pigtail wrote: 
In theory, the lottery money cannot be used for what would be considered typical funding needs. So in a well-to-do district, the funds might get used to provide equipment or supplies for an elective course. When I was in college, the first year of the lotto, our campus radio station scored some sweet sound equipment. Absolutely nonessential but about a 4-decade upgrade in technology.

In a poorer district, kids get iPads maybe, laptops, when their desks are breaking and the building isn't up to code and/or can't deliver internet to those devices. It's weird.

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
I know here in CA we supposedly give 1% of lottery sales to public schools.  That was the deal when we voted to legalize the lottery here back in the 80s.  I clearly remember that portion of the bill.  So where is that money?  A shit ton of money is spent on lottery sales daily.  Why must we cut educational programs that are already stretched lean to support school safety?  I remember my kids high school was so damn administrative heavy.  With a population, city wide of 50,000.  Why are there 3 vice principals and 2 principals at their high school?  And these administrators are not starving or even living lean like most teachers.  One of those principals drove a BMV 7 series which is what 75-80K?  There is so much wrong with that. 

After Parkland shooting, U.S. states shift education funds to school safety

Thanks NRA!

Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today

'It was quasi-religious': the great self-esteem con

 Lazy8 wrote: 
I agree completely.  I realize it's a different world than when I was in school, but I remember standardized tests being used to determine (in conjunction with classroom performance) a student's need for advanced subject classes or remedial ones, which I think has similarities to the European system. I don't know if this was determined to be judgmental and thus detrimental to a child's psyche (expectations too high or too low), but as someone who was part of that system, I found it very useful, as I wasn't stuck in classes where I felt bored.

A different experience to testing for aptitude was when I first came to Texas. I was in 4th grade and attending parochial school (as I had for my first three years in Boston). Within days of my starting school, one of the teachers decided I belonged in the remedial reading class, not based on any test or my performance but because I talked "funny", even though I'd been reading since I was about three years of age. So into the remedial class I go, which was taught by a different teacher.  She (a nun - the other was a lay teacher), who was from Ireland and still had a lovely brogue (the shoe *and* the accent), asked why I was in the remedial class. I was still traumatized by the move to this strange world, compounded by being an introvert, so I could only respond with "I don't know, Sister Brendan. Mrs. Polk said I belonged here."  She just shook her head and said, "Oh no - you belong in the advanced reading class!"  And so I was moved into that class...which was taught by the teacher who equated my Boston accent with a lack of reading skill. As you might imagine, this was episode ended up being seminal in the formation of my opinion of Texas in general.  

I would second what Lazy8 posted and add to it by citing what Harold "Doc" Howe II, a widely respected educator and policy expert, thought and said about educational standards and testing based on standards.

I can't find the quote, but he was supposedly once asked about national educational standards. His reply was, in essence, they should be brief and very open-ended/general.

Regarding our current system, he had this to say:

"For the state to say, 'Here's all the little things that all the little kids have got to know, and here's the test you give them, and then we'll know whether they're learning anything,' that's baloney, and that's what we have right now,"

 

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Yes, apparently some states have several different salvos of mandated, standardized tests; that seems "distracting" at best.  I agree with your points, particularly with the last two paragraphs. Over they years, I have had several friends who grew up in the UK, and they told me about the different standardized tests they had taken in the 1960s and '70s.  At least two of them were pretty much told that they should go into the trades instead of academics, as determined by their test results.  It wasn't a mark of shame for them, it helped them in many ways - to get into apprenticeships and eventually trades instead of possibly wasting time floundering around in colleges.

 Proclivities wrote:
My midmost just finished his first year teaching full time. In the second half of the year he didn't have a single week that didn't have some kind of state-mandated standardized test.

Which would have been OK with him...if he had gotten to see the results. They won't be available for months after the end of the school year, and they aren't intended to guide classroom instruction. As it was the tests' biggest impact was a reduction in instruction time.

The US isn't the only country in the world to use standardized tests. Europe has been doing it for decades and the stakes are very high with those tests, but the stakes are for the student, not the school. A student's future is largely determined by these tests; you can be guided into a trade school rather than college, or booted out of public education altogether.

There is a lot to be said for this approach. The onus is on the student (and the parents) to learn and prepare, and in some cases teachers are freer to teach. Their outcomes are generally better than ours. I have grave reservations about deciding the path of a life that young (would you want 16 year old you to pick your career, academic or professional?) and like a typical American I value the freedom to reinvent onerself at any time.

Education reform in the US has focused on test scores, and really there isn't another metric that makes any sense. Without metrics there is no way to judge if what you tried worked or not. We have spent endless time and money assessing the problem, but the ensuing reforms have been based on trendy gimmicks rather than the obvious: we need to pay teachers enough to attract people who are good at it, give them authority and autonomy, and let them teach. If we keep looking for magic bullets we will keep failing our children.

Teaching is a very human act. No top-down system is going to change that. Let the humans work.

 kcar wrote: 
It depends on the test and the state or district.  There are many different types of "standardized tests"; they are not all just rote, multiple-choice, bubble-in tests.  However, tests of any sort, are seldom designed to try to "engage kids in learning", nor can they - that is primarily the job of teachers and parents.  Tests are generally designed to determine what students have learned or (more importantly) retained.  Of course, if a student, parent, or teachers determines a weakness from the outcome of a test, then that could encourage or engage them in improving that aspect.  The outcomes of well-designed tests could possibly help 'tailor paths' for students, but still, it's in the hands of states and districts as to how they much can - or want to - spend for tests and specialized or remedial programs.  Still, the majority of tests are rote and mechanical and the administration of them by many districts is often thoughtless and perfunctory.

 kcar wrote:
They (standardized, fill in the bubble tests) are indeed a useful and potentially powerful tool when properly designed and employed. When misused, as they are now, they warp education rather than improving it.

 aflanigan wrote: 

I'm enjoying it too. Hail Woopie Tech! 

Yeah, self-paced instruction doesn't work for everyone. You have to be motivated and have a sense that you're in charge of your education. Again, I think that the more immersive your educational experience—that is, one that lets you be an active, experimenting participant using all your senses—the more you'll learn and the greater your motivation to continue will be. 

I think your most recent post, however, captures the tension that most large school systems face. On one hand, they want to encourage and nurture multiple intelligences and kids with different talents. That means that they try to provide "enrichment" programs and extracurricular activities beyond the core curriculum. That can be expensive and subject to the first budget cuts. Progress in that kind of non-core education likely is harder to capture with standardized tests.

On the other hand, schools have to honor the core curriculum, which traditional education and standardized testing focused on. Apparently there's more and more grade inflation and fewer students prepared for college. I can see why governments and parents want to assess how much and how well kids have learned and how well they're prepared for the future. It's one thing to nurture their talents but they have to meet minimum educational standards by the time they finish high school. 


"Like Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, for example, education experts know that every child is unique, has different approaches to learning about the world around them, different potentialities, and different schedules for achieving milestones in emotional, intellectual, and spatial intelligence and development."

Again, like the math teacher/author's mastery learning program, that sounds like it would take a lot of time, effort, money and interdisciplinary coordination to implement in a high school. I'm pretty sure it could be done, but one of the first questions that pops into my mind is: how do you make sure that all the different educational pathways you want to offer in a school end up providing roughly similar levels of education, or at least meet minimum educational standards? And how do you sustain excellence in that approach to education over many years?

I think you have to have strong, maintained commitment from teachers, students and parents to learn. Unfortunately, a lot of people think it's OK to just talk the talk and fake your way through. Or you have attitudes like the one prevalent amongst a lot of DC students, where it's not cool to be too smart or strive in education. I think that there is a "yeah, whatever" attitude amongst families whose kids attend DC schools. Yes, there were a lot sub-par teachers and inefficiency in the DC school system before Michelle Rhee stepped in, but I don't think that enough parents showed the kids that education happens outside of school as well as inside of it, and that knowledge of the world around you, beyond your preferences, is self-improving and self-empowering. You can have the best teachers and facilities but if the kids don't have curiosity and respect for learning, you might as well be pushing rope. 

The DC school system is improving. In the 90s, teachers and staff were afraid for their physical safety. There was a sense of resignation amongst teachers that trying to get kids to a minimum standard of knowledge was a hopeless task. Poverty had much to do with those low expectations and levels of achievement. I'm sure people didn't see how a rigorous high school education was going to help kids in the future. I also don't think that large school systems work for K-12  kids: school becomes more about gaming bureaucracies  than reaching every child. 

Standardized tests in my opinion reveal the dysfunction of school systems and their struggle to create uniform levels of success. When such tests intrude too much on the educational calendar and flow of teaching, they become part of the problem. Standardized tests can be a coarse-grained metric for the relative success of a school system but they provide no answers about how to engage kids in learning or how to tailor different educational paths for different types of kids. 


"In Virginia they call them "pacing guides". Every state has guidelines regarding what students in each grade should be learning each day, each week, each month, etc."


I can only imagine those guidelines were thought up by school system administrators trying to cover their asses. It's always amazing that there are so many people telling teachers how to do their jobs, yet so few of those people actually have the guts to stand in front of a class and teach. Teaching high school kids is a hit-or-miss prospect, no matter how engaging the curriculum or effective the teacher. Some kids aren't ready or willing to learn in a high school setting and some are. I think that will always be the case. 

 aflanigan wrote: 
  Agreed, it just doesn't work.

 kcar wrote: 
I'm enjoying this conversation. I concur that self paced, potentially self guided instruction can work well for some people.

At the end of my career as a Physics student at WPI I was a consultant/monitor in what they called the "IPI" lab (for individually paced instruction). It was basically what you're talking about. Packaged modules on basic Newtonian physics. A student could come and review the material at their convenience, ask me or other consultants questions, and get an exam from us to take and get graded on the spot.

 The problem is, as the article/op ed I linked makes clear (and as anyone who has been paying attention to education reform in K-12 the last few decades could tell you), public education curriculum has increasingly been based on a one size fits all model. Getting schools, particularly struggling ones, to move away from that model is an uphill battle, to put it mildly. In Virginia they call them "pacing guides". Every state has guidelines regarding what students in each grade should be learning each day, each week, each month, etc. It's sort of like a scene from a dystopian novel, such as the scene from A Wrinkle in Time where children bounce balls and skip rope in unison.

Standardization of curriculum and educational method is anathema to genuine educational improvement, and high stakes testing has only reinforced the artificial uniformity and placed meaningful, substantive improvement (i.e. other than test scores rising) further out of reach. Like Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, for example, education experts know that every child is unique, has different approaches to learning about the world around them, different potentialities, and different schedules for achieving milestones in emotional, intellectual, and spatial intelligence and development. But the ones who realize how difficult improving schools and education for all children is to accomplish are drowned out by pitch men/women pushing the latest educational panacea. 

 aflanigan wrote: 
Yes, I've met psychometricians and other people in the field (statisticians, teachers, counselors, etc.) who lament that, but they keep trying.  It may seem futile but people have to try - even if it's only little steps.

 Proclivities wrote: 
One of the glaring flaws in the use of high stakes educational testing as we do, as any psychometrician will tell you, is that they are almost always being used these days for two different purposes: To judge student learning, and to judge school quality. It's like using a yardstick to measure the size of an atom, and to measure the distance between planets.

 aflanigan wrote: 
Yes, "item writing" is often be done by part-time or temp employees like teachers, etc. but the "subject matter experts" in many states are DOE employees - often psychometricians, as well as those who work for the different testing companies.  You're right that most tests are designed to rank and sort students, specifically multiple-choice "bubble" tests, and little can be validated or specifically measured from multiple-choice responses (though computer-adaptive, multiple choice questions can be more informative).  Many states are working more towards testing with more "constructed response" items, which have more detailed rubrics to measure student responses with than the old Stanford 9 models, and also works towards identifying strengths or weaknesses - obviously, it's all got a long way to go and the arbitrariness of it is pretty disenchanting.  Still, it's up to each state how much they want to invest in testing, some may just buy "off-the-shelf" tests from Pearson or whomever.  I'm not sure how many states or districts actually base graduation from one grade to another solely on results of standardized tests (EOGs, etc.), but it's probably not very common, especially since those scores are generally not available until the end of the following summer.  Ultimately teachers make those decisions with counselors, based on the student's progress and performance during the year.  Schools and districts are generally more worried about test results than most students are.

 Proclivities wrote: 
Actually question writing, I'd be willing to bet, is never done by state level officials.

Setting educational standards is done by committees of subject matter experts. They produce broad, shallow standards which the state Dept. of eds sign off on. No one wants their subject to be deemed less important so they load them up with lots of stuff that has little use for the average adult.

Question writing is done by part timers, often teachers, that work as contractors for the testing companies and get paid per question. They spend a weekend making a little extra dough by writing questions based on a fairly rigid framework dictated by the testing companies. The purpose of these questions is the same as it has been since standardized tests like the Stanford 9 were first created: They are designed to rank and sort students along a curve. They throw out questions that either too few or too many students get correct when the items are "test driven", so to speak, to see if they're suitable. These types of multiple choice tests are never validated or shown to be reliable, i.e. the test makers do not establish that the tests actually measure what they claim to measure (mastery of a subject by a particular student, for example). They're basically designed to rank and sort students into "winners" (who get to progress to the next grade) and "losers" (who get summer school, repeat a grade). 

 kcar wrote: 
In many states, their standardized tests are largely designed and composed by educators and people in government (ie: state Departments of Education), within that state.  Of course, anything can be used to shift blame, especially if it's shifted by an elected official who is taking heat for unsatisfactory performance.

 kcar wrote: 
It's also very lucrative for education corporations such as Pearson, McGraw Hill, etc. that are either owned by or run by friends/relatives of the politicians who have been pushing the high stakes testing reform the past couple of decades, or else find ways to funnel money to their campaigns/lobby them.