Spouting off

I am all for accountability but it seems that perhaps the only thing this will accomplish is having a bunch of kids experience failure.

Failure at a young age can have life long implications for any kid.

I think the standards movement will run its course and eventually be ousted or drasticly changed. Unfortunately, our kids seems to be the ones stuck in the middle of the movement.

My 5th graders school gave pre-ISATS(illinois); those who didnt pass were invited to twice weekly 90 min after school sessions(they call it extended day)This started on our retrun from Xmas break and continues until the reall ISATs in spring.

I certainly was NOT surprised to get my sons notice but have been surprised at just how many kids attend these. And realize not everyone opted to participate-a few have dropped out as well

I am proud of the school for taking such a strong stand-after all, these kids are shuttled to the cafeteria for a breakfast equivalent snack-3/4 teachers work with each class size group-bus transport home is provided. Can you imagine the funds this is eating?

the school is truly making an effort but…wow, what a lot of kids they are having to remediate. It just doesnt seem workable in the long haul. Like you said, this isnt just identified LD kids-there are so many(seems like some are math impaired but do fine with language while others do the opposite-yet we dont allow for that differentiation anymore-everyone has to fit a prototype of well roundedness and be prepared to be an aerospace engineer AND a literature professor)

Wow, sounds like your district is putting forth a great effort to help the kids pass the test. I too am in Illinois and my kids take the ISAT. Last year all 3 happened to take the reading, math and writing portions. My oldest son scored below standards on the reading portion, barely met standards for writing (passed by 2 points) and met the math standards. My daughter exceeded the standards on reading (thought the test was too easy), met the standards fairly decently for math, and barely met standards for writing (passed by 2 points); my youngest son got academic warnings in both reading and writing, and scored below standards on math. The school did not offer extra help to either of the boys. The comment was they are on “I.E.P.’s and will be promoted. The interesting thing is they also take the MAT7 test and all 3 scored much better on this test then the ISAT. My daughter for instance scored at or above the 70th percentile on all areas of this test (scores from the 70th-95th) including the language portion that covered writing (90th percentile). So my question is who are these standards written for? Although the boys showed the same pattern on the MAT7 as the ISAT the scores on the MAT7 were much higher. My oldest son has to take the Prarie stae exam in 11th grade and it concerns me that the school did not seem worried that he failed the 8th grade ISAT reading test and scored an independent reading level of 5th grade. He is in a reading skills class now but only because I went an advocated using their test scores as the basis for the request. What happens to the students who have parents that don’t know to advocate?

The standards seem to be written for the employers in the community. The general phrase to search for is Work Force, as in Work Force Investment Act, Work Force Investment Board, etc. The entire Work Force movement falls primarily under the U.S. Dept. of Labor and the state employment commissions and the politicians have pushed the state ed. departments into providing the testing part of it.

The employers, and the colleges to a lesser degree, want to know what skill sets they are getting when they take on someone with a high school diploma.

This is a simple observation, and entirely my opinion, based on 29 years of working with clients as an employee of a state vocational rehabilitation agency.

FWIW,

John

So, my next set of very stupid questions are: Who gets to see the results? Aren’t they protected as part of the students records? If the results are used in this manner should’nt the schools want to remediate those that don’t pass so they can be productive members of society? I know stupid questins but had to ask.

John,

Is there any evidence that these tests accomplish what you are saying they are supposed to accomplish?

I would think that accountability is a two way street. If you just pull standards out of some beauracratic hat are they really standards? Shouldn’t there be some evidence that testing competency equals work competency?

Secondly, aren’t employers a fairly diverse group. How could they speak with one voice as you claim?

Sorry John, I as an employer would be not looking for someone who spouts beauracratic nonsense but rather someone with ideas who can think out of the box. I would want someone who could hold down a conversation and project a positive self image.
These type of people don’t always test well on standardized tests.

This is also a very big issue in my state, (Virginia), we have the SOL’s or Standards of Learning. My daughter is ADD inatttentive, and generally doesn’t score well on any lengthy test. The students are required to pass several tests at the end of 3rd, 5th, 8th, and then to graduate. My daughter missed passing the reading test last year at the end of 3rd by one point. She will have to retake the test again this year, and if she doesn’t pass, I have been told that she may be retained, even though she is a solid “B” student. Does this not seem ridiculous to anyone, but me.

I am very concerned for my 2nd grade son who has a very significant reading LD.

Well, keep your eyes on Texas this Spring bec we started a new high stakes test this year that is significantly harder than the test that was in place for the last 10 years or so. AND, 3rd graders have to pass the reading portion to be promoted. Then as this group of 3rd graders gets older they have to continue to pass to be promoted. The exit test is also harder and includes chemistry, physics and calculus.

Then Gov. George W. Bush pushed the no pass/no promote deal (first as gov. then as prez). “Stop Social Promotion!” Employers were mad that kids out of high school could barely read and write or do math. And it is true some kids coasted on through school. Now there is accountability - which I think is a good thing. Bec of these scores you can see what schools and even individual teachers are effective teachers. Schools are rated based on their test scores and their attendance rates. It is quite difficult to be sent home these days! Schools are motivated to supply tutors and Saturday schools to help the kids who are suffering on the benchmarks.

My coworker here at the law firm showed me a sample test her 4th grader had been working on. She asked me one of the reading questions (which sentence in the above paragraph doesn’t belong?) and I made my guess as to the right answer - which was different from her guess or her husband’s guess. She had emailed the teacher asking what the correct answer was and the teacher couldn’t tell and so she was contacting someone in the district to see what the correct answer is. THAT is how difficult these tests are. It’s very high level thinking.

