Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), standardized test scores are the indicator used to hold schools and school districts accountable for student achievement. Each state is responsible for constructing an accountability system, attaching consequences—or stakes—for student performance. The theory of action implied by this accountability program is that the pressure of high-stakes testing will increase student achievement. But this study finds that pressure created by high-stakes testing has had almost no important influence on student academic performance.
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
Thomas Lux
For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall
into swimming pools,
these otherwise bright and scary arachnids.
They can swim a little, but not for long
and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown—but if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving the death of ugly and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if
you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.
And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors
and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up
again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld
of your socks, and that even—
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams—
they may tell the others
in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s
that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.
The Center on Education Policy report ["Do you know the latest good news about education"] cites several overlooked facts that appear to me to be uncontested:
* More Americans are completing high school or college. The percentage of Americans 25 or older who completed high school increased from 74 percent in 1985 to 84 percent in 2002. The portion of people in that age group who completed college rose from 19 to 27 percent in the same period. Much attention has been paid recently to the fact that other developed countries have caught up with the United States in college completion, but we should not begrudge them their own good news. At least we have improved.
* More children are getting more hours of early education. Full-day kindergarten, for instance, is serving more than 60 percent of children of kindergarten age, compared to less than a third in 1983.
* Broadly speaking, the achievement gap is narrowing. "On long-term NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] trend assessments in math and reading, test score gaps between white and minority students have narrowed to the smallest margins in three decades," said the center's summary of the report.
* Average SAT scores are going up, even as more students take the test. The math average of 518 for members of the class of 2004 is 14 points higher than 1994 and 21 points higher than 1984. That class's verbal score of 508 is 9 points higher than 1994 and 4 points higher than 1984, after a decline in scores that inspired much of the public school restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s.
Too difficult? That's rich.
Parents, students and gluttons for standardized tests will be able to take a sample version of Florida's high school graduation test when it is released online Wednesday.
The Florida Department of Education will post the 10th-grade version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test on its Web site, www.fldoe.org. The version is an actual test that was administered in Spring 2004.
Previously, only a small number of questions were publicly released.
Education Commissioner John Winn said the sample test is intended to help students and families become comfortable with the look, feel and experience of the FCAT.
...Winn also said he expects critics of the FCAT to complain about questions that may seem too difficult. (emphasis mine)
Granholm calls for statewide mandatory curriculum
Associated Press
LANSING -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm called Friday for a mandatory statewide curriculum for Michigan's high school students.
It's another step toward possibly changing the state's mandatory requirements for high school graduates. The only current state requirement is a civics class, with the rest of the standards set by local school boards.
"With Michigan's economic future on the line, we can't afford to have our 500 local school districts marching in different directions," Granholm said in her weekly radio address. "Instead, we need a high standards, mandatory curriculum to get all our students on the road to higher education and a good paying job."
School districts across the state are sending out the one-page STAR Student Report to the homes of the state's estimated 6 million public school students. Educators see the reports, all of which should be mailed by the end of this month, as a road map to improving each student's performance.
[...]
The multicolored report, printed on both sides of a single sheet of paper, includes a bar graph indicating a child's score on each subject-related test taken - English language arts, math, science and history-social science - and where that score falls on the proficiency scale: far below basic, below basic, basic, proficiency and advanced.
The state's goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced in all subjects.
On the back page, each subject is broken down, with the percent of questions answered correctly by a child compared to the percent correct of students statewide. The percentages listed by each subject area give parents and teachers a chance to tailor their efforts to help the child.
Two schools in England were the focus for this research. In one, the teachers taught mathematics using whole-class teaching and textbooks, and the students were tested frequently. The students were taught in tracked groups, standards of discipline were high, and the students worked hard. The second school was chosen because its approach to mathematics teaching was completely different. Students there worked on open-ended projects in heterogeneous groups, teachers used a variety of methods, and discipline was extremely relaxed. Over a three-year period, I monitored groups of students at both schools, from the age of 13 to age 16. I watched more than 100 lessons at each school, interviewed the students, gave out questionnaires, conducted various assessments of the students' mathematical knowledge, and analyzed their responses to Britain's national school-leaving examination in mathematics.
At the beginning of the research period, the students at the two schools had experienced the same mathematical approaches and, at that time, they demonstrated the same levels of mathematical attainment on a range of tests. There also were no differences in sex, ethnicity, or social class between the two groups. At the end of the three-year period, the students had developed in very different ways. One of the results of these differences was that students at the second school--what I will call the project school, as opposed to the textbook school--attained significantly higher grades on the national exam. This was not because these students knew more mathematics, but because they had developed a different form of knowledge.
