30 August, 2009
Standing in the rain
As my weekdays are no longer my own, I don't know how much energy I'll have on Sept 2, the fourth anniversary of the death of my friend Karen Hunter. So, I'm putting up this picture in advance and I'm going to spend a lot of today, I'm sure, doing what I've been doing since that day: standing in the rain, alone, which also feels unnatural. Standing alone doesn't make any sense, period.
Karen took this picture in a park across from her office in Brooklyn Heights.
Lost in space
There is something very jarring about being on a staff in which, at 41, you are the most senior teacher.
I could say that what's different is what we do on weekends -- I try to replace joint fluid with vitamin supplements and my younger colleagues go out and engage in activities. That's not it, however. Many colleagues older than myself are far more spry. There is some truth to what might be a stereotypical complaint: I feel as though I'm a third-tour sergeant among first-tour infantry. Battles have made me less self-assured, though better prepared. I'll know when to jump and when not to, but I also know that there are always challenges which you cannot predict. But, that's not the complete source of my unease. A lot of it has to do with knowing what preconceived ideas younger teachers sometimes have about older ones. Not a small part of it has to do with the fact that I know there are senior teachers out there who don't have positions with whom I could be working if the irrational budgets that Bloom/Klein has created did not make that impossible.
Yet none of these feels completely right. Perhaps the biggest part of it, is that I've never experienced this before. I've never been without people senior to me and without contemporaries. It's unnatural.
I could say that what's different is what we do on weekends -- I try to replace joint fluid with vitamin supplements and my younger colleagues go out and engage in activities. That's not it, however. Many colleagues older than myself are far more spry. There is some truth to what might be a stereotypical complaint: I feel as though I'm a third-tour sergeant among first-tour infantry. Battles have made me less self-assured, though better prepared. I'll know when to jump and when not to, but I also know that there are always challenges which you cannot predict. But, that's not the complete source of my unease. A lot of it has to do with knowing what preconceived ideas younger teachers sometimes have about older ones. Not a small part of it has to do with the fact that I know there are senior teachers out there who don't have positions with whom I could be working if the irrational budgets that Bloom/Klein has created did not make that impossible.
Yet none of these feels completely right. Perhaps the biggest part of it, is that I've never experienced this before. I've never been without people senior to me and without contemporaries. It's unnatural.
23 August, 2009
The dangers of meaningless success
It's hard to tell a parent NOT to be encouraging to a child. They want to convince their kids they can be superheroes so that, I think, when the time comes for them to make their choices in life, they will not feel that they did not have the opportunity to follow their dreams. I'm not here to make the conventional lecture about this attitude, that, yes, little Zeno may have the opportunity to play basketball, but if he has poor balance, the NBA may not be in his future. Many little Zenos have worked so hard as to build serviceable careers either as athletes, broadcasters, writers or coaches at all levels of the sport. What I'm concerned about, besides the fact that there are so few opportunities even for the hardworking in an economy which out-speeds itself in speculation as opposed to observation, is that behind the parents' insistence that Zeno can do it, is an acceptance that, if he can't, it's okay, he can live at home.
Now, I have nothing against parents or their adult children who live with them. My question is, though: Did they really give Zeno the green light to go after his dream or to fail at it? And I believe our public schools are complicit in this regard.
In NYC, parents of public school children are given plenty of reasons to feel content with their children's development. Every year, their children are "tested" to see if they can advance to the next grade. The fact that the NY State exams have been proven invalid as markers for appropriate academic achievement by the results of the NEAP exams is not at the forefront of our media. For 18 million dollars, Mike Bloomberg has launched a campaign that makes "I Like Ike" look like it was the slogan for a student-body president. He isn't lying in the sense that these children did pass an exam. That the exam was beneath the students to whom it was given doesn't matter. After all, he could argue, do you ask the average third grade ballet student to be held to the rigor of the American Ballet Theater school? But, if we don't, then how will this young person really know if he/she is on the path to his/her dream? How will young Marie know her math skills are where they need to be if she is to develop into a scientist? How will her parents know?
You're probably thinking Marie and Zeno's parents are happy enough that they enjoy something in life and have some proficiency in it. They know, right, that the odds are good their kids are going to work a job they hate because they're going to have to "do what they gotta do" to survive?
While it may be true that most people don't go on to make a living at what they want to do, that's no reason to destroy their true opportunities from the onset. Worse, it's leaving most of our students with a proficiency which wouldn't even let them follow the field in popular literature or as amateur enthusiasts. Zeno will get all he needs to know about basketball from watching TV, you think? What if he can't understand the best commentators on the sport. I heard a cashier at a local supermarket talk about how she can't stand listening to legendary broadcaster Tim McCarver because "he knows nothing." When I pressed her for an example, she said that he "just goes on and on and nobody understands him." That's like saying that Keith Olbermann has no sense of irony. So, if Zeno's language skills are low, he may miss a lot of information and perspective which would help him to understand the game, how it's reported and how it advances.
When I was a kid, I was given the sense that the world was open to me. When I went on to high school, I was given even more of a sense that I might be a leader within it. In college, I floundered --not academically-- but somewhat artistically. My critical skills were always strong, but I didn't know nearly as much about how plays are actually put on as I thought. And I didn't integrate well into a performing ensemble because I was extremely defensive. Nevertheless, I got excellent grades in my major of Theater and no one ever sat me down to talk about the pragmatics of my entering the field. I went to an esteemed school and my degree was not an artistic one, but one in liberal arts. In other words, for a non-artist, I had done well. But, no one explained this to me, then. I learned this when I went on to get an MFA--a degree designed to test my abilities as a theatrical artist. I learned about what BA programs were and weren't designed to do, and I faced the fact that I could teach, write about or work in a quasi-academic role assisting a director, but that my temperament in itself was going to make it hard for me to direct or act, whether or not I had real talent. Had I been assessed this way in college, I'd probably have changed the strategies I used to plan my studies and my future. I'd've known that I needed to head to a Ph.D. program and I'd've thought of myself as a historian/scholar. Thankfully, my schooling did give me advantages I could have and could still use to pursue that aspect of the field.
