So we are back to parental involvement being key. That is not a thing that can be regulated. So long as parents continually shove their children off on the state, education will continue to decline. If they decide to get involved and take responsibility for directing their child’s education, it won’t much matter what the system looks like, learning will improve.

One of the abstracts includes that there was some sort of mental testing as part of several measures to determine performance, something I am not against.

I also don’t know much about these tests. They may well be very targeted to the skills one needs to be successful in the military. I know you have to take a competency test to even get in, so some selection has already occured. Just out of curiousity, I wonder if it would be possible that some who failed these tests and never were able to enter would, with training, prove to be quite competent at whatever their job was to be? I guess we’ll never know. But the military also does not have the responsibility to educate every child…they can screen as they choose within the scope of the law.

As an independent meausre, I can see value to a school district determining that a standardized test might be an efficient means of ensuring some things. I don’t think it should come from the federal level (obviously, from other statements I’ve made). For the most part, kids who do well in school do well on these tests. That isn’t the issue. There may be some correlation, but correlation isn’t the same as a direct relationship. There are numerous children who do not test well and yet go on to succeed quite well in the real world.

Also, I’m not accusing the military of this now, but mental testing has a long history with the American military. It was our military, after all, that conclusively proved the feeble-mindedness of the Jew. Native born white Americans are the most intelligent in the world, followed closely by Northern Europeans (due to their Nordic blood, Brigham hypothesizes) with those from Southern Europe at the bottom. In WWI, we didn’t allow blacks to serve in the military, but I wonder where they would have ended up in this testing?

I don’t have a problem with testing in a general sense. I don’t have a problem with them as one meausrement out of many. I have a problem with them as the sole measure of accountability and success. There are some things they cannot measure which also are important. Skills important in college which I’m sure you would like to see more of…abstract reasoning, writing, etc.

They are also having unintended consequences, turning our schools into minimum competency classrooms. The standards I personally place on education are far greater than what the test does. I agree whole heartedly that teachers need to have higher expectations for their students, but that does not seem to be resulting from more testing.

The SAT, which I’m sure you are very familiar with, seems only to be able to predict socio-economic status which was the original point before the bunny trail. Grades alone are a better indicator of how successful a student will be in college and adding the SAT to that improves the prediction only negligibly. This has been researched and proved to such a degree that several universities began moving away from it as the sole measurement for college entrance.

I don’t doubt that for the most part the tests may be accurate enough to be able to check teachers most of the time. But I do not like what the high stakes testing is doing to classrooms. And I don’t like the idea that children like my brother who for whatever reason cannot fill in all the bubbles may spend their education in a special education setting due to one measurement of their ability. As a check, fine. As the sole meausre of success, there are too many other problems.

I appreciate your concern for my children, but I think they will be just fine. We’ll get to filling in bubbles some day, but right now, I am happy that my first grader has enough of a grasp of mathematical principles that she figured out multiplication on her own. I am happy that she is reading at a second-third grade level. I am also happy that she is able to apply what she is learning. We have a very structured curriculum which I find far superior to anything in the public schools, and the essay testing and note book work, while a little difficult to standardize, does provide for more of a measure of her actual problem solving skills while giving her ample opportunity to demonstrate her knowledge of basic skills.

Study after study has shown that raising expectations raises student performance. So why are we allowing this testing, which is only part of an attempt to quantify and measure what is going on, actually lower classroom expectations?

We (you) are suffering the effects of the last great educational idea to come out of New Zealand…whole language. And the various philosophies which followed which lead to classrooms without structure, problems with no right answer, children determining their own paces, and teachers never actually teaching. That philosophy needs to go.

So how about all those California seniors who had been given passing grades, but couldn’t pass an 8th grade proficiency test? You want to pass them on to me, so I can waste my time teaching them what they didn’t learn in high school?

Sorry, I do that all the time, and frankly, I’m sick of it. But you’re perfectly welcome to start doing your jobs, so I don’t have to do them for you. Because that’s what I do, do your jobs for you.

