Are tests biased against students who don't give a s***?
by Scott McLeod
Shocking, awful, embarrassing - especially since I have long admired you both–Grant and, John.I often thought Grant’s thinking cool/cold/logic without the common human touch, but I also respected the insights that flowed from his logic. I just can’t believe you and he wrote that junk, John. What do you think it does to kids, families, human beings…even if the test evaluations were a good measure. Nobody in the field of testing would argue for it - as you surely know. Even when I fired people for far better reasons, I did it in ways that would cause the least hurt possible. Teachers who are unsuccessful are not criminals, or bad people, or deserving of being mistreated. It’s a blow against our common humanity - surely the most precious thing we have to pass on to our children. By our way of treating each other shall we be known. (Do you imagine the possibility of this being done to one of your own offspring??? In any field?)I presume you’d like us also to go back to the days when the kids scores are publicly posted too.Maybe we can add their families - to spread the “shame” as widely as we can.
The naming of names based on dubious measures is truly disgraceful.I am disappointed and shocked to see you endorsing this approach.Why humiliate people in public when most psychometricians and accountability experts say that VAA [value-added assessment] is not ready for prime time? Shall we put scarlet letters around the necks of teachers whose kids don’t get higher test scores? Continue on this path, and we will have more teaching to lousy tests, more narrowing of the curriculum, and more cheating. Not good education. Not a way to improve education. Just mean-spirited and pointless.
If at the end of the year, if the 9-year-olds haven’t made their presidential portraits out of pasta or built their toilet-paper-tube robots, their teacher would not have met her goal and would be graded accordingly.
We need assessments that gauge students' understanding and require them to demonstrate what they know, not tests that allow students to rely solely on guessing and picking one among four canned answers.
If you want to talk about authentic accountability, then we have to start asking the kids if they like school. Then we have to care about their answer. And then we have to stop blaming them and reflecting on our own practices.
if the students fail to learn the material as shown by the usual measures, it is the students’ fault, except that the students think it’s the teacher’s fault.
When Rhee took over the D.C. schools in 2007, "8 percent of our eighth graders were on grade level, but all the adults in our schools were rated as exceeding expectations," Rhee recalled to NEWSWEEK. "How can all the adults think they are doing an excellent job but producing at an 8 percent success level? There's a wild disconnect there.
What's this look like in your school district?
the kids are feeling "gob-smacked" about the whole project. They are used to having their research papers outlined for them .... gather info about the topic, produce five pages, make sure to use "x" number of sources, be sure to include ... blah, blah, blah..... We've given them minimal direction for this. Many don't know what to do. They are simply not used to being asked what is important to them. It will be interesting to watch what they do - once they stop whining and begging for direction
Why wouldn't they feel 'gob-smacked?' We've socialized them to be fact regurgitators...
I don’t want my own kids to go quietly through their lives. And I don’t want that for our RCS students either. I hope we’re graduating students who can research and analyze and take the initiative. I hope we’re graduating students who can help to solve the many problems that our world faces - making it a better place than it is today. I want our graduates to know that they have the power to do so. And so I’m always wondering, what are we doing to prepare them to be good thinkers? To let them practice these things?
Time will tell if my own kids can do more than be good students in school. I’m hopeful and optimistic, but I’m not sure that the ability to score well on the Global exam or Earth Science Regents or the 8th grade Math exam shows much more than an ability to memorize, study and take a test well. Does this success indicate an ability to critically think, to problem solve, to collaborate, lead, initiate, communicate, analyze? To really understand the world around them and their places in it?
Relatively small improvements in the skills of a nation’s workforce can have a big effect on its future economic well-being, concludes a new international study that seeks to quantify those benefits.
For the United States, the research suggests, modest gains in student achievement as measured by one international assessment could cumulatively boost the country’s gross domestic product by tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decades.
“There’s almost a one-to-one match between what people know and how well economies have grown over time,” Andreas Schleicher, the head of indicators and analysis for the education directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said at a briefing held here last week to discuss the findings. “It’s not the quantity of schooling that drives success in countries, it is the quality of [learning] outcomes that we see that is explaining the relationship.”
Claiming that higher test scores and more diplomas will lead to prosperity is a sleight of hand for which well-educated reporters should not fall. The assumption that if twice as many people get a B.A. an M.A. or a Ph.D., twice as many higher-paying jobs will appear is a colossal fraud. But even more shameful is the assumption that knowing "right answers" on a standardized test is a way to judge even future employees, much less future citizens.