My mother and I had a few exchanges in which I assured her I could become a teacher if theater didn't work out. When she asked me, about two years ago, why I felt unsatisfied with my achievements, I pointed out among other things, that I had never "made it" -- never written a play which went to Broadway, etc. She responded in complete shock, "Is that what you wanted? Very few people can do that." It's not the sweet assurance that I wasn't alone in my lack of achievement, but the disbelief that so disheartened me. I had been writing, acting and going to see plays and operas my whole life. Yet, I wasn't expected to have wanted to attain conventional success in the field I spent most of my time working in, at all. What did she think I was doing in those summer acting classes? What was I dreaming about? Was I expected to languish in precocity my entire life? My uncle, I learned about a year earlier, hadn't really given any thought to what I would become -- this despite his being the cheering section at several debates I lead in elementary school and the catalyst for my attending Stuyvesant High School. He said to me, "I had no idea...You were a girl...I thought you would get married." I went to college in the 80's and my uncle is a dentist, my mother a semester away from college graduaton and my father (though absent from my life) was a CPA. My mother insisted in a way I came to see more as pragmatic and faithless, that I could always live at home and she could support me. I'd gone to top schools which had made me a shrewd student, but for all my decent grades, no one really thought they had proof I was going to "be anything." What I had thought was a track record of success was meaningless to those around me. Fortunately, I had been competitive academically my whole life so I had developed useful skills and ideas and even strategies for survival. I had assumed, too, that I probably wouldn't live as an artist and took a teaching job fairly soon after graduation. Until this June, I still worked in the theater as a dramaturg, but it's harder to bifurcate my energies between two worlds and I need to harness them for the job that pays the bills. Acting and directing did help me as a teacher, and I haven't stopped looking at things as an artist. I encourage my students to do the same, but I hold them to real standards. I've found there are a lot of good, young artists out there and not enough good training or work. At least, however, an artist should know if he/she is really as effective as he/she can be. So they know that they had the chance to make use of what luck, hard work and time did offer.
In giving public school students weak assessments, we are denying them their dreams and their parents know this. Parents, I think, have become complicit in extending their children's agonies/adolescence because they don't want to seem like they are limiting their exploration. Inherently, however, their dooming them to floundering, rather than finding their niche. The testing movement is a defensive reaction, not a proactive step toward giving students real skills and choices. It's like saying, "Well, for non-students, they're pretty good." The only ones not in on the game are the kids. And they're not reading the commentary in the local tabloids because it's not there -- our major newspapers don't use higher than 8th grade vocabulary, so it might be possible that some of them would understand it. My students who do see postings about the ease of the NY State exams get infuriated. We ought to ask them what they think should be done. They wouldn't mince words.
Now, I have nothing against parents or their adult children who live with them. My question is, though: Did they really give Zeno the green light to go after his dream or to fail at it? And I believe our public schools are complicit in this regard.
In NYC, parents of public school children are given plenty of reasons to feel content with their children's development. Every year, their children are "tested" to see if they can advance to the next grade. The fact that the NY State exams have been proven invalid as markers for appropriate academic achievement by the results of the NEAP exams is not at the forefront of our media. For 18 million dollars, Mike Bloomberg has launched a campaign that makes "I Like Ike" look like it was the slogan for a student-body president. He isn't lying in the sense that these children did pass an exam. That the exam was beneath the students to whom it was given doesn't matter. After all, he could argue, do you ask the average third grade ballet student to be held to the rigor of the American Ballet Theater school? But, if we don't, then how will this young person really know if he/she is on the path to his/her dream? How will young Marie know her math skills are where they need to be if she is to develop into a scientist? How will her parents know?
You're probably thinking Marie and Zeno's parents are happy enough that they enjoy something in life and have some proficiency in it. They know, right, that the odds are good their kids are going to work a job they hate because they're going to have to "do what they gotta do" to survive?
While it may be true that most people don't go on to make a living at what they want to do, that's no reason to destroy their true opportunities from the onset. Worse, it's leaving most of our students with a proficiency which wouldn't even let them follow the field in popular literature or as amateur enthusiasts. Zeno will get all he needs to know about basketball from watching TV, you think? What if he can't understand the best commentators on the sport. I heard a cashier at a local supermarket talk about how she can't stand listening to legendary broadcaster Tim McCarver because "he knows nothing." When I pressed her for an example, she said that he "just goes on and on and nobody understands him." That's like saying that Keith Olbermann has no sense of irony. So, if Zeno's language skills are low, he may miss a lot of information and perspective which would help him to understand the game, how it's reported and how it advances.
When I was a kid, I was given the sense that the world was open to me. When I went on to high school, I was given even more of a sense that I might be a leader within it. In college, I floundered --not academically-- but somewhat artistically. My critical skills were always strong, but I didn't know nearly as much about how plays are actually put on as I thought. And I didn't integrate well into a performing ensemble because I was extremely defensive. Nevertheless, I got excellent grades in my major of Theater and no one ever sat me down to talk about the pragmatics of my entering the field. I went to an esteemed school and my degree was not an artistic one, but one in liberal arts. In other words, for a non-artist, I had done well. But, no one explained this to me, then. I learned this when I went on to get an MFA--a degree designed to test my abilities as a theatrical artist. I learned about what BA programs were and weren't designed to do, and I faced the fact that I could teach, write about or work in a quasi-academic role assisting a director, but that my temperament in itself was going to make it hard for me to direct or act, whether or not I had real talent. Had I been assessed this way in college, I'd probably have changed the strategies I used to plan my studies and my future. I'd've known that I needed to head to a Ph.D. program and I'd've thought of myself as a historian/scholar. Thankfully, my schooling did give me advantages I could have and could still use to pursue that aspect of the field.
My mother and I had a few exchanges in which I assured her I could become a teacher if theater didn't work out. When she asked me, about two years ago, why I felt unsatisfied with my achievements, I pointed out among other things, that I had never "made it" -- never written a play which went to Broadway, etc. She responded in complete shock, "Is that what you wanted? Very few people can do that." It's not the sweet assurance that I wasn't alone in my lack of achievement, but the disbelief that so disheartened me. I had been writing, acting and going to see plays and operas my whole life. Yet, I wasn't expected to have wanted to attain conventional success in the field I spent most of my time working in, at all. What did she think I was doing in those summer acting classes? What was I dreaming about? Was I expected to languish in precocity my entire life? My uncle, I learned about a year earlier, hadn't really given any thought to what I would become -- this despite his being the cheering section at several debates I lead in elementary school and the catalyst for my attending Stuyvesant High School. He said to me, "I had no idea...You were a girl...I thought you would get married." I went to college in the 80's and my uncle is a dentist, my mother a semester away from college graduaton and my father (though absent from my life) was a CPA. My mother insisted in a way I came to see more as pragmatic and faithless, that I could always live at home and she could support me. I'd gone to top schools which had made me a shrewd student, but for all my decent grades, no one really thought they had proof I was going to "be anything." What I had thought was a track record of success was meaningless to those around me. Fortunately, I had been competitive academically my whole life so I had developed useful skills and ideas and even strategies for survival. I had assumed, too, that I probably wouldn't live as an artist and took a teaching job fairly soon after graduation. Until this June, I still worked in the theater as a dramaturg, but it's harder to bifurcate my energies between two worlds and I need to harness them for the job that pays the bills. Acting and directing did help me as a teacher, and I haven't stopped looking at things as an artist. I encourage my students to do the same, but I hold them to real standards. I've found there are a lot of good, young artists out there and not enough good training or work. At least, however, an artist should know if he/she is really as effective as he/she can be. So they know that they had the chance to make use of what luck, hard work and time did offer.
