Dear 8th Grader: You Have a 3% Chance of Getting Ready for College

by Lisa Hansel
April 2nd, 2013

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Posted in accountability, Literacy, Research and Reports | 3 Comments »

What are the odds that an eighth grader in a high-poverty school who is far behind academically will catch up? You know the odds are low, but single-digit low? According to research from ACT, catching up in high school is rare—if by “catching up” we mean getting poorly prepared eighth graders ready for college by twelfth grade. An eighth grader in a high-poverty school who is far from meeting ACT’s college readiness benchmarks has just a 6% chance of catching up in reading—in science and mathematics, that student has a mere 3% chance. What about catching up before high school? Not likely. A fourth grader in a high-poverty school who is far behind has just a 7% chance of catching up in reading by eighth grade and an 8% chance in mathematics.

For some readers, the obvious conclusion is that the schools need to get better at closing the gap. But the ACT’s report also has findings for all schools, the top 10% of all schools, the top 10% of low-poverty schools, and the top 10% of high-poverty schools. All of the results on catching up are depressing.

Once gaps exist, we certainly have to do everything we can to close them. At the same time, we must start earlier to prevent these enormous gaps from opening up. The path to college begins in preschool.

And, by the way, after preschool, children should go to kindergarten. Why do I state the obvious? While many of us have been chattering about Obama’s universal preschool plan, ECS has just reminded us that some kids do not have access to kindergarten. Across states, access to high-quality kindergarten is so unequal that it “perpetuates, if not exacerbates, the achievement gap.” While 15 states require children to attend kindergarten, five states do not even require school districts to offer kindergarten. (Those five are Alaska, Idaho, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Four of them have adopted the Common Core State Standards, which begin in kindergarten. Are you scratching your head yet?)

Ultimately, the ECS report reminds us that we have a long, long way to go in developing a strong system of early childhood education in this country.

Silver lining time: The one benefit of having waited so long to get serious about early learning is that we have an enormous body of research to draw from. We have so much research that sorting through it is a challenge. For that, I’m turning to an unsung hero of the school improvement world: Chrys Dougherty. He is a senior research scientist with ACT and a former teacher. He knows the education and cognitive science research—and he gets kids and classrooms.

ACT recently published Dougherty’s College and Career Readiness: The Importance of Early Learning. Everyone involved in early childhood and early grades education should read it. For that matter, everyone interested in school improvement and closing the achievement gap should read it.

I’m assuming that you are going to read it—it’s only 8 pages! So, instead of offering a CliffsNotes version, I’m providing my favorite parts (you’ll have to go to the report for the endnotes):

Students who do not have a good start usually do not thrive later on. That is due not only to the fact that students in stressful environments with limited learning opportunities often remain in those environments, but also because early learning itself facilitates later learning—students who already know more about a topic often have an easier time learning additional information on the same topic, and early exposure to knowledge can stimulate students to want to learn more….

Educators have long emphasized the importance of learning to read well in the early grades, a belief supported by longitudinal research. Reading consists of two abilities: the ability to identify the words on the page (decoding), and the ability to understand the words once they are identified (comprehension)…. Ensuring that students learn to decode well depends, among other things, on using activities and methods in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade that develop children’s phonological (sound) awareness and their knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds. Meanwhile, children’s comprehension can be developed in the early grades by reading aloud to them from books that develop their knowledge and vocabulary….

One study found that kindergarteners’ general knowledge of the world was a better predictor of those students’ eighth-grade reading ability than were early reading skills. This is consistent with research showing that reading comprehension, particularly in the upper grades, depends heavily on students’ vocabulary and background knowledge….

Accountability systems have been designed to create a sense of urgency about improving test scores. However, this has often had the undesirable effect of shortening educators’ time horizons so that they emphasize changes aimed at improving accountability ratings over the short run. These changes can include narrowing the curriculum to deemphasize subjects not tested in the current grade, and spending inordinate amounts of time coaching students on how to answer sample test questions.