At the textbook school, the students were motivated and worked hard, they learned all the mathematical procedures and rules they were given, and they performed well on short, closed tests. But various forms of evidence showed that these students had developed an inert, procedural knowledge that they were rarely able to use in anything other than textbook and test situations. In applied assessments, many were unable to perceive the relevance of the mathematics they had learned and so could not make use of it. Even when they could see the links between their textbook work and more-applied tasks, they were unable to adapt the procedures they had learned to fit the situations in which they were working.
The students themselves were aware of this problem, as the following description by one student of her experience of the national exam shows: "Some bits I did recognize, but I didn't understand how to do them, I didn't know how to apply the methods properly."
In real-world situations, these students were disabled in two ways. Not only were they unable to use the math they had learned because they could not adapt it to fit unfamiliar situations, but they also could not see the relevance of this acquired math knowledge from school for situations outside the classroom. "When I'm out of here," said another student, "the math from school is nothing to do with it, to tell you the truth. Most of the things we've learned in school we would never use anywhere."
Students from this school reported that they could see mathematics all around them, in the workplace and in everyday life, but they could not see any connection between their school math and the math they encountered in real situations. Their traditional, class-taught mathematics instruction had focused on formalized rules and procedures, and this approach had not given them access to depth of mathematical understanding. As a result, they believed that school mathematical procedures were a specialized type of school code--useful only in classrooms. The students thought that success in math involved learning, rehearsing, and memorizing standard rules and procedures. They did not regard mathematics to be a thinking subject. As one girl put it, "In math you have to remember; in other subjects you can think about it."
The math teaching at this textbook school was not unusual. Teachers there were committed and hard-working, and they taught the students different mathematical procedures in a clear and straightforward way. Their students were relatively capable on narrow mathematical tests, but this capability did not transfer to open, applied, or real-world situations. The form of knowledge they had developed was remarkably ineffective. At the project school, the situation was very different. And the students' significantly higher grades on the national exit exam were only a small indication of their mathematical competence and confidence.
The project school's students and teachers were relaxed about work. Students were not introduced to any standard rules or procedures (until a few weeks before the examinations), and they did not work through textbooks of any kind. Despite the fact that these students were not particularly work-oriented, however, they attained higher grades than the hard-working students at the textbook school on a range of different problems and applied assessments. At both schools, students had similar grades on short written tests taken immediately after finishing work. But students at the textbook school soon forgot what they had learned. The project students did not. The important difference between the environments of the two schools that caused this difference in retention was not related to standards of teaching but to different approaches, in particular the requirement that the students at the project-based school work on a variety of mathematical tasks and think for themselves.
When I asked students at the two schools whether mathematics was more about thinking or memorizing, 64 percent of the textbook students chose memorizing, compared with only 35 percent of the project-based students. The students at the project school were less concerned about memorizing rules and procedures, because they knew they could think about different situations and adapt what they had learned to fit new and demanding problems. On the national examination, three times as many students from the heterogeneous groups in the project school as those in the tracked groups in the textbook school attained the highest possible grade. The project approach was also more equitable, with girls and boys attaining the different grades in equal proportions.
It would be easy to dismiss the results of this study because it was focused on only two schools, but the textbook school was not unusual in the way its teachers taught mathematics. And the in-depth nature of the study meant that it was possible to consider and isolate the reasons why students responded to this approach in the way that they did. The differences in the performance of the students at the two schools did not spring from "bad'' teaching at the textbook school, but from the limitations of drawing upon only one teaching method. To me, it does not make any sense to set any one particular teaching method against another and argue about which one is best. Different teaching methods do different things. We may as well argue that a hammer is better than a drill. Part of the success of the project school came from the range of different methods its teachers employed and the different activities students worked on.
The way America’s Choice works is that schools adopt the NCEE’s “New Standards” – which are aligned with but more rigorous than Minnesota standards -- and assign at least two coaches, a design coach and a literacy coach, to work with teachers on organizing their classrooms. America’s Choice classrooms are built on a workshop model, in which teachers present ten minute, very focused, mini-lessons and then lead students in independent and group work and a classroom-wide sharing of results, all geared to the standards.
Piaget believed that people are driven to organize their [mental] schemes in order to achieve the best possible adaptation to their environment. He called this process equilibration. But what motivates people's drive toward equilibration? It is a state of disequilibrium, or a perceived discrepancy between an existing scheme and something new. In other words, when people encounter something that is inconsistent with or contradicts what they already know or believe, this experience produces a disequilibrium that they are driven to eliminate.
