Talk of the Nation ‘s second hour is about retaining students who do not pass a standardized test and phasing out “social promotion.” Some are accusing the test of being racist because black students tend to fail them at a higher rate. The audio will be available at 6 PM EDT.
I am having some concerns about this nation-wide craze for standardized tests. I’m not the only one who isn’t coming from the bleeding-heart-Left. The above link reports reservations about the Washington Assessment of Standard Skills (WASL). A few years back I was at my parents when my little brother was taking the fourth grade WASL. He spent his days studying for the test, and was supposed to spend the evenings studying for the WASL. Actually, he ended up playing his Playstation 2, it was just a big vacation for him. He did well, and let me be honest and state my siblings are “above average” like all the children in Lake Wobegon, but my sister told me that a lot of kids fail this test. It seems that the No Child Left Behind philosophy is really starting to get out of control. Students at both ends of the bell curve are not really going to benefit from these tests. Some could pass them half-asleep, while some will never be able to grasp the concepts (or memorize the facts) that are being drilled into them.
Godless comments:
A few observations:
1) I prefer the much derided “teaching to the test” than not teaching at all. Sufficiently rigorous tests (e.g. the AP in high school) are quite worthwhile. However, a test must be combined with accountability: if you do not pass, you fail. If standards based assessment was combined with an end to social promotion, we’d be ok.
2) The problem is not standards based assessment per se . The problem is that it is biologically impossible for no child to be left behind. As Dick says in comments:
I am convinced that [the] No Child Left Behind Act is going to rub the US nose in g, heritablity, and racial difference. They have set up a highly g-loaded test, insisted that all children pass it, and established severe penalties for schools that fail to make that happen. Something’s got to give. First up, cheating scandals. And after that?
Dick is right, but we will probably not see ideological collapse: the “axiom of equality” will endure. When jobs are on the line, we will see twisted statistics and eventually a recourse to non-g-loaded tests. After all, there are literally thousands of hits devoted to the idea that standardized test scores are “racist”. The eventual endpoint will be to build affirmative action into the scoring procedure itself:
It was a false alarm for the SATs, for right now anyway.
The Wall Street Journal reported incorrectly on Aug. 31 that Educational Testing Service was instituting a new program aimed at promoting social equity, called “Strivers,” into the SATs. While there is no such program, ETS is currently researching ways to incorporate information on a student’s background with the SAT, and The Wall Street Journal’s report triggered discussion about the possibility of such a program.
The Wall Street Journal reported that ETS had developed a “statistical equation that will generate an expected SAT score for every student based on 14 different categories. … The Strivers score is the difference between the actual SAT score and the expected score. Anyone who scores 200 points higher than the expected score is considered a Striver. “
This particular “innovation” has not yet been adopted, but explicit race-norming cannot be far off. As I’ve said before, the whole “No Child Left Behind” business is entirely Soviet, and even has five year plans:
If a school fails to make adequate yearly progress for a fifth year, the school district must initiate plans for restructuring the school. This may include reopening the school as a charter school, replacing all or most of the school staff or turning over school operations either to the state or to a private company with a demonstrated record of effectiveness.
There will be no gulags, of course, but the idea that humans are biological blank slates to be blasted clean and remade by federal fiat is the driving ideology here , as it was in the USSR and every communist state. The truth is something like this:
In my view, we can expect most children to learn basic literacy and arithmetic. Beyond that, we start hitting g-correlated barriers. Perhaps we will see a push for vouchers, an end to mandatory property taxes, and a long-overdue privatization of education…but as Sailer has observed, that brings its own problems.
That said, vouchers remain political poison for Republicans, no matter what the free market ideologues say. The reason 97% of these poor parents in Cleveland chose religious, primarily Catholic, schools is because they were the only ones who’d take the vouchers. Secular private schools and exclusive suburbs don’t want a flood of impoverished kids wrecking their schools’ shiny test scores. Voucher programs that extend beyond inner cities are anathema to suburban homeowners, who don’t want their property values driven down by having their precious local schools jammed with slum kids waving vouchers. If the GOP alienates its natural base of suburban homeowners, it’s doomed.
I’ll be frank, the biggest reason why “bad schools” are bad and “good schools” are good is the quality of the students.
If I was a parent, I would try to send my kid to a magnet school or a private school, or somewhere where math & science education was still revered and where there were no metal detectors in the hallways. The problem with educational assessment is that the left blames society and funding, while the right blames the teachers and the parents. No one identifies the real problem: kids who just aren’t that smart.
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