By contrast, many steps to improve academic learning and behaviors take time to bear fruit and may not immediately result in higher test scores. For example, implementing an excellent kindergarten and first-grade reading, mathematics, science, social studies, or fine arts program will not immediately affect test results in the older grades. Neither will field trips to science and art museums, nature areas, and historical sites—all of which develop knowledge of the world. Accountability incentives should be modified to recognize efforts that increase student learning over the longer run and promote learning in grades and subject areas not covered on state tests.

If we actually followed Dougherty’s advice, our students would have a great chance of getting ready for college.

 

Poles Apart

by Robert Pondiscio
August 29th, 2012

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Posted in Education News | 8 Comments »

“Are we hopelessly polarized, or are we suffering from fatigue?” legendary PBS education correspondent John Merrow asks in a thoughtful blog post. “I think many of us are just tired, worn out from listening to the rants and negativity.”

What he said.

To his credit, Merrow is saying out loud what a lots of folks in the education blogosphere have been saying privately for a while now.  “Debate” has become trench warfare, with the usual suspects saying the usual things, over and over, louder and louder.  They’re merely getting more shrill and strident.  It’s getting tedious out there.  Hearts and minds are not being won.

Merrow’s no fool or squishy appeaser pleading, can’t we just get along?  “Sometimes one position is correct, or largely correct. Sometimes people’s strongly held convictions are just plain wrong,” he writes.

Merrow lists several ways in which education debate is polarized: accountability, the achievement gap, school management and structures, assessment, technology, and our expectations for what we should expect of schools and teachers. Are we also polarized about the purposes of public education? Here Merrow hits his stride:  “The goal of school is to help grow American citizens. Four key words: help, grow, American, citizen.  Think about those words,” he writes

“Help: Schools are junior partners in education. They are to help families, the principal educators.

“Grow: It’s a process, sometimes two steps forward, one back. Education is akin to a family business, not a publicly traded stock company that lives and dies by quarterly reports.

“American: E Pluribus Unum. We are Americans, first and foremost.

“Citizen: Let’s put some flesh on that term. What do we want our children to be as adults? Good parents and neighbors, thoughtful voters, reliable workers? What else?”

“We need to get beyond polarization and figure out what we agree on,” Merrow writes.  Wise and heartfelt words from one of education’s elder statesmen.

The Inspector Will See You Now

by Robert Pondiscio
April 11th, 2012

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Posted in accountability, Education Practice | 20 Comments »

If we look at more than just test scores to determine teacher effectiveness, shouldn’t we do the same for schools, asks Fordham’s Mike Petrilli.  The best accountability systems, he argues, “take various data points and turn them into user-friendly letter grades, easily understandable by educators, parents, and taxpayers alike.”  Petrilli wants to go one step further adding a human element to accountability in the form of “school inspectors” modeled on Great Britain’s inspectorate system.

Under Petrilli’s proposal, a group of inspectors would visit a school at least once per year. “They would mostly look for two things,” he writes.

  1. Evidence that the school is achieving important outcomes that may not be captured by the state accountability system. For example, the school’s administrators might show them test score data from a computer adaptive exam like NWEA’s that demonstrates progress for individual kids (especially those well above or below grade level) that isn’t picked up by the less-sensitive state test. Or perhaps a high school has compelling data about its graduates’ college matriculation and graduation rates that put its mediocre test scores in a different light.
  2. Indications that the school’s culture and instructional program are inculcating valuable attributes in their students. This is to guard against the “testing factory” phenomenon. Is the school offering a well-balanced curriculum (and extra-curriculars), or engaging in test-prep for weeks on end? Is it focused on teaching “non-cognitive” skills and attributes, such leadership, perseverance, and teamwork? Character traits like empathy, honesty, and courage?

Petrilli’s first point is deeper data that probably doesn’t require on-site inspections; the second is more interesting.  I’m all for a more nuanced view of school performance.  If you’ve been in a school lately and haven’t come away dispirited by the sheer volume of test-prep and frustrated by curriculum narrowing, you’re likely engaged in a form a denial or willful ignorance.  Anything that broadens the lens is a step in the right direction.

