So you think slapping a high-stakes testing system on top of a government monopoly is going to tell you how well your kids are doing? Think again, mes amis, think again.
State finds schools broke WASL protocols
By The Associated Press
TACOMA — The state school superintendent's office has investigated nearly two dozen reports this year of improperly administered standardized tests at public schools across Washington.
In one case, a class of fifth-grade students in Graham, Pierce County, corrected their Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests after finishing them, The News Tribune of Tacoma reported yesterday.
School officials later invalidated the results of the science tests and gave the Rocky Ridge Elementary School teacher who administered them a 15-day suspension for violating WASL test protocols, the newspaper said.
Details of "irregularities" in the testing were spelled out in nearly 200 pages of documents obtained by The News Tribune through public-disclosure requests.
A handful of teachers have been reprimanded, placed on paid leave or suspended without pay after reportedly disclosing questions before the exam, changing answers or counseling students to fix their answers.
The state might invalidate certain tests at seven schools and is closely watching scores at eight other schools, according to preliminary estimates.
If you want an education system that will force schools to be responsive to your needs, and to prepare your children for higher-education and life and work, look not to our dysfunctional education monopoly, but to a free market.
In a market, schools are chosen (or rejected) based on their ability to deliver the things families want. All the things families want, not just a passing grade on one set of tests.
When you eliminate parental choice and evaluate monopoly schools using a single set of tests, you create incentives for exactly the kind of fraud we're seeing in Washington state. More broadly, however, you create a system in which schools cannot tailor their services to the particular demands of the families they serve, having instead to offer a standardized, homogenized course of instruction to match the standardized, homogenized tests.
Folks, Gidget is not a widget. Kids and families have different priorities, talents, and needs. Why have we turned education into a government cheese factory?
Here's a surprise: Stop teaching kids how to do basic arithmetic by hand, and they get worse at it. Let them use calculators for arithmetic from a young age and they get better at using calculators--but can't actually multiply or divide.
That's precisely what we did in the United States from 1990 onward. During the "back to basics" movement of the 1980s, students' performance in paper and pencil arithmetic improved. When schools increasingly started pushing the use of calculators for basic arithmetic in the '90s, things changed. Earlier improvements in students' ability to do arithmetic by hand stoped and then reversed direction.
As of 1999, American students are reasonably proficient at doing arithmetic on a calculator--which is to say they can type in the numbers and symbols they read on a test sheet, and then hit the [=] key. Not an especially profound display of mathematical prowess. When students are actually forced to think through arithmetic problems by hand, they most often fail miserably.
These are the conclusions reached by Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless in a newly released paper. Here's how Tom puts it:
Given an identical set of computation items, how do nine year olds perform when they are allowed to use a calculator compared to when a calculator is not allowed? Calculators change everything. For a large number of nine year olds, when calculators are available on computation items, they get correct answers. When calculators are not available, they get wrong answers. The smallest calculator advantage is on addition items, a skill nearing mastery. Students score 78.4% using only pencil and paper and 87.0% with calculators. The calculator advantage in other areas is huge. In subtraction, students scored 89.2% with calculators available and 59.7% without calculators. In multiplication, students scored 87.9 % with calculators and 42.5% without them. On division items, the scores were 77.1% with calculators, 48.3% without.
The conclusion is clear: allowing fourth graders to use calculators on items that are intended to assess computation skills will produce misleading results—misleading, that is, if one assumes that knowing how to compute means being able to make calculations without technological assistance. The fear of critics that calculators might serve as a crutch also appear well founded. Believing that a nine year old can compute when he or she cannot do so without a calculator is tantamount to believing that a nine year old can ride a bike when he or she cannot do so without training wheels.
In today's NYT, Nick Kristof defends the right of companies to outsource jobs to other countries, but argues that we should get our educational act together so that our own workers are more internationally competitive—making outsourcing less attractive. So far so good. Where Kristof and many others go awry is in their proposed solution to our educational woes. After noting how badly American high-school seniors perform in mathematics and science compared to their peers in Asia, he calls for a national campaign to improve instruction in those subjects, just like the one sparked by the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite during the height of the cold war.
The trouble is, that earlier campaign resulted in a federal expenditure of about $1 billion (which was over 1% of the entire U.S. budget in 1958) without leading to any significant lasting improvement in science, mathematics, or foreign language instruction (the three areas on which it concentrated). Instead, much of the money was squandered on dubious and untested pedagogical methods (see Diane Ravitch’s The Troubled Crusade) and science equipment that was not always fully utilized. Before Kristof gets too misty eyed about the post-Sputnik era, he should recall that the sixties gave us “open classrooms,” and the “new math,” among the most infamous bits of educational quackery of the 20th century.
The spark for Kristof’s OP/ED appears to have been a recent report by the American Diploma Project pointing out how abysmally unprepared U.S. high-school graduates are for both college and the modern labor market. The ADP advises states to impose its own curriculum and testing package so that a high-school diploma means something again. Their basic goal is certainly laudable, but further centralizing the state’s control over what and how children are taught is an astoundingly bad idea. To advocate it honestly, one must be ignorant of the long history of government involvement in education.
The first rule of thumb for proponents of government curricula and testing should be: Imagine what your most objectionable political opponents will do with the powers you wish to bestow upon the state. The ADP and like-minded folks seem to imagine that whatever content and testing program they put in place will either remain immutable or will improve (in their view) over time. This is impossibly utopian. In reality, successive legislatures of differing ideological stripes will manipulate the content to suit their whims, creating a hash that will please few. The second rule of thumb should be: Gidget is not a widget. It is unrealistic and counterproductive to try to standardize children’s knowledge and skills. Children are different, and if we wish the best for them we will try to maximize their individual potentials rather than feeding them through a homogenizing educational assembly line.
Yes, high-school diplomas need to mean something again, and yes, both students and schools should know precisely what competencies a given diploma implies. But there is no need for every high-school diploma in a state or a nation to mean precisely the same thing. This is not a totalitarian regime that must coerce its subjects into conformity to ensure its survival. On the contrary, this is a liberal society that relies on diversity and innovation as driving forces of progress.