[...]
Meaningful learning, then, occurs when people create new ideas, or knowledge (rules and hypotheses that explain things), from existing information (for example, facts, concepts and procedures). [emphasis mine] To solve a problem, we have to search our memory for information that can be used to fashion a solution. Using information can mean experimenting, questioning, reflecting, discovering, inventing, and discussing. This process of creating knowledge to solve a problem and eliminate a disequilibration is referred to by Piagetian psychologists and educators as constructivism.
[G]lobal transformations of the objects of perception, and of the very intelligence which makes them, gradually denote the existence of a sort of law of evolution which can be phrased as follows: assimilation [interpreting an experience so that it fits an existing scheme] and accommodation [changing an existing scheme to incorporate the experience] proceed from a state of chaotic undifferentiation to a state of differentiation with correlative coordination.
...[S]tarting last year, an attempt to revamp the middle school/junior high instructional model with an approach called "disciplinary literacy" was rolled out at four schools. This year, it will be instituted at all eight, plus the K-8 Monroe Community School.
The idea of disciplinary literacy is to train students to approach science, math, English and history "as a practitioner, rather than studying it," said Mike McCollor, principal at Washington, the first school to get the new program this year.
In science, for example, that might mean students collect leaves and start classifying them themselves rather than reading about taxonomy in a text and getting a lecture about it, said Davis, a coach brought in to help science teacher Sarah Weaver run her class according to the new model.
"(It's) doing science but learning content," Davis said.
As seventh-grader Brian King summarized it after hearing the science teachers introduce the concept: "They don't tell you, they let you figure it out."
English teacher Suzanne Myhre said she intends to have her students form strong opinions on the works they'll be reading as a way of deepening their understanding.
Students in Tara Brash's math class were asked Tuesday to figure out how to form eight triangles out of six toothpicks.
They were given some time to work on their own, but were soon grouped with others to share their ideas.
"In math, there is not always one single correct answer," Brash told the students.
Group work is a hallmark of the new approach, as is the posting of student work and ideas.
In Courtney Major's history class later in the day, student responses to the questions "What is history?" and "Why study history?" were recorded on big pieces of newsprint taped to the wall at the front of the classroom.
The most important single message of modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead, these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levls of reading, mathematics, and other branches of learning -- when learning is proceeding well. In fact, the term "higher order" skills is probably itself fundamentally misleading, for it suggests that another set of skills, presumably called "lower order," needs to come first. This assumption -- that there is a sequence from lower level activities that do not require much independent thinking or judgment to higher level ones that do -- colors much educational theory and practice. Implicitly at least, it justifies long years of drill on the "basics" before thinking and problem solving are demanded. Cognitive research on the nature of basic skills such as reading and mathematics provides a fundamental challenge to this assumption.
Indeed, research suggests that failure to cultivate aspects of thinking such as those listed in our working definition of high order skills [nonalgorithmic, complex, yielding multiple solutions, involving nuanced judgment, uncertainty, imposing meaning, etc.] may be a source of major learning difficulties even in elementary school.
[...]
Cognitive theory... suggests that processes traditionally reserved for advanced students -- that is, for a minority who have developed skill and taste for interpretive mental work -- might be taught to all readers, including young children and, perhaps especially, those who learn with difficulty. Cognitive research suggests that these processes are what we mean by reading comprehension. Not to teach them is to ignore the most important aspects of reading.
Nearly one-third of California public schools won praise today for meeting state achievement goals on test scores even while they were branded as failures for missing a federal gauge of success...What we have here is a case of a growth model going up against a status model. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, as I spent many weeks working on it during my EdTrust internship. Simply put, a growth model looks at a student or group of students' progress over time. A status model just checks to see if student achievement is above or below a certain line.
Campus leaders were left to decipher the differences between California's Academic Performance Index, which rewards incremental test score gains, and the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to clear a rigid achievement bar that rises regularly...
State education officials said they were pleased that 81% of the schools had met their state improvement targets, up from 64% last year.
But the officials were not happy about the results under the federal system: nearly 2,300 schools that met their state targets still fell short of the No Child Left Behind goal. More than 5,100 California schools met their federal goals.
That's because the federal bar rose for the first time this year, leaving many campuses unable to reach it.
To pass the federal bar this year, elementary schools and middle schools had to raise at least 24% of their students to the proficient level in English-language arts, up from nearly 14% last year.