I certainly agree that you can tell a lot about a school by walking its halls and sitting in its classrooms.  The trouble is that the higher the stakes, the less likely you are to see—or to be allowed to see—the school as it actually is, warts and all.  I’m reminded of the spitting and polishing we used to do in my school when we were having a Superintendent’s walk-through or preparing for our “quality review.”  Suddenly fresh student work bloomed on every bulletin board.  Daily agendas were posted.  Aims and standards in child-friendly language were omnipresent on the blackboard.  Records and planbooks spruced up and made ready for review.  Amazing, engaging lessons were planned and delivered.  No boxed macaroni and cheese when company’s coming.   Dirty dishes went into the oven and dust bunnies were swept under the rug moments before guests arrive.

In short, it’s not hard to master the art of displaying “visible evidence” of teaching and learning, while the underlying practices remain disappointing.  If you think that test prep is a waste of time, try getting your lesson plans, student data, running records and myriad other bits of housekeeping presentation-ready for the Inspectorate.  Is this really what we want teachers to focus their energies on?

Some years ago, I proposed a system of random testing whereby the students to be tested, testing dates, grade levels and subject matter was a matter of chance.  The only way to perform well under such an accountability system would be to actually teach all of the students well in all subjects.  That still strikes me as the right impulse.  Any accountability measure with stakes attached to it will inevitably come to dominate classroom practice.  It’s simply human nature to want to put your best foot forward when your reputation or your job is on the line.  This is fairly obvious.  The most likely response to the accountability mechanism should be precisely the practice you want to see in classrooms.  Anything else misses the mark.

A good inspection system can add significant value.  A thoughtful review diligently considered can lead to constructive suggestions and improved outcomes.  It needn’t be a “gotcha” game.  But the same is true of pure test-driven accountability.  In theory, the best outcomes should come from a well-rounded curriculum, effectively implemented by well-trained teachers.  It just hasn’t seemed to work out that way in practice.

Storylines

by Robert Pondiscio
February 10th, 2012

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Posted in accountability, Educational Policy | 20 Comments »

“President Obama and Secretary Duncan pushed the reform envelope as far as they could be expected with these waivers….We remain skeptical, however, of the storyline that says we are a nation filled with states chomping at the bit to do the right thing for children but which are hamstrung from doing so by federal bureaucrats and paperwork.” — Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform on states receiving waivers from compliance with No Child Left Behind (via This Week in Education)

I remain equally skeptical of the storyline that says schools are dysfunctional purely as a result of adult indifference or self-interest.

I see no reason to believe that failing schools are filled with tenured layabouts refusing to teach and not getting fired.  In my experience, such schools are mainly filled with decent people trying their best and failing. And with depressing regularity, they are failing despite doing exactly what they were trained to do–even because they are doing exactly what they were trained to do.

The entire edifice of accountability assumes that American education is essentially a sound product, but it’s delivered poorly. I see no evidence to suggest this is true. I see much evidence to suggest it’s not.

Student Achievement, Poverty and “Toxic Stress”

by Robert Pondiscio
January 4th, 2012

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Posted in accountability, Education News, Education Practice, Education Theory, Research and Reports, Teaching | 30 Comments »

It’s a safe bet that not many teachers are avid readers of the medical journal Pediatrics.  But a report that appeared in the publication last week deserves to be read and understood deeply by everyone in education.  It has the potential to transform the way we think and speak about children who grow up in poverty–and education as a means of addressing its worst effects.

The report links “toxic stress” in early childhood to a host of bad life outcomes including poor mental and physical health, and cognitive impairment.  The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), in an accompanying policy statement, calls on its members to “catalyze fundamental change in early childhood policy and services” in response.

The term “toxic stress” is not a familiar one in education circles, but it should be.  The Harvard Center on the Developing Child describes a toxic stress response as occurring “when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support.”  Think of it as one plus one equals negative two:  something bad happens to a child, and there’s no positive adult response to mitigate the trauma.  The lack of adult support is what makes stress, which is largely unavoidable, “toxic” to a child.  Crucially, repeated or prolonged activation of a child’s stress response system “can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years,” notes the Center’s website.

This cannot be dismissed as pseudoscience or a mere hypothesis.  The report and policy statement notes a “strong scientific consensus” and a growing body of research “in a wide range of biological, behavioral, and social sciences,” on “how early environmental influences (the ecology) and genetic predispositions (the biologic program) affect learning capacities, adaptive behaviors, lifelong physical and mental health, and adult productivity.”