Scribner, B.L.S., Smith, D.A., Baldwin, R.H., and Phillips, R.L., Are Smart Tankers Better? AFQT and Military Productivity, Armed Forces and Society, 12, 1986, pp.193-206; See http://afs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/2/193

Horne, D., “The Impact of Soldier Quality on Army Performance,” Armed Forces and Society, 13, 1987, pp. 443-445;, http://afs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/443

Fernandez, J.C. “Soldier Quality and Job Performance in Team Tasks,” Social Science Quarterly, 73, 1992, pp. 253-265. A description of this study is in http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2005/RAND_TR193.pdf

Confidence bias appears in psychological experiments regardless of whether the person being tested is in fact being held accountable. And you wonder whether it is applicable or not to schools - think about the people you know - how many of them are immune from confidence bias? Do all of them rigorously set out to disprove every single one of their favourite theories? Confidence bias is a major problem in the sciences which is why there is so much emphasis on peer review and replicability of research.

As for “http://www.fairtest.org/NJ%20Standardized%20Testing%20characteristics.pdf”, this is about the problems of the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJASK) - specifically the report finds it’s too short to be reliable as an assessment across all the sub-areas it aims to address. This is not an argument that standardised tests are inherently unreliable.

“http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPSL-0211-125-EPRU.pdf” - may be set against http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/GradingtheSystems.pdf - very few states have their standardised tests and accountablility measure sorted out.

And on the other side, having high-stakes test does not appear to reduce performance. This report at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_33.htm looks at schools’ results on high stakes tests with their results on low stakes standardised tests. “The report finds that score levels on high stakes tests closely track score levels on other tests, suggesting that high stakes tests provide reliable information on student performance. … If schools are “teaching to the test,” they are doing so in a way that conveys useful general knowledge as measured by nationally respected low stakes tests.”

Standardised tests are not an idiot-proof scheme that can be plonked down and produce magical improvements in educational results. This is only a count against them in the real world if there is in fact an idiot-proof scheme in education that achieves major improvements in educational results. I don’t know of any.

As for the School-to-Work programme, it seems like a scandously waste of money and effort (high school students at grade 11 picking what job they want to work in? I changed my mind
while I was at university), but there’s no reference to your “single, high stakes test which will determine what classes you can take and eventually, if the whole school-to-work program
is implemented, what job you can have.” Under the scheme kids are still left to chose which job interests them - albeit at a ridiculously young age.

You did not supply a html link to the Marc Tucker letter - is this the one you are referring to? http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/marc_tucker/ The one where he says “All students are guaranteed that they will have a fair shot at reaching the standards: that is, that whether they make it or not depends on the effort they are willing to make, and nothing else. School delivery standards are in place to make sure this happens.”
And I can’t see any reference in this letter to a “single, high stakes test which will determine which classes you can take and…which job you can have.” (I don’t think it’s a good proposal, but that’s for other reasons.)

“There is no time left in the day to challenge bright children. In fact, I remember being shown my bubble…how to determine which students were most likely to gain improvement through increased instruction. You focus on those because they deliver the increases in performance the school needs to maintain its ranking. So you just ignore the bright ones because they will pass anyway and the slower ones because they aren’t worth the investment of time necessary to show a measurable increase in student scores.”

This is a values judgment. If schools do not have enough time to be able to educate all kids to the best of each kid’s ability, then do you
(a) give everyone about equal time, and let the slower kids spend their time frustrated, bored, ashamed of not being able to read, and likely to be illiterate for years afterwards, or do you
(b) try to bring every kid up to a
basic standard of reading, maths, writing even at the price of boring and not extending the smarter kids.
My choice, if schools can’t do both, is option (a). And I say this as someone who was good at school and very bored at school - miserable though my childhood was the childhoods of those who hadn’t learnt to read was far worse. And their adulthoods are worse too.

