's FCAT, etc., is demoralizing and corrupting teachers and administrators by gun-barrel emphasis on something that is, in the long haul, trivial. One can only hope that some day in the future we will look back and ask "What were we thinking?