“Game changer” is a trite and overused phrase, but it applies here.  The report should have a profound impact on educators and education policymakers.  At the very least, understanding the language and concept of exposure to toxic stress should inform the increasingly acrimonious, dead-end debate about accountability and resources aimed at the lowest-performing schools and students.

On the one hand, those who insist that improving educational outcomes must be viewed within a broader context of health care, community resources and poverty can claim a victory here and a potential ally in the AAP.  Interventions must start from Day One.  Not Day One of school, Day One of life.  Kindergarten is too late.  Those who favor quality preschool programs have crucial evidence to support their case.  The story in four words:  Geoffrey Canada is right.

But it is equally clear (or should be) that low-income status is not synonymous with toxic stress. Even the worst schools and poorest neighborhoods have a significant number of children from stable homes with engaged, caring adults, who are able to provide the consistency and nurturing necessary to buffer the negative effects of even the most traumatic stressors.  “Research shows that, even under stressful conditions, supportive, responsive relationships with caring adults as early in life as possible can prevent or reverse the damaging effects of toxic stress response,” according to the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.

To this end, no less than pediatricians, schools and teachers–especially in early childhood– have an essential role to play.  In the absence of nurturing relationships at home, children may be able to find the support they need within the educational environment.  According to Rebecca Schrag, Ph.D., psychologist at Healthy Steps at Montefiore Medical Center, supportive adult relationships “can no longer be considered the ‘touchy-feely’ domain of child psychologists alone.  Rather, there is hard science suggesting that they are perhaps the number one protective factor against the negative outcomes of a range of stressors.  The AAP has made a huge step forward in releasing its policy statement on toxic stress, and it would be truly wonderful if other professionals who work with children – educators, most notably – followed suit.”

In light of the important role of supportive adult relationships, the takeaway here is clearly not that exposure to toxic stress makes it impossible for schools to succeed with low-income children.  But it should make clearer that the bar is much, much higher for a significant number of kids who endure extreme levels of chaos and disruption in their lives, children whose brains – even by age 5 – show the deleterious effects of toxic stress exposure.  This does not mean we should throw up our hands and say, “let’s not waste time and money on poor kids.  It’s not going to work.”  But it certainly puts the “No Excuses” mindset at a disadvantage, particularly when most children only begin school in kindergarten.  Given the scientific consensus cited by the report, holding to the idea that schools or teachers should be able to reverse unilaterally the worst effects of toxic stress in all cases begins to sound ill-informed and hopelessly naïve.

At present, the standard reform recipe for improving educational outcomes for all children living in poverty is high expectations, improved teacher quality and muscular accountability.  For many low-income kids, perhaps even most, this may indeed be enough.  For others, more – much more – is clearly required.  It is critical that educators and policymakers begin to differentiate between the two.

Innovate or Imitate?

by Robert Pondiscio
December 6th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy | 24 Comments »

If education is a test, America might want to spend a little more time copying the answers the other countries are writing down on their papers.

Writing in at The Atlantic, Marc Tucker notes that despite spending “more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg” America continues to lag not just developed nations like Japan, Finland, Canada, “but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”

“You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.”

Tucker’s list of “unproven solutions” includes charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers’ unions, and basing teachers’ pay on how their students do on standardized tests. These strategies are “nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations,” he writes. “And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we’re not doing,” notes Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

“They develop world-class academic standards for their students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum. In the U.S., most states have recently adopted Common Core State Standards in English and math, which is a good start. But we still have a long way to go to build a coherent, powerful instructional system that all teachers can use throughout the whole curriculum.”

The top performers also raise entry standards for the teaching profession and insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach” and generally make teaching a high-status profession.

“The result is a virtuous cycle: teaching ranks as one of the most attractive professions, which means no teacher shortages and no need to waive high licensing standards. That translates into top-notch teaching forces and the world’s highest student achievement. All of this makes the teaching profession even more attractive, leading to higher salaries, even greater prestige, and even more professional autonomy. The end results are even better teachers and even higher student performance.”

