AssortedStuff

The BBC’s education writer Mike Baker thinks he sees a “long-term change of direction” in the UK’s love affair with “accountability” (aka standardized testing).

The latest sign was this week’s report from the Commons Schools Committee. It delivered a message we don’t often hear from politicians: trust the teachers.

The MPs [Members of Parliament] argued that the “complexity” of the school accountability system in England is creating “a barrier to genuine school improvement”.

The report highlighted the “adverse effects” that often flow from a target-driven school culture and criticised Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education] for taking a narrow, results-based view of learning in schools.

A report from a government “Expert Group” suggests that improving the reliability of teacher assessments would allow the country’s schools to move away from their reliance of “externally marked tests”.

The report did not argue for an end to all external assessment. But it called for a shift toward more within-school, teacher-led assessment. This, it said, would not only save money but also a lot of the teaching time that is lost to exam preparation and administration.

And this is the key point: it is not about dropping school accountability altogether, but about making sure it does not obstruct teaching and learning.

Baker refers to the UK testing program as a “crude” way to assess learning, one that has had “unintended effects” such as narrowing the curriculum.

It’s hard to tell from this one article whether or not any of these trends away from standardized testing are actually going to take root in British schools (much less their political institutions).

However, it’s all stuff we also need to be considering on this side of the pond.

bbc, england, reform, standardized testing, teachers

In a guest education column from the Post earlier this week, Daniel Willingham, billed as a cognitive scientist at UVa, makes a good, practical case for the arts being an essential part of K12 education.

He makes many excellent points but there are two that resonate the loudest.

Kagan argues that the arts offer a unique means of communication, using representations in the mind other than words, which are at the core of most school subjects.

…participation in the arts allows children to see the importance of creating beauty, of creating an object that others may enjoy. When a child gets an A on a math test, the immediate benefit is to the child alone. But when the child creates a drawing, she makes something for the pleasure of others as well.

Our traditional system of schooling has always been largely closed, with students only taught to communicate with those in the same room, and largely not allowed to express themselves beyond those walls.