Since standardised tests lead your school into spending masses of effort into educating the marginal student into reading and maths while ignoring the smarter students, we can deduce that whatever the school was doing before standardised tests was not teaching those marginal students how to read and do maths. So from my point of view it is a good thing that you were teaching more kids how to read and do maths. It is a shame that the school was ignoring the slower ones, that’s an argument for bringing schools’ standards forward more so the school has to teach everyone the minimum (ignoring the severely cognitively-disabled).

This of course does depend on my value judgement that if we can’t have both, bringing every kid to basic literacy is more important than educating the smarter kids to a higher standrad while letting the slower ones rot.

“10) Regarding recess, every research study ever conducted that I am aware of has shown that taking away recess lowers student performance.”

Thanks. It’s nice to know that for once my intuition was not wrong. That happens so seldom.

As for testing companies stuffing things up - everyone stuffs things up. It’s far more widespread than cheating. Companies regularly recall products, patients die due to anaesthestic, construction engineers build bridges that fall down. Politicans get their countries into wars (which, regardless of an analysis of any particular war, implies a stuff-up by at least one politician - one on the side that lost). What matters is the quality controls you have in place to catch stuff-ups.

In NZ, when I was going through, exam quality and marking standards were maintained by openness. Each student’s exam booklets were returned to them and the exam questions were released once the exam was sat. Consequently wrong questions generally made the front page of the newspaper (eg the year I sat School C English there were about four multi-choice questions which had no right or wrong answer and this made the front page of the newspaper so the exam authority announced that all answers to those questions would be right).

Students could check their exams for mistakes in the marking and on payment of a fee get them remarked (refunded if the remarking resulted in significant changes). This transparency increased quality.

American psychometricians have told me that releasing exams and answers would drive up costs because questions can’t be re-used to the same extent, but none of them appear to have any effective alternatives as to how to maintain incentives on testing companies to maintain quality.

And incidentally, the successsful project is Direct Instruction Model - a specific form of teaching - not direct instruction as a generic term of having the teacher up the front telling students information. This is the programme developed by Professor Wesley C. Becker and Siegfried Engelmann.

It is not plain old teaching. From the earlier link I provided “The central element of The Full Immersion Model of DI is the scripted curricular program. The curriculum materials include highly interactive yet fast-paced lessons. Each lesson builds on the previous lessons; therefore, the lessons gradually introduce new skills. The lessons require teachers to adopt specific instructional strategies such as directing choral responses and signaling.”

The link I supplied works fine for me so I am not sure what the problem is - perhaps your browser is not coping the whole link over? I’m going to try a html reference as well,

href=”http://www.csrq.org/documents/ESCSRQReport-Full_000.pdf”>http://www.csrq.org/documents/ESCSRQReport-Full_000.pdf - for the off chance that that works better. If not, try this front page at http://www.csrq.org/CSRQreportselementaryschoolreport.asp

The reason I think parental involvement is not the “pencillin” of education is that parental involvement is not within the school’s control. Nor is it necessary, since Direct Instruction (note capitals) works without requiring parental involvement.

They make one mistake and millions of students are affected. As in the cases cited. Teacher bias may affect some students, but what about testing bias? They have always disproportionately affected the poor and minorities. The poorest whites score better than the richest blacks. Is that because whites are better? White poverty is better than black wealth? Or is there the possibility of cultural bias, which has long been claimed and can be demonstrated in some test items?

As to the cheating, yes it is the fault of the individual people involved. But there is a lot of pressure and obvioulsy many will opt that route.

NCLB has numerous failures. And for all the money that it has spent and all the systemic changes it has brought about, it boasts little in actual gains (by its own measures). The achievement gap hasn’t lessened any. In fact, the rate of gains that we were seeing prior to its enactment have slowed. And there is evidence from state statistics that, historically speaking, the introduction of high stakes testing has regularly lead to a drop in proficiency.