The cycle in the U.S., Tucker notes, is the opposite of virtuous.  Teaching is a low-status profession, lacking in prestige and colleges of education set a low bar for admissions.  Salaries are low.  Teachers also have weak knowledge of their assigned subjects “and increasingly, they’re allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training,” he notes. “When we are short on teachers, we waive our already-low standards, something the high-performing countries would never dream of doing.”

The inevitable result is ever lower student achievement, which drives more attacks on teaching and stricter accountability, which Tucker wisely observes, makes it “even less likely that our best and brightest will become teachers.”

But hey, we can innovate and disrupt with the best of them!

The problem, Tucker concludes, is not a lack of innovation but a simple lack of what successful countries have: “a coherent, well-designed state systems of education that would allow us to scale up our many pockets of innovation and deliver a high-quality education to all our students.”

Education Week

by Guest Blogger
November 21st, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Teaching | 16 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

Last Friday, the Illinois State Board of Education proposed new rules that will link teacher performance to their students’ performance on assessments. Up to thirty percent of teacher evaluations will be based on how students perform on tests, and while I understand the value of student progress in evaluating teachers, it’s certainly not the main thing that determines success in education. My mind has been on assessments lately because I just came out of a week defined by what I initially labeled a colossal assessment failure. I gave unit tests to cap off a couple of weeks in Latin and English grammar, and things did not go well. My students failed, failed, failed, and as teachers are wont to do, I used the transitive property and concluded that I had failed, failed, failed.

I spent the following weekend going over the assessments, my preparation, my teaching, the students’ homework scores, and found that the week of failure was much more complicated than one faulty assessment or a failure to teach some critical aspect of the lesson. As I could not go back and re-do the previous month of teaching, I decided to move forward, and figure out how to turn failure in to a learning experience. Once some time had passed, and I’d gained the benefit of hindsight, I wrote about the solution I came up with in my blog, Coming of Age in the Middle . I wrote about my teaching methods, but mostly, I wrote about how I had managed to make it through the week without tucking my tail between my legs and quitting my job.

A writer friend of mine liked the post, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, my failure was in the Gray Lady herself. When K.J. Dell’Antonia wrote her piece on my blog, titled “What Good Teachers Do When Kids Fail,” in the New York Times’ parenting blog Motherlode , the comments fell into two distinct camps: Parents who wished their teachers had more time to address student failure and teachers who lamented that they had no time to address student failure. A few teachers wrote about the time they took for re-writes and remedy, but for the most part, the message from educators was one of regret and frustration with a testing-centric schedule that did not allow for reflection.

The solution I came up with for my students required humility on both sides of the classroom – I had to admit I had failed my students and my students had to admit that they had not held up their end of the pedagogical bargain – but mostly, it took time. Time that, according to the comments after the article, most teachers just don’t have. I handed out blank tests and asked the students re-take the assessment as an open book exercise. They were asked to work in pairs I had strategically assigned, and teach each other the material on the test. They were required to not only find the correct answer, but to show why all of the other answers were wrong. This process ate up two classes, and as I only see my Latin students twice a week, this one remedial exercise burned an entire week of the school year. Clearly, this is simply not an option in many classrooms. Maria, from Baltimore, MD, wrote:

“I am a public high school math teacher. It’s only November, and I’m already 10 days behind schedule in one class, 3 days behind in another. And this is without me taking any sick days, no snow days, just a few days away from class for . . . you guessed it, administering the No Child Left Behind tests. I would love to have students retake their tests and learn from mistakes, but thanks to NCLB, and curricula that are an inch deep and a mile wide, we need to press on to the next topic.”

Many comments stressed the vital role that failure plays in education. Dr. Kim, from Ithaca, NY wrote,

“We need to allow students opportunities to fail. Too often our kids are afraid of failure. If we don’t fail, we’re not pushing our limits–we’re not challenging ourselves. I have a friend who is an amazing skier who says “if you don’t fall, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.” This is true. Plus, we learn much more from failure. Our brains are programmed to remember those things with strong emotional attachments — positive or negative. Failures are memorable.”