In giving public school students weak assessments, we are denying them their dreams and their parents know this. Parents, I think, have become complicit in extending their children's agonies/adolescence because they don't want to seem like they are limiting their exploration. Inherently, however, their dooming them to floundering, rather than finding their niche. The testing movement is a defensive reaction, not a proactive step toward giving students real skills and choices. It's like saying, "Well, for non-students, they're pretty good." The only ones not in on the game are the kids. And they're not reading the commentary in the local tabloids because it's not there -- our major newspapers don't use higher than 8th grade vocabulary, so it might be possible that some of them would understand it. My students who do see postings about the ease of the NY State exams get infuriated. We ought to ask them what they think should be done. They wouldn't mince words.
Labels:
Bloomberg,
Keith Olbermann,
Klein,
NEAP Exam,
NYS Standards,
Tim McCarver
22 August, 2009
Mornings
The child screamed as if her hair were being torn off by a motorcycle.
I looked down to find a very upright girl of about two yelling and insisting on something I couldn't understand to her mother, who was trying to get her to come into the back seat of a car. Her father just looked over the open car door from the driver's seat. A moments later, all the noise stopped and the child got in.
Events like these fill my mornings, as the noise from the street raids my apartment at will. They are ordinary events, but they carry with them the kind of off-handed violence that I try to avoid whenever possible. I was a very quiet child for a reason -- hysteria unnerved me. My mother could go from calling upon the gods to help her find her cigarette case to benignly asking me to have a slice of cake in 15 seconds or less. Every bite of cake was useful as a means of numbing my ears and skin from the lasceration which came before.
I'm sure that little girl is eating an ice cream cone right now.
I looked down to find a very upright girl of about two yelling and insisting on something I couldn't understand to her mother, who was trying to get her to come into the back seat of a car. Her father just looked over the open car door from the driver's seat. A moments later, all the noise stopped and the child got in.
Events like these fill my mornings, as the noise from the street raids my apartment at will. They are ordinary events, but they carry with them the kind of off-handed violence that I try to avoid whenever possible. I was a very quiet child for a reason -- hysteria unnerved me. My mother could go from calling upon the gods to help her find her cigarette case to benignly asking me to have a slice of cake in 15 seconds or less. Every bite of cake was useful as a means of numbing my ears and skin from the lasceration which came before.
I'm sure that little girl is eating an ice cream cone right now.
20 August, 2009
Michael Jackson - They Don't Care About Us
Should be the anthem of the next political campaign by a real leftist.
18 August, 2009
Small schools
I prefer small schools. With the exception of ONE YEAR in my career, I have only taught in them. That one year, I was placed in a large school as an ATR. It wasn't a choice.
What's great about small schools is how well you get to know your students and they, you. You really get in sync and teaching them becomes much, much easier as you know how their minds work. Plus, the atmosphere is much less aggressive and more like a family. It's also easier to get things done -- you know what you need to do and there are fewer hoops to jump through.
The one horrible thing about the small schools in which I have worked thus far is, for all the knowledge that you have of the kids you are neither:
1) Given liberty to design a curriculum completely for them as you are bound by state standards which don't always make sense and tests which are capricious in their focus and lackluster in their challenge. It's like being an Olympic coach and having to prepare your athletes for a strange set of unhelpful and bizarre exercises which might cause him/her injuries.
2) Funded sufficiently to take care of the problems of which you are well-aware. You'd think if you were given the opportunity to work this closely with students, you'd be given the means to help them. Brooklyn Comprehensive had a part-time social worker on staff. Do you know how many of our kids needed help with everything to getting housing to being counseled through the anxiety of returning to school at the ripe ages of 18-21?
The "new small schools," I've seen have no more money than we did, and some of them seem to have less. I didn't see any social workers at all at the ones in Tilden and they SHARE a psychologist. Why? Why not give people the ability to make the idea really work? One transfer high school has a van with which it picks up students. This is made possible by funding the city gives to community based organization who then pays for the van. This is because this organization demands large fees to work with students -- so it can do the job right. Not everyone can afford to get to work with this organization. And they're getting overwhelmed.
But, I ask you: why not just give THE SCHOOL the money for the van? What's with the middleman? Cronyism, I think, but I could be wrong.
What I know is that IT IS WRONG for one school to have so much more resources than others and for them all to be judged in the same way. I think it's also against the equal protection clause of Amendment 14. Is this not, "separate, but equal"? Why does no one raise this? Well, maybe they think this Supreme Court wouldn't rule in favor. That's still no reason not to bring the case. Can you imagine if all of the schools had the ability to help the students they know, and in some cases, know so well?
What's great about small schools is how well you get to know your students and they, you. You really get in sync and teaching them becomes much, much easier as you know how their minds work. Plus, the atmosphere is much less aggressive and more like a family. It's also easier to get things done -- you know what you need to do and there are fewer hoops to jump through.
The one horrible thing about the small schools in which I have worked thus far is, for all the knowledge that you have of the kids you are neither:
1) Given liberty to design a curriculum completely for them as you are bound by state standards which don't always make sense and tests which are capricious in their focus and lackluster in their challenge. It's like being an Olympic coach and having to prepare your athletes for a strange set of unhelpful and bizarre exercises which might cause him/her injuries.
2) Funded sufficiently to take care of the problems of which you are well-aware. You'd think if you were given the opportunity to work this closely with students, you'd be given the means to help them. Brooklyn Comprehensive had a part-time social worker on staff. Do you know how many of our kids needed help with everything to getting housing to being counseled through the anxiety of returning to school at the ripe ages of 18-21?
