testing

Diane Ravitch on test scores and family wealth

 

Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education who actually has some insight into what works and doesn’t work in education, puts standardized testing clearly into the doesn’t-work category.

She reemphasized that fact last night at Baylor University in a speech in which she, among other things, noted that standardized tests measure the “family wealth index” of a child, not his or her knowledge or ability to learn.

You can read a fuller account of her speech in the Waco newspaper story linked below.

Low-income children generally turn in lower scores on standardized tests, and Ravitch isn’t the only person of note who knows this. So do teachers, principals and superintendents.

And, so do most legislators, at least those who actually pay attention to test scores. Yet, the majority of Texas lawmakers not only continue to under-fund education, they also under-fund programs, such as health care, that could help improve the educational prospects for thousands of school children.

“The test scores of 15-year-olds indicate nothing about the future performance of our country, nothing at all,” Ravitch said.

Legislative neglect, however, says a lot about the future performance of Texas.

http://www.wacotrib.com/news/education/baylor-education-speaker-bemoans-emphasis-on-standardized-tests/article_cbbcace4-61b5-58ae-87de-087b442a03dc.html

When a perfect test score hurts a teacher

 

The absurdity (and that is putting it mildly) of using computerized interpretations of student test scores to evaluate teachers is on display once again, this time in New York, where a suit brought by a veteran, highly regarded teacher against New York state education officials was scheduled to be argued this week before the state’s Supreme Court in Albany.

Sheri G. Lederman, a fourth-grade teacher in the Great Neck public school district, is a highly regarded educator whose students consistently score higher than the statewide average on standardized math and English Language Arts tests. Yet, she has run afoul of the value-added, or VAM, model, a concept that has been repeatedly trashed by educational experts but which New York persists in using to help evaluate its teachers.

The Washington Post story, linked at the end of this post, presents a good account of the lawsuit and the problems with VAM. The article is long, so here are some highlights (or lowlights):

# Lederman’s record is “flawless,” according to her superintendent. But a complex computer program used to measure and adjust student test scores for various factors determined that she was “ineffective” in promoting student growth. Her attorney called the process “a statistical black box which no rational fact finder could see as fair, accurate or reliable.”

# A teacher in Florida, which also uses VAM, saw his evaluation hurt because a computer ruled that his four top-scoring students – to demonstrate “progress” – had to score higher than the maximum number of points that could be earned on an exam. One of his sixth-grade students, for example, had a computer-predicted score of 286.34 on the exam. In reality, the highest score the student could earn on that particular test was 283. She scored a 283, a perfect score but not good enough for the VAM computer, which counted it as a negative toward the teacher’s evaluation. (Sounds like something from the “Twilight Zone.”)

# Because high-stakes tests were administered only in math and English language arts, an art teacher in New York City was evaluated on his students’ math test scores and saw his evaluation drop from “effective” to “developing.”

And, don’t forget, taxpayers are spending millions of dollars on this nonsense, dollars that should be spent directly on the classroom.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/08/09/master-teacher-suing-new-york-state-over-ineffective-rating-is-going-to-court/?tid=pm_local_pop_b

 

 

Wondering what teachers think about STAAR testing

 

Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, a Republican member of the State Board of Education from Dallas, is wondering what, if anything, the board can do to improve STAAR test scores.

My immediate response would be for the conservatives on the board to stop rewriting history or ignoring science the next time the board reviews a set of textbooks or revises curriculum. But Miller had another idea – form a committee of teachers to discuss the problem, The Dallas Morning News reported. Teachers are the real education experts, after all, and they have to administer the tests and prepare students for them.

Perhaps Miller has heard the growing roar from parents, Republicans and Democrats alike, against standardized testing. Unfortunately, though, many of Miller’s Republican colleagues in state government – particularly the lieutenant governor and the state Senate majority – probably would consider her idea more heretical than anything else.

In their view, teachers are for campaign photo-ops. When they are looking for information about educational policy, they are more likely to turn to the pseudo, self-styled “experts,” privateers seeking to rake off tax dollars for vouchers or some other privatization scheme. Most of these “experts” haven’t set foot in a classroom in years.

So, I give Miller credit for acknowledging the real expertise of teachers, even though there isn’t much the State Board of Education can do about testing policy. That’s primarily a job for the Legislature.

I can’t speak for every teacher, but I suspect that, given the chance to tell the State Board of Education or the Legislature what to do about STAAR test scores, many teachers would tell officials to dump the STAAR and quit using standardized tests to punish students, teachers and campuses.

Here is a workable alternative. The state should replace the STAAR with a diagnostic test, administered at the beginning of the school year, to help teachers learn their students’ strengths and weaknesses, and then get out of the way. Leave teachers alone to do what they do best – teach. And, I don’t mean teach to a test. I mean help their students learn how to learn and experience the sense of real accomplishment that comes with that.

http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2015/05/dallas-state-education-board-member-wants-the-board-to-talk-about-flat-staar-scores-in-july.html/

 

 

 

Texas students don’t need another test

 

Although state Rep. Bill Zedler seems to be trying to swim upstream against a pretty strong current of public opinion, he has filed a bill to require Texas students to pass a civics test in order to receive a high school diploma. I know. Another  test. Just what we don’t want, right?

Remember, two years ago the Legislature, rather than be stampeded out of town by outraged parents, reduced from 15 to five the number of end-of-course exams high school students already have to pass to graduate.  And, many of those same parents wouldn’t take kindly to seeing the number begin to creep back up. They prefer, instead, more reductions in testing, beginning with grade school.

So, what does Zedler, an ultraconservative from Arlington, have in mind? Maybe he thinks a new civics test would encourage more students to participate in politics or, at least, vote. I doubt that. Another test would just annoy more kids and their parents, encourage more teaching to the test and steal even more valuable learning time from classrooms. Besides, students in Texas public schools already have completed many lessons and tests in U.S. and Texas government and history, from elementary school through high school.

Zedler’s bill (HB829) would require the civics test to be “composed of all or a portion of the questions on the civics test administered by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services as part of the naturalization process under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.”

By copying the federal citizenship naturalization test, Zedler’s proposal could save taxpayers the multi-million-dollar cost of hiring a private contractor to develop a new test. Many students who would be tested, of course, would be immigrants.

Interestingly, according to a recent article in the Washington Post, more than 97 percent of immigrants applying for citizenship pass the Naturalization Civics Test. That suggests many immigrants know more about how our government is supposed to work than many native-born Texans do. But that, still, is no reason to increase an already excessive test burden on Texas students.