I completely agree that some of the best lessons are learned from failure. Failure can shock a student out of complacency, particularly among those students who are smart enough to do well on a bare minimum of effort. Middle school is the ideal time for this time of shock; the stakes are still low(ish) and the potential for growth is huge. I’m not one for sports quotes, but in this case, baseball player and coach Vernon Law had it right. “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” It would have been much easier to teach the lessons first and give the test after, but in the end, I think the experience taught all of us a greater lesson. Everyone has to admit to failure – teacher and student. As a result of this failure, I grew as a teacher and they grew as students. Crossroads Academy was built on a core virtues curriculum as well as a core knowledge curriculum, so our journey through this week of failure became an important part of the students’ character education. That’s where commenter T. Zinner of Boston hits the nail on the head:

This article goes to the heart of our goal as parents and the ideal of teachers: creating individuals with strength of character. The happiest and most successful people seem to be the individuals who take their talents and face obstacles either directly with perseverance or creatively so that the obstacles are no longer viewed as challenges. This is the case for the most exceptional physicians I work with, the patients who live fully despite illness and friends and neighbors who create lives of joy and depth in the face of unexpected loss or change in circumstance.

That’s the kind of teaching I love to do, teaching that helps students become better people, teaching that takes into account the unpredictability inherent teaching adolescents.

But this sort of teaching is increasingly not what is valued today, and it’s certainly not what counts as quality teaching or a gauge of student progress. Failure makes people nervous because in order to find anything of value in the situation, everyone has to face their role in the failure. It would have been much easier for me to fail the students and move on, or curve the exam so much that the failure got lost in a sea of amended numbers. The grades would have looked good, the students would have felt good, and everyone would have been satisfied with my performance. But lurking under this neat and tidy appearance, my students would know. They would know they had not really learned the material, that I had swept something under the rug. Worse, I would know that somewhere down the line that gap in their education would come back to haunt them.

Assessments are often blunt instruments, and to decide a teacher’s worth based on student testing measures just one small fraction of the learning that goes on in the classroom. This one assessment failure taught me valuable lessons about my teaching methods, the quality of my assessments, and the courage of my students. Two of my students summed up our week perfectly as they handed in their remedy exam: “I think I learned more from that one failing grade than from any A,” and “You know, now that we have gone through every question, that test really wasn’t that hard.”

My sentiments exactly.

When Reading Tests Attack (Content)

by Guest Blogger
August 3rd, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Teaching | 21 Comments »

By Rachel Levy

During  my first year of full-time teaching ESOL and Social Studies at an inner-city Washington, DC, high school, my principal approached me and told me that my students had come to her saying how much they were enjoying history class. I explained to her my intent to teach content but with a reading and writing intensive emphasis, to build those skills which were quite low among our school’s students. She was enthusiastic and I was thrilled.

A few weeks later, she attended our Social Studies department meeting where she explained to us that since there were no standardized tests in Social Studies, from that point forward, we were required to spend one-fifth of our class time teaching the Stanford-9 Reading Test.  For each of my students, I had to make charts based on testing data showing the skill (for example “context clues”) and how they did on that skill.  Then I was supposed to target my lesson plans to teach and remedy each student’s individual weaknesses. This didn’t seem right, but there was no protesting this: I wanted to help my students, she was my boss, and she was telling me what to do. Furthermore, such instruction and data collection had to be documented in our lesson plan books and during classroom observations.

This is where and how NCLB-applied pressure and high-stakes testing cause poor practices. Some counter, “The testing itself doesn’t cause teaching to the test in an ineffective way. Why don’t teachers simply adopt effective practices, like Core Knowledge?” While testing shouldn’t (in principle) encourage poor practice, unfortunately, my experiences in the classroom and now as a parent shows that national policy incentives mandating high stakes testing change classroom teaching for the worse. Ground-level feedback can help us to see how to fix accountability better than philosophical debates about the nature of testing.

I agree that it’s completely logical, obvious even, as Andrei Radulescu-banu put it on Robert’s recent post, that A=>B (Please read  his comment in its entirety). Certainly, test scores will gradually rise if a well-rounded and knowledge-rich curriculum is implemented. However, many educators are hindered in following this logic by performance pressure and by belief.