The "new small schools," I've seen have no more money than we did, and some of them seem to have less. I didn't see any social workers at all at the ones in Tilden and they SHARE a psychologist. Why? Why not give people the ability to make the idea really work? One transfer high school has a van with which it picks up students. This is made possible by funding the city gives to community based organization who then pays for the van. This is because this organization demands large fees to work with students -- so it can do the job right. Not everyone can afford to get to work with this organization. And they're getting overwhelmed.
But, I ask you: why not just give THE SCHOOL the money for the van? What's with the middleman? Cronyism, I think, but I could be wrong.
What I know is that IT IS WRONG for one school to have so much more resources than others and for them all to be judged in the same way. I think it's also against the equal protection clause of Amendment 14. Is this not, "separate, but equal"? Why does no one raise this? Well, maybe they think this Supreme Court wouldn't rule in favor. That's still no reason not to bring the case. Can you imagine if all of the schools had the ability to help the students they know, and in some cases, know so well?
16 August, 2009
What would it take
1) For people to realize that taking a big school, dividing it up into four smaller schools, each with it's own administration, will not ultimately save any money. Theoretically, you want all of those teachers to stay with the school they founded. So, eventually, they will cost more than they do.
2)For people to realize that there have been small schools before and many of them have been closed. Small is good, but not enough.
3) For people to actually think about what their kids are learning. Do any of these parents LOOK at the tests their kids take?
2)For people to realize that there have been small schools before and many of them have been closed. Small is good, but not enough.
3) For people to actually think about what their kids are learning. Do any of these parents LOOK at the tests their kids take?
08 August, 2009
If President Obama is serious about keeping unemployment down
Then stop firing experienced teachers all over the country, so that you can hire newer, cheaper ones!
06 August, 2009
What is the offer for after ten years?
Joel Klein has said more than once that he thinks no one should remain a teacher for more than ten years. Aside from the obvious prejudice against experienced teachers which this shows, I wonder what he has in mind for the individual who is beginning to become masterful at an intensely difficult job and has by that point also accrued a mortgage and begun a family?
Teaching experience translates to NO other profession. Though you've managed hundreds of kids, you are not considered management. Though you've organized a classroom and possibly a whole school organization, that isn't considered the same as handling an office and office supplies. You can't even necessarily qualify as a paralegal because you don't know the computer systems or the jargon. You've lived in a universe entirely a creation of the school system. At interviews, people will view you the same way they would someone who has worked at a factory installing a particular kind of car door. Except that even the factory worker has recognizeable skills which translate elsewhere -- an ability to execute instructions precisely and to work with a team on a prescribed schedule.
So, unless you were the kind of person who enjoyed or had the money to take a new job at entry level, your only other option would be to go to graduate school and take out loans for both school and upon which to eat. In New York City, it's impossible to get loans to cover the cost of our living expenses -- it's too much money. Plus, because you've been earning a salary which in other states would allow you to save, but here helps you to live in your own apartment and eat squarely, you won't be awarded grants or most other kinds of financial aid. At 32, you'll be a fairly old-ish candidate for Medical School, Veterinary School, and less so for Law or Business school. The odds are good that the only way to realistically re-train will be to go at night or on-line while you are still working. I'd like to see the teacher with the energy to work on something completely different and teach full-time. You'll have to go part-time - should you start re-training at year 4 or 5 then? How do you explain to your principal your sudden unwillingness to put in all the extra time you used to and that most new schools now ask for? You can start raising issues like "it's not in my contract," etc. Go ahead. At most schools, see what that gets you. I guess, if you end up in the Rubber Room, THEN you will have some of the energy necessary to re-train.
So, I get it: You work very above and beyond the contract for four years. Then, you start to limit how much you do this using something as spurious as the law behind you, and, in most cases (I have a decent principal, not most cases) you get an automatic pass to The Rubber Room. Since it takes years for your case to be heard, you use that time to start your part-time degree in some other field. When you go back to school (as you will because you can't really be fired for having been competent and just refused to say, stay three extra hours after school a day, unpaid) you raise the same issues again and get sent away again. You keep doing this until you finish your degree, and in fact, find a job in your new field.
That's the only way that a reasonable person would quit teaching after ten years, assuming he/she was competent. Get yourself into trouble, anyway, so you actually have the energy to do something else -- you won't be teaching. Assuming you are not like me and do not internalize the experience of being removed from your school and develop deep depression (and you do not let being placed in a room full of similarly anxious people get to you), you should be able to take a class or two afterwards or online.
Of course, the odds are good you won't have been able to do this at a top-named school as you couldn't afford it. So, you will have to hope that people will still remember you in your first-four-year incarnation and give you glowing references. Unless of course, they're also on the same ten year plan....
Only a lunatic would leave a job he/she was competent at under these circumstances. Now, that's another possibility -- you release people from mental institutions and dope them up, hand them a script to teach from for ten years and then take it all back and put them back. Some of them might not notice the difference. And since you don't give parents a voice in anything, there will be no complaints. You just tell the UFT that these people went on the Open Market and were hired. No one has the manpower to check...
Teaching experience translates to NO other profession. Though you've managed hundreds of kids, you are not considered management. Though you've organized a classroom and possibly a whole school organization, that isn't considered the same as handling an office and office supplies. You can't even necessarily qualify as a paralegal because you don't know the computer systems or the jargon. You've lived in a universe entirely a creation of the school system. At interviews, people will view you the same way they would someone who has worked at a factory installing a particular kind of car door. Except that even the factory worker has recognizeable skills which translate elsewhere -- an ability to execute instructions precisely and to work with a team on a prescribed schedule.
So, unless you were the kind of person who enjoyed or had the money to take a new job at entry level, your only other option would be to go to graduate school and take out loans for both school and upon which to eat. In New York City, it's impossible to get loans to cover the cost of our living expenses -- it's too much money. Plus, because you've been earning a salary which in other states would allow you to save, but here helps you to live in your own apartment and eat squarely, you won't be awarded grants or most other kinds of financial aid. At 32, you'll be a fairly old-ish candidate for Medical School, Veterinary School, and less so for Law or Business school. The odds are good that the only way to realistically re-train will be to go at night or on-line while you are still working. I'd like to see the teacher with the energy to work on something completely different and teach full-time. You'll have to go part-time - should you start re-training at year 4 or 5 then? How do you explain to your principal your sudden unwillingness to put in all the extra time you used to and that most new schools now ask for? You can start raising issues like "it's not in my contract," etc. Go ahead. At most schools, see what that gets you. I guess, if you end up in the Rubber Room, THEN you will have some of the energy necessary to re-train.
