The Great Depression prompted the absurd, but necessary, system of paying farmers not to produce crops. The Great Recession has created the equally ridiculous situation where schools are awash in billions of dollars of federal funds for "innovation," while essential services are cut to the bone.
Perhaps we need a second stimulus to pay education providers to stop experimenting on our kids. Maybe we need an economic recovery package that to pays educators and/or students to dig holes for burying their "innovations," so we can get back to the business of teaching and learning.
Valerie Strauss' aptly titled post, "School District Field-Tests 52 (Yes, 52) New Tests on Kids," describes the Charlotte-Mecklenberg district's testing of their standardized assessments on students. And now, kids will again have to take those 52 tests in May. This is a $1.9 million down payment on promises made for the Race to the Top. The district admits that the testing has teachers stressed and some classes have lost up to 30 hours of instruction. The experiment's worst problems were suffered in the kindergarten through second grade classes.
Dana Goldstein recently documented this maddening obsession in the "reformers" paradise of Colorado Springs. First-graders were tested in art class with a question about Picasso's "Weeping Woman." Six year-olds were asked to "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion."
Goldstein reports that students endure 25 days of high-stress testing a year, and that the district's teacher turnover rate, at 25 percent, is the highest in the state. Forcing teachers to choose between their professional integrity and their job undoubtably helps explain why the district lost 11 percent of its highest-ranked teachers.
Tennessee has chosen the worst of all worlds approach in order to fulfill its RttT obligations. In the short run, they will use value-added rankings to fire teachers, based on test scores of students who they have never taught!?!? In the longer term, the state will create new tests for the subjects that have not yet been subjected to the bubble-in system of accountability.
If I sound angry, here is the reason. When I began teaching in the early 1990s, I discovered that 10 to 15 percent of my freshmen refused to do any work. Many of my students who accepted "zeros" for a final grade were exceptionally bright. They complained about the teach-to-the-test regimes in elementary school that taught them to hate school. During the next decade, the educational malpractice of the Reagan era was forgotten, but then came No Child Left Behind.
NCLB dumped huge amounts of money on my old school, but we did not have the time or the authority to plan rational ways of investing the resources. So, my district borrowed tricks devised in Texas to massage their scores. When we failed to recreate "the Texas Miracle," stakes for students were attached to tests. Within six weeks, failure rates for tested subjects at my school ranged from 80 to 90 percent. We started the semester with of more than 900 students. Almost immediately, 210 students left school
The impact of this failed experiment started to hit me when I could not persuade my sophomores to take an ACT Plan Test. There were no stakes attached to this test, and taking it was a step toward guaranteed tuition grants by the state. Most kids gave up on the test within minutes, and I learned that in the previous two weeks my students had also endured Benchmark Tests, common assessments, and Matrix Tests. For some, the majority of their class time had been devoted to standardized testing.
For the first time in years, I could not get my failure rate below 25 percent. Then I learned that my failing sophomores failed an average of six classes that semester. By that time, our school's population had dropped to nearly 600. Another 100 students had failed four or more classes.
So, I would gladly support an old-fashioned subsidy to give the testing companies and the consultants the profits they seek, in return for not turning schools into test-prep factories. The price tag would be cheap in comparison to driving the joy of art and music out of childhood, replacing it with the "reductive half-truths" that "reformers" see as the right answers.
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How Standardized Testing Damages Education | FairTest
A Brief History of Standardized Testing - TIME
I believe part of the reason school has become such a grind for kids is because we've taken away all the fun-but-important enrichment activities due to lack of funding. Much easier to suffer through a statewide testing period when you still have art, music, drama, PE, and extra-curricular activities to take a break from the hard academic subjects.
also, our middle and high school just had 1-1/2 gyms for middle school, jv and varisity, male and female b-ball players, for volleyball and PE. Dance, like most electives was no problem because it was gone.
I think the California average is something in the neighborhood of $7500. It seems to get better at the high school level, but only by about 2K per student or so. We're just about dead last (48th, if memory serves) of 50 states in per student spending. So much for being the Golden State.
It's malpractice.
A father is concerned for his 8th grade son's new-found worry over high-stakes tests. Read the email exchange between the father and the principal who lied, made an A student question his academic ability, and explicitly ignored the lowest scoring kids. It's disgusting and revealing and happens all the time, in public schools.
Unfortunately what we don't test for is whether we've maintained and enhanced a joy in learning. Since learning is essential to the viability of humankind, when we suppress the inherent thirst for learning--which we are apparently doing--we effectually contribute to our very own dissolution, not our evolution.
Thus the only test that we should be preparing people for is the test of life, for living a humanly productive life for the benefit of all. We can't foretell what situations each will face but we can envision the necessary thinking and learning abilities people will need to successfully meet these challenges.
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/02/10/better-thinking-leads-to-better-solutions/
This extreme testing is fundamentally wrong. By now,the majority that agrees with us must be overwhelming.
I wish the few remaining supporters of this test mania would watch kids as they take these tests. Perhaps skilled teachers in early grades can make a game of the testing and ameliorate the harm. But you can't lie to older teens. They know their noses are being rubbed in it. They understand the humilation being dumped on them.
Been teaching since 2000 and I feel this man's pain.
My fail rate is 10-13% and it is only that low because I spend a good deal of time undoing the damage these tests do to them.
Susie Watts, College Direction, Denver, Colorado
An ACT rep denied that any questions were on a college level. So, as I recall, I brought a question about Claude Levi Strauss from a practice test to the meeting and asked how many of us had studied Structualism in high school.
Holding us "accountable" as based on scores on a standardized tests is like holding a coach accountable based on the results of one period of one game.