There were vague and all-encompassing standards (think horoscopes), however there was no social studies curriculum in DCPS at the time (there still isn’t).  By collaborating with my colleagues and relying on my own education and knowledge of social studies topics I came up with unit and lesson plans pretty easily. However, I really struggled to come up with lesson plans for teaching the Stanford-9 Reading Test.  I thought at the time that it was because I didn’t have much background in reading instruction, that I was missing something. Eventually I figured out that it wasn’t that I was missing something, it was because “teaching” the Stanford-9 Reading Test made absolutely no sense (and Tim Shanahan explains here that such an approach doesn’t work). So I taught history and geography as much as I could and I taught what I imagined “teaching the Stanford-9 Reading Test” was only when I had to, and made sure I had passable documentation in my lesson plan book.

In my second year, I got braver. In faculty meetings when we talked in small groups about how to get our test scores up, I voiced my opinion that the way to get test scores up was via an implicit route—to teach content and have students read and write as much as possible. I stated my skepticism that one could teach the Stanford-9 Reading Test or that students could learn the Stanford-9 test, but except in private asides, I had no supporters. And this was before Michelle Rhee came to town, mind you. Before NCLB, teaching content to struggling students was unappreciated; now, it’s practically an act of subversion.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have little tolerance for the secondary teachers who say their job isn’t to help struggling readers. Yes, kids should be reading well by the time they get to middle and high school. But for whatever reason (and it’s probably a good idea to try and figure out that reason), many aren’t. Accept it and adjust your practice accordingly. If you’re not prepared to teach and help struggling readers or even non-readers, you have no business teaching in most American public school classrooms. But this does not mean giving a student reading on a first grade level a tenth grade textbook and telling her to read it. Rather it means finding content-relevant materials appropriate to students’ age and maturity and books on their level, scaffolding, and building up.

I also don’t blame my principal. Downtown was breathing down her neck, judging her on reading and math scores.  Rather than fight a losing battle that could cost her her position (while she was ambitious for herself, she also cared deeply about the students in her charge and about the school she had built from scratch), she embraced it all, including putting on Stanford-9 pep rallies. I am not making that up; these pep rallies happen.

In addition to what I describe above and the bankrupty of the content of the tests themselves, described by Diana Senechal here, another fundamental problem is that many of the advocates of reforms centered on testing-based accountability actually believe that kids who can’t read (decode) at all well should not be learning content, that they have to learn reading first and then they can learn content, that teaching a content-based curriculum is useless if kids can’t read. “Let’s focus on teaching reading and get the reading scores up and then we can worry about content.” And let’s be honest, even many teachers and educators who are opposed to testing-based accountability believe this. I encounter this all the time, as a teacher in both inner city and high-performing suburban districts, as a parent in my children’s high-performing district, and in my interactions with readers as an education blogger and writer.

I encountered this attitude, that language proficiency is a prerequisite to learning content frequently as an ESOL teacher. People insisted that English Language Learners should master English first before learning content. However, a very effective way to teach the English language is through the “sheltered content” model, where the content is a vehicle to teach the language. Of course, both English Language Learners and struggling readers need intensive and explicit language and reading instruction, but not beyond its utility and not without pairing it with content.

In the vast majority of cases, the “belief” that students have to learn to read before they can learn content is not a result of dysfunction, laziness, or poor intentions. Quite the contrary–this belief is based on the proven correlation between strong literacy skills and academic success and on the understandable urgency to get kids to master such skills. Unfortunately, it is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how people learn and of how such literacy skills develop. Some are celebrating NCLB’s increasing poor and minority students’ ability to read the tests they’re taking, but just because they can read the tests doesn’t mean they actually have a grasp of the content or that they know more. Being able to read the road signs is well and good, but it won’t get you very far if you don’t know how to drive or where to go.

Rachel Levy is a writer and a former (and likely future) ESOL and Social Studies teacher who lives in Ashland, Virginia, with her husband and three children. She blogs about education at All Things Education.

Standardized Testing is Not the Devil…

by Robert Pondiscio
March 22nd, 2011

Tags: , ,
Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Education News | 14 Comments »

…Test prep is the devil. 