So, I get it: You work very above and beyond the contract for four years. Then, you start to limit how much you do this using something as spurious as the law behind you, and, in most cases (I have a decent principal, not most cases) you get an automatic pass to The Rubber Room. Since it takes years for your case to be heard, you use that time to start your part-time degree in some other field. When you go back to school (as you will because you can't really be fired for having been competent and just refused to say, stay three extra hours after school a day, unpaid) you raise the same issues again and get sent away again. You keep doing this until you finish your degree, and in fact, find a job in your new field.
That's the only way that a reasonable person would quit teaching after ten years, assuming he/she was competent. Get yourself into trouble, anyway, so you actually have the energy to do something else -- you won't be teaching. Assuming you are not like me and do not internalize the experience of being removed from your school and develop deep depression (and you do not let being placed in a room full of similarly anxious people get to you), you should be able to take a class or two afterwards or online.
Of course, the odds are good you won't have been able to do this at a top-named school as you couldn't afford it. So, you will have to hope that people will still remember you in your first-four-year incarnation and give you glowing references. Unless of course, they're also on the same ten year plan....
Only a lunatic would leave a job he/she was competent at under these circumstances. Now, that's another possibility -- you release people from mental institutions and dope them up, hand them a script to teach from for ten years and then take it all back and put them back. Some of them might not notice the difference. And since you don't give parents a voice in anything, there will be no complaints. You just tell the UFT that these people went on the Open Market and were hired. No one has the manpower to check...
04 August, 2009
The Trouble with Testing
And this is from the NY Times -- a corporation which has shown great fondness for all things Bloomberg.
August 3, 2009, 6:41 pm
What Do School Tests Measure?
By The Editors
According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago. While statewide passing rates on the tests have risen in every grade on English and math tests, New York City’s scores have gone up even more, and across all neighborhoods. The racial achievement gap has been cut in half on some tests.
This is good news for Mayor Bloomberg, who has made standardized testing a linchpin of his administration’s stewardship of the schools. Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform
Richard D. Kahlenberg, Century Foundation
Bruce Fuller, professor education and public policy
Lance T. Izumi, Pacific Research Institute
Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco, N.Y.U.’s immigration studies program
Marcus Winters, Manhattan Institute
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are These Tests Any Good?
Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.
I know of no country that doesn’t test its K-12 students at some point before they graduate from high school, with some countries giving more tests than others and at different grade levels depending on the number of years of compulsory education and levels of schooling available. Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
Good tests come in 47 varieties. There are reading-based prompts requiring extensive essays written on the spot, or sets of questions requiring a choice of the best answer from a group of possible answers (both formats can assess conceptual understanding). There are also “product” tests that reflect the application of the knowledge and skills acquired in a particular course of studies. The hysteria about testing per se is unwarranted.
While the number of students ‘passing’ has risen, nothing is happening at the level that should indicate academic success.
More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate. That is exactly what we want English or history teachers to do. What is not clear with respect to the New York State tests is the extent to which the English tests actually compel teachers to teach students how to read high quality literature written at an appropriate level of complexity or difficulty for the grade.
Based on a perusal of New York State’s grade 8 reading selections several years ago, I judged that the test was assessing the ability to understand passages more appropriate for grades 4 and 5. And this judgment was independent of where the cut score was set.
Why is this relevant today? The combined scores in New York City show a decline from grade 3 to grade 8 in the percentage of students who are “advanced proficient”: from 17 percent in grade 3, 20 percent in grade 4, 22 percent in grade 5, 16 percent in grade 6, 14 percent in grade 7 and 9 percent in grade 8. These combined scores are heavily influenced by the mathematics scores (which also decline regularly over the grades). If we look at the scores in English separately, we find that the percentage of students who are “advanced proficient: went from 8 percent in grade 3, 5 percent in grade 4, 10 percent in grade 5, 7 percent in grade 6, 4 percent in grade 7, to 3 percent in grade 8. Moreover, the percentages for this level of performance do not appear to have risen at all in the past decade; if anything, they appear to have declined. While the number of students “passing” has risen, nothing is happening at the level that should indicate academic success.
Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know. Teachers should be teaching to a demanding English test, but until we know that they are, one may ask: Should English teachers be teaching to these particular tests?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beware the Mayor’s Claims
Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
New York City’s schools are getting better, according to multiple barometers, thanks to a variety of gutsy reform efforts. But the exaggerated trumpeting of modest progress — what’s become a yearly ritual in the mayor’s office — undercuts the credibility of Michael Bloomberg and his schools chief, Joel Klein.
Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
When New York lowers standards and the mayor hypes the progress, it’s no surprise that parents and employers remain skeptical over the schools’ true efficacy.
This gap is precisely why few informed analysts still take seriously where state and city officials peg “proficient” student performance. Magically, even more students in Mississippi are “proficient” readers than allegedly high-flying New York City pupils.
The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows. Somehow the mayor’s back-slapping press release failed to mention this test-score inflation that has raged in New York and across the nation ever since No Child Left Behind let state officials define cut-points signaling when a student is proficient or not.
Mayor Bloomberg’s claim of dramatic achievement growth is dubious when placed in historical context. The mayor claims that the share of eighth graders proficient in math has climbed from 29 percent in 2002 to more than 82 percent this past spring — an eye-popping 52-point increase in just seven years, three times that detected by the more reliable federal assessment over the last two decades.
The city’s youngsters are certainly acquiring basic literacy skills more effectively now than a decade ago. But when Albany lowers standards and the mayor hypes the progress, it’s no surprise that parents and employers remain skeptical over the schools’ true efficacy.
What’s key in moving forward is to depoliticize student testing and hold public officials accountable when they grossly overstate progress. Given Mayor Bloomberg’s faith in education markets — forcefully backing charter schools and competition among reform groups that help lift the schools — he should know that parental choice works only when families have sound and reliable information about school quality.
The mayor’s self-congratulatory interpretation of student progress prompts a feeling of disbelief, not one of confidence.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Problem for Low-Income Students
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of “All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice,” and “Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy”.
Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking. But test score results can also be easily overblown and obscure significant disadvantages still faced by children in New York City’s high poverty schools.