School is a lot harder than when we were kids, that’s for sure!

On the one side I do want my students to pass and I always hate to see a kid I know and like to fail.

On the other side I have spent my professional life in schools which were disintegrating under the popular no-standards approach of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and I have seen a number of good kids (including a couple of relatives) tracked down to chair-warming classes —You pass if you show up and keep the chair warm. Staying awake and/or refraining from violence are optional.

By the way, strict standards are not new, in fact they are very old. I myself went to a system where there were very challenging written examinations every year 1 to 12 in every subject. These were all essay exams and problem-solving math, no multiple-choice ever. Starting in Grade 4 the same exam was used for all classes in a grade and some exams were marked by other teachers, for objectivity. The final exam in Grade 11 or 12 was province-wide and marked by outside committtees, also all essays. From Grade 4 up 80% of the final grade was exam-based.
You know what? It didn’t kill us. The number of students who repeated grades in this very strict exam-based system was *lower* than the number I saw in “social-promotion” systems!! I was shocked when I started teaching, after the 1970’s revolution. In my own classes with all those exams maybe one or two kids out of thirty to forty would repeat a year. In the new, supposedly “open” system, two or three kids in a class of twenty would be repeated. Huh?
Then there’s all the stress and anxiety and all that of exams. Well, my classmates, at least the great majority, didn’t experience that. Exams were a fact of life, something you had to do, and we all did them. We had years of practice, three terms a year, every year, writing exams, so we had time and help to learn how to do them Practice is important, and we were given the chance.
Those higher-level math thinking problems? Well, we had textbooks that *taught* us those, they weren’t a sudden end of the year trap but another of those facts of daily life, and the vast majority of students, over 95%, survived them quite well.
In this kind of system, everyone, teachers and parents and students, knows what the rules are and what standards have to be met. It is wonderfully relaxing to know what your job is and when and how you have to perform! Given reasonable standards, the great majority of students did meet them.When I first went into the “modernized” schools and saw the tremendous stress on kids, being tested every day, being marked on every single piece of homework and never having a chance to take a breath before the next demand, being repeated on the decision of some closed-door committee and having no control over it, I was shocked. This wasn’t education, it was torture.

The old system wasn’t perfect; it didn’t have any real resources for slow learners and extra help for LD was minimal (Of course, Mrs. Reid’s handwriting teaching in Grade 3 was the best thing ever for a kid with visual-motor problems (me), and I regularly bless her memory.)
At that time, the concept of “dropout” was as yet unheard of in our culture; when you got to be 16, you made the decision whether you were a scholar or not. The 75% who were not left school, and the principal shook their hands and wished them luck in the working world. The remaining 25% stayed and finished high school. The drive to have everybody finish high school seemed to be a good idea at the time — until I started teaching and saw that the new Grade 12 “graduates” had far fewer skills than my cohort who left Grade 10 on their sixteenth birthday. I have been asking for thirty years, and still have no decent answer to the question, what value it is to keep kids unwillingly in the school building for two extra years and to teach them nothing. One answer I got was realistic if not educational — to try to keep them off the streets and the unemployment lists and away from vandalism and other crimes. So I spent my professional life trying to deal with a place that was a combination of prison and social welfare system, but rarely an educational institution.

When I started teaching I thought that people were making needed changes in the school system in order to improve it. After a couple of years, I decided that with all its faults the old system at least did the job it was there for — providing basic education to all and academic skills for those who wanted to stay. It wasn’t much of a social welfare center and did nothing to keep unemployed teens out of the way, but then it never aimed to. The new system has some good teachers and good schools in various places, but in general the only description is chaotic.

So in general, with a lot of “if . . “, I think standards and exams are a positive change. If the exams are appropriately written and at a level suitable for the ordinary student at that grade level. If the exams test skills the students really need, not just test-wiseness. If the course design and the exams are worked out together. If everybody knows what to expect. If the students get enough preparation, not just a cram session, but all year working on the skills they need to know. If teachers are held to teaching the appropriate curriculum, but are not forced into test cramming. If, given that everybody has to finish high school now, some extra provision is made for getting people through high school when they have difficulties.

Just think how much improvement we could get if people put all that time and energy into teaching kids and improving the system instead of fighting against exams.

As someone who grew up in NY state with the Regents exams decades ago I don’t see that forcing teachers to try to successfully teach all of their students is a bad thing; for a long time the teachers have not had an objective criteria to measure efforts; however I believe that states like Mass. will be forced to reconsider the requirement that 10th graders pass a state math and english test for a hs diploma. Too many students are failing to deny them a diploma. However Bush is solidly behind this testing effort and it will be hard to derail it now. In my state their are numerous tutoring efforts(free) available afterschool, summertime and online to help students succeed.

What is the point of the test if you can’t fail?

Students are not stupid and when they know they cannot fail, they just blow off the tests. Believe me I have seen this!

No, large numbers of students should not fail. That is a problem of the previous system that had no standards and passed kids along ready or not, and now these kids are suffering as the system changes.

In a good system problems are caught and corrected early and don’t snowball to illiteracy and total failure in Grade 10 or 12.

As I mentioned above, in the system that I attended with an extremely strict test-based system every single year, *fewer* students repeated than in the social-promotion systems I worked in later.
And in the test-based system they knew why they repeated and what they had to do about it. My brother was one of these when he slacked off in Grade 9 and had to repeat; he decided to work a little more and goof off a little less and so finished high school including the province-wide exams. As I said, problems caught and corrected early before they snowballed.