Via Alexander Russo comes word of a “misguided war” against standardized testing, and a backlash against the backlash. “Standardized testing is rarely fun — and it could almost certainly be improved — but it’s not nearly as antithetical to real, deep learning as its detractors suggest,” writes Anna North at the blog Jezebel, who scoffs at well-off parents refusing to let their kids sit for tests. Such protests

“…. run the risk of deepening the divide between haves and have-nots that continues to plague public education — and pretty much every other aspect of society. Any attempt to scuttle standardized testing needs to acknowledge that even if the tests are problematic, the deficits they attempt to address are real — and any alternative approach needs to face these deficits, not just walk away from them.”

North slightly misdiagnoses the issue.  Personally, I have no problem with tests, per se.  But you’d have to be naive to dismiss the impact preparing for those tests have had on the children North and everyone else purports to care so deeply about.  Talk to someone who has taught in a low-performing school and you’ll almost certainly hear stories about prodigious amounts of time sacrificed on the altar of practice tests and language arts lessons in “test sophistication.”  At my South Bronx elementary school, we had a Teachers College consultant who encouraged us to ”teach tests as a genre of literature.”  But even that pales in comparison to a grad student of mine who was mandated to spend two hours per day on test prep from the first day of school.  

Testing and accountability are unlikely to disappear.  Boycott the test?  Perhaps, but if I were a parent activist, I would march into the school office the first day of school with the following bargain:  “I’m sure you agree the best test prep is great teaching and a robust curriculum, Ms. Principal.  So let’s keep our focus right there.  Don’t worry about spending my child’s time and your budget dollars on test prep materials.  Because if they show up in our kids classrooms, we can promise our kids won’t be showing up for the test.”

Neither Good Nor Bad

by Robert Pondiscio
September 13th, 2010

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Assessment and Testing | 2 Comments »

Assessment is nearly a constant feature of a decent classroom.  Every time a teacher asks a question in class, leads a discussion, conferences with a child about his work, looks at homework, or glances over a student’s shoulder while she is writing, he or she is assessing–making a judgement about what the child knows, can do, and needs help with.  A baseline idea in education is “assessment drives instruction” — in order to meet a child where he or she is, you have to know where exactly that is. 

For a teacher, this is among the blandest, most obvious statements imaginable.  So why bring it up?  The New York Times, as it is wont to do, has discovered that young children in China are tested constantly–from “mad minute” math quizzes to science exams.  Elizabeth Rosenthal writes that for her two young children attending elementary school in China, “taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time.”

In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.

Point taken.  Another recent New York Times piece described the benefits of testing as a learning tool.  “The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future,” observed the Times’ Benedict Carey. 

So assessment is fundamental to teaching, and testing is not only a form of assessment, but a potentially powerful learning tool.  Still, I worry that the wrong takeaways will result from these pieces.  As with, well, everything in education, the risk of oversimplification here is great.    Surely, there is a difference between the constant assessment –formal and informal — that takes place in nearly every good classroom and drives instruction, and the annual ritual of high-stakes testing that now dominates elementary and middle schools.  Likewise there is a difference between studying and mastering a body of material for, say, a biology or geometry test, and a state reading test.  There is no body of knowledge to study with a reading test.  Test-taking skills and reading strategies that might provide a short-term boost are deleterious in the long run.  Countless hours of test prep and strategy sessions are educationally unproductive.  And it would be naive in the extreme to suggest high-stakes tests are not materially different than a workaday math quiz in the anxiety they produce.

The bottom line, as always: it’s complicated.  These issues are not simply about “testing good” or “testing bad.”  With the exception of a few anti-testing zealots — and they are few indeed — it is the rare educator who is opposed to all testing.  Indeed, it’s almost impossible to teach at all without assessing your students on a nearly constant basis, formally and informally.  Yes, lots of kids love to compete against themsleves and classmates on “mad minute” math drills.  Yes, classroom tests focus the mind and efforts of students to master material.  Unfortunately, none of these things are true of high stakes reading and math tests. They don’t drive instruction because months go by before you get the results. No bragging rights or competitive juices are fired by them. And reading tests are impossible to study for  since they are constructed on a mistaken notion of reading as a transferable skill.  It’s possible to be a firm believer in testing–even high stakes testing–yet have misgivings about their impact on education.

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