Whatever the score, children in high poverty are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
Consider, for example, the over-the-top coverage provided to gains in New York state exams by students at an overwhelmingly low-income school that is part of the Harlem Children’s Zone. According to The Times columnist, David Brooks, by eighth grade, in math, the Zone’s middle-school, the Promise Academy, “eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.” The “approach works,” Mr. Brooks wrote, implying that separate schools for rich and poor and black and white can, in fact, be equal after all. But this conclusion raises two problems, which illustrate the limitations of test score results.
First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills. As the Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas pointed out, on a different assessment — the Iowa Test of Basic Skills — eighth-grade Promise Academy students scored at the 33rd percentile for a national sample in math. This is important, Mr. Pallas notes, because if the New York State test score gains are real, and not just the result of test prep, the success should transfer to other tests.
Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment. This is important given research finding that more than half of jobs are filled through connections.
By all means, let’s celebrate test score gains in New York City, and the narrowing of the achievement gap. But hold the champagne until we can show more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Tests Can and Should Do
Lance T. Izumi is the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
In the wake of widespread state testing following the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, critics have claimed that teachers are simply teaching to the tests. Yet this argument is overly simplistic and ignores the benefits that come from good tests.
Opponents of testing try to have it both ways. When test scores are low they argue for a holistic view of student achievement that focuses on non-test indicators of performance rather than teaching to the test. When results are high, as in the recent rise in New York City scores, they counter that the scores are suspect because teachers are just teaching to the test. If a state test is well conceived, both these arguments fail to hold water.
If tests are reliably aligned with rigorous state academic content standards, then teachers are right to teach to the test.
Susan Philips, a professor of education at Michigan State University and one of the nation’s leading testing experts, has testified that well-developed standardized multiple-choice tests give more individual examples of student knowledge and skills, are more consistent in scoring, are capable of measuring higher-order thinking and are fairer than other non-standardized assessments. Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
If tests are reliably aligned with rigorous state academic content standards, then teachers who teach to the standards are teaching to the test, and there is nothing wrong with that. E.D. Hirsch, author and University of Virginia education professor, notes that “grade-by-grade standards and some form of fair grade-by-grade tests are logically necessary for monitoring and attaining grade-by-grade readiness.” Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
While inappropriate use of test materials should not be countenanced, a valid standardized test linked to tough standards is a critical tool for measuring and improving student performance. Assuming New York has such a test, when Joel Klein says that if test prep means “teaching people to read and understand paragraphs, that’s what I think education is about,” then he’s right.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ignoring the Needs of English-Language Learners
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco are the co-directors of the immigration studies program at New York University and the co-authors of “Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society.”
This article overlooks the elephant in the American classroom: the educational progress of English-language learners, the fastest-growing group of students in American schools. This neglect may not be surprising given that the ever more Byzantine academic testing architecture has never been designed with the educational needs of this population in mind.
This test regime has huge implications for dropout rates and access for immigrant children.
The current high-stakes testing and accountability systems create unintended consequences for immigrant English-language learners, which outweigh whatever benefits standardized tests may have. Because too many immigrant students attend highly segregated and impoverished schools, are not exposed to quality curricula and undergo multiple school and programmatic transitions, their performance on such tests is often compromised. Is it any surprise then that in the “gold standard” (not what The Times calls “the dumbed down” New York State Test) National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment for 2007, 71 percent of English-language learners in the eighth grade scored “below basic” in reading and zero percent scored at the “advanced” level?
The high-stakes testing context is proving to be extremely challenging to newcomers. Not only are many immigrant children tested before their academic language skills have adequately developed, but all too often their day-to-day educational experiences are shaped by instruction that teaches to the test, which is far from an adequate measure of what it takes to succeed in the complex and challenging economies and societies of the 21st century.
This eye on the omnipresent “adequate yearly progress” is more often than not at the expense of more engaging, broader academic knowledge. What’s more, this test regime has huge implications for dropout rates as well as college access for children of immigrant families.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Making the Best of a Flawed System
Marcus Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he has done several studies on high-stakes testing, school report cards and the effects of vouchers on the public school system.
One of the pitfalls of standardized tests, perhaps the most important accountability-focused reform, is their elevation of scores over genuine learning. In high-stakes testing jurisdictions, anxious teachers, in order to avoid earning bad grades themselves, “teach to the test,” as the saying goes. In doing so, fortunately, some teachers adopt classroom techniques that produce real increases in student proficiency, particularly among the lowest-performing students. Tough proctoring rules can deter less well-motivated teachers from raising test scores in more underhanded ways.
The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency. In most programs, the proficiency benchmarks that students must pass are levels of literacy and numeracy so low that only the most academically troubled students will find themselves better prepared for the outside world. High-achieving students, by contrast, will have already far exceeded them. While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world. Meanwhile, limited resources are relocated away from the most promising students. If the premise of our educational system is that all students must be able to crawl before we help others to run, then such a policy is a worthy one.
Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it. Still, they are flawed. On a multiple choice exam, a child can demonstrate whether he can read and grasp the gist of a piece of writing, but he cannot usually demonstrate the depth or thoroughness with which he comprehends it. The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
August 3, 2009, 6:41 pm
What Do School Tests Measure?
By The Editors
According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago. While statewide passing rates on the tests have risen in every grade on English and math tests, New York City’s scores have gone up even more, and across all neighborhoods. The racial achievement gap has been cut in half on some tests.
This is good news for Mayor Bloomberg, who has made standardized testing a linchpin of his administration’s stewardship of the schools. Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform
Richard D. Kahlenberg, Century Foundation
Bruce Fuller, professor education and public policy
Lance T. Izumi, Pacific Research Institute
Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco, N.Y.U.’s immigration studies program
Marcus Winters, Manhattan Institute
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are These Tests Any Good?
Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.
I know of no country that doesn’t test its K-12 students at some point before they graduate from high school, with some countries giving more tests than others and at different grade levels depending on the number of years of compulsory education and levels of schooling available. Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
Good tests come in 47 varieties. There are reading-based prompts requiring extensive essays written on the spot, or sets of questions requiring a choice of the best answer from a group of possible answers (both formats can assess conceptual understanding). There are also “product” tests that reflect the application of the knowledge and skills acquired in a particular course of studies. The hysteria about testing per se is unwarranted.
While the number of students ‘passing’ has risen, nothing is happening at the level that should indicate academic success.
More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate. That is exactly what we want English or history teachers to do. What is not clear with respect to the New York State tests is the extent to which the English tests actually compel teachers to teach students how to read high quality literature written at an appropriate level of complexity or difficulty for the grade.
Based on a perusal of New York State’s grade 8 reading selections several years ago, I judged that the test was assessing the ability to understand passages more appropriate for grades 4 and 5. And this judgment was independent of where the cut score was set.
Why is this relevant today? The combined scores in New York City show a decline from grade 3 to grade 8 in the percentage of students who are “advanced proficient”: from 17 percent in grade 3, 20 percent in grade 4, 22 percent in grade 5, 16 percent in grade 6, 14 percent in grade 7 and 9 percent in grade 8. These combined scores are heavily influenced by the mathematics scores (which also decline regularly over the grades). If we look at the scores in English separately, we find that the percentage of students who are “advanced proficient: went from 8 percent in grade 3, 5 percent in grade 4, 10 percent in grade 5, 7 percent in grade 6, 4 percent in grade 7, to 3 percent in grade 8. Moreover, the percentages for this level of performance do not appear to have risen at all in the past decade; if anything, they appear to have declined. While the number of students “passing” has risen, nothing is happening at the level that should indicate academic success.
Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know. Teachers should be teaching to a demanding English test, but until we know that they are, one may ask: Should English teachers be teaching to these particular tests?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beware the Mayor’s Claims
Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
New York City’s schools are getting better, according to multiple barometers, thanks to a variety of gutsy reform efforts. But the exaggerated trumpeting of modest progress — what’s become a yearly ritual in the mayor’s office — undercuts the credibility of Michael Bloomberg and his schools chief, Joel Klein.
Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
When New York lowers standards and the mayor hypes the progress, it’s no surprise that parents and employers remain skeptical over the schools’ true efficacy.
This gap is precisely why few informed analysts still take seriously where state and city officials peg “proficient” student performance. Magically, even more students in Mississippi are “proficient” readers than allegedly high-flying New York City pupils.
The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows. Somehow the mayor’s back-slapping press release failed to mention this test-score inflation that has raged in New York and across the nation ever since No Child Left Behind let state officials define cut-points signaling when a student is proficient or not.
Mayor Bloomberg’s claim of dramatic achievement growth is dubious when placed in historical context. The mayor claims that the share of eighth graders proficient in math has climbed from 29 percent in 2002 to more than 82 percent this past spring — an eye-popping 52-point increase in just seven years, three times that detected by the more reliable federal assessment over the last two decades.
The city’s youngsters are certainly acquiring basic literacy skills more effectively now than a decade ago. But when Albany lowers standards and the mayor hypes the progress, it’s no surprise that parents and employers remain skeptical over the schools’ true efficacy.
What’s key in moving forward is to depoliticize student testing and hold public officials accountable when they grossly overstate progress. Given Mayor Bloomberg’s faith in education markets — forcefully backing charter schools and competition among reform groups that help lift the schools — he should know that parental choice works only when families have sound and reliable information about school quality.
The mayor’s self-congratulatory interpretation of student progress prompts a feeling of disbelief, not one of confidence.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Problem for Low-Income Students
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of “All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice,” and “Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy”.
Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking. But test score results can also be easily overblown and obscure significant disadvantages still faced by children in New York City’s high poverty schools.
Whatever the score, children in high poverty are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
Consider, for example, the over-the-top coverage provided to gains in New York state exams by students at an overwhelmingly low-income school that is part of the Harlem Children’s Zone. According to The Times columnist, David Brooks, by eighth grade, in math, the Zone’s middle-school, the Promise Academy, “eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.” The “approach works,” Mr. Brooks wrote, implying that separate schools for rich and poor and black and white can, in fact, be equal after all. But this conclusion raises two problems, which illustrate the limitations of test score results.
First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills. As the Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas pointed out, on a different assessment — the Iowa Test of Basic Skills — eighth-grade Promise Academy students scored at the 33rd percentile for a national sample in math. This is important, Mr. Pallas notes, because if the New York State test score gains are real, and not just the result of test prep, the success should transfer to other tests.
Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment. This is important given research finding that more than half of jobs are filled through connections.
By all means, let’s celebrate test score gains in New York City, and the narrowing of the achievement gap. But hold the champagne until we can show more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Tests Can and Should Do
Lance T. Izumi is the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
In the wake of widespread state testing following the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, critics have claimed that teachers are simply teaching to the tests. Yet this argument is overly simplistic and ignores the benefits that come from good tests.
Opponents of testing try to have it both ways. When test scores are low they argue for a holistic view of student achievement that focuses on non-test indicators of performance rather than teaching to the test. When results are high, as in the recent rise in New York City scores, they counter that the scores are suspect because teachers are just teaching to the test. If a state test is well conceived, both these arguments fail to hold water.
If tests are reliably aligned with rigorous state academic content standards, then teachers are right to teach to the test.
Susan Philips, a professor of education at Michigan State University and one of the nation’s leading testing experts, has testified that well-developed standardized multiple-choice tests give more individual examples of student knowledge and skills, are more consistent in scoring, are capable of measuring higher-order thinking and are fairer than other non-standardized assessments. Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
If tests are reliably aligned with rigorous state academic content standards, then teachers who teach to the standards are teaching to the test, and there is nothing wrong with that. E.D. Hirsch, author and University of Virginia education professor, notes that “grade-by-grade standards and some form of fair grade-by-grade tests are logically necessary for monitoring and attaining grade-by-grade readiness.” Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
While inappropriate use of test materials should not be countenanced, a valid standardized test linked to tough standards is a critical tool for measuring and improving student performance. Assuming New York has such a test, when Joel Klein says that if test prep means “teaching people to read and understand paragraphs, that’s what I think education is about,” then he’s right.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ignoring the Needs of English-Language Learners
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco are the co-directors of the immigration studies program at New York University and the co-authors of “Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society.”
This article overlooks the elephant in the American classroom: the educational progress of English-language learners, the fastest-growing group of students in American schools. This neglect may not be surprising given that the ever more Byzantine academic testing architecture has never been designed with the educational needs of this population in mind.
This test regime has huge implications for dropout rates and access for immigrant children.
The current high-stakes testing and accountability systems create unintended consequences for immigrant English-language learners, which outweigh whatever benefits standardized tests may have. Because too many immigrant students attend highly segregated and impoverished schools, are not exposed to quality curricula and undergo multiple school and programmatic transitions, their performance on such tests is often compromised. Is it any surprise then that in the “gold standard” (not what The Times calls “the dumbed down” New York State Test) National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment for 2007, 71 percent of English-language learners in the eighth grade scored “below basic” in reading and zero percent scored at the “advanced” level?
The high-stakes testing context is proving to be extremely challenging to newcomers. Not only are many immigrant children tested before their academic language skills have adequately developed, but all too often their day-to-day educational experiences are shaped by instruction that teaches to the test, which is far from an adequate measure of what it takes to succeed in the complex and challenging economies and societies of the 21st century.
This eye on the omnipresent “adequate yearly progress” is more often than not at the expense of more engaging, broader academic knowledge. What’s more, this test regime has huge implications for dropout rates as well as college access for children of immigrant families.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Making the Best of a Flawed System
Marcus Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he has done several studies on high-stakes testing, school report cards and the effects of vouchers on the public school system.
One of the pitfalls of standardized tests, perhaps the most important accountability-focused reform, is their elevation of scores over genuine learning. In high-stakes testing jurisdictions, anxious teachers, in order to avoid earning bad grades themselves, “teach to the test,” as the saying goes. In doing so, fortunately, some teachers adopt classroom techniques that produce real increases in student proficiency, particularly among the lowest-performing students. Tough proctoring rules can deter less well-motivated teachers from raising test scores in more underhanded ways.
The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency. In most programs, the proficiency benchmarks that students must pass are levels of literacy and numeracy so low that only the most academically troubled students will find themselves better prepared for the outside world. High-achieving students, by contrast, will have already far exceeded them. While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world. Meanwhile, limited resources are relocated away from the most promising students. If the premise of our educational system is that all students must be able to crawl before we help others to run, then such a policy is a worthy one.
Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it. Still, they are flawed. On a multiple choice exam, a child can demonstrate whether he can read and grasp the gist of a piece of writing, but he cannot usually demonstrate the depth or thoroughness with which he comprehends it. The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
03 August, 2009
One year later and it makes even less sense
Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School has been closed for a full year, and in retrospect all I can see is the damage that resulted. The DOE didn't save any money -- all except one of the faculty, staff and adminstrators are still working. A school is a sum of its parts and all the parts have simply been moved to other budgets. All that has occurred is that there are fewer ways for at-risk youth to gain a high school diploma than before. With the closing of South Shore, Tilden and Canarsie high schools there will be more students without diplomas with fewer options available.
What would it take to re-consolidate the parts in a building (we didn't have our own)? Won't it be cheaper than the unemployment, the welfare and all the other monies which will be poorly spent helping young people subsist?
And which teachers are wandering? Teachers who refused to pass kids through the system if they weren't ready and people who helped those kids develop into students. In both cases, teachers did exactly what everyone expects of them. They held students accountable and they gave them as much attention as humanly possible.
It's ironic that the teachers who held to the standard and the teachers who helped students meet those standards in a smaller environment with extended time ARE BOTH being punished. None of us should be. What it shows us is that Bloomberg et al don't care about true student success. They want a cheaper, more quickly made product. Graduate the kid on watered down tests and in less time.
What's sad is that some parents actually buy in. A friend boasted about her child's "4" on her grade level exam. All the publicity about the dumbing down of the Math tests hadn't reached her. Worse, as someone who graduated from a school where such exams were considered meaningless, she had lost sight of her own academic values. The pressure had been so high for her child to pass that the relief which came when she did clouded her judgement. She talked about Bloomberg "holding teachers to task." Meanwhile she'd had to get her child lots of tutoring in addition to that provided by the school. For what? Just to get her to pass an exam we'd've both agreed was inferior under different circumstances. But, all the fighting she had to do to get her child services, the over-crowding of her class -- all that disappeared when she was given the magic "pass" on the grade exam. I guess we do live by the standards we set, and our Mayor has seen to it that these are lower than we would have stood for before he came into office.
My friend's kid won't ever need a school like Brooklyn Comprehensive because she will just get her tutoring for as long as she needs, and when she recovers from the temporary euphoria, she'll go back to fighting the school for services, etc. It's the kid sitting next to her child whose parents are uninvolved or who glides by barely passing these exams who is in more trouble. What happens to him/her when the tides change again and the tests are strengthened or eliminated in favor of real accomplishment?
Perhaps one of the teachers from our school will have been shuffled into his/her school by accident of fate. I doubt it, though.
What would it take to re-consolidate the parts in a building (we didn't have our own)? Won't it be cheaper than the unemployment, the welfare and all the other monies which will be poorly spent helping young people subsist?
And which teachers are wandering? Teachers who refused to pass kids through the system if they weren't ready and people who helped those kids develop into students. In both cases, teachers did exactly what everyone expects of them. They held students accountable and they gave them as much attention as humanly possible.
It's ironic that the teachers who held to the standard and the teachers who helped students meet those standards in a smaller environment with extended time ARE BOTH being punished. None of us should be. What it shows us is that Bloomberg et al don't care about true student success. They want a cheaper, more quickly made product. Graduate the kid on watered down tests and in less time.
What's sad is that some parents actually buy in. A friend boasted about her child's "4" on her grade level exam. All the publicity about the dumbing down of the Math tests hadn't reached her. Worse, as someone who graduated from a school where such exams were considered meaningless, she had lost sight of her own academic values. The pressure had been so high for her child to pass that the relief which came when she did clouded her judgement. She talked about Bloomberg "holding teachers to task." Meanwhile she'd had to get her child lots of tutoring in addition to that provided by the school. For what? Just to get her to pass an exam we'd've both agreed was inferior under different circumstances. But, all the fighting she had to do to get her child services, the over-crowding of her class -- all that disappeared when she was given the magic "pass" on the grade exam. I guess we do live by the standards we set, and our Mayor has seen to it that these are lower than we would have stood for before he came into office.
My friend's kid won't ever need a school like Brooklyn Comprehensive because she will just get her tutoring for as long as she needs, and when she recovers from the temporary euphoria, she'll go back to fighting the school for services, etc. It's the kid sitting next to her child whose parents are uninvolved or who glides by barely passing these exams who is in more trouble. What happens to him/her when the tides change again and the tests are strengthened or eliminated in favor of real accomplishment?
Perhaps one of the teachers from our school will have been shuffled into his/her school by accident of fate. I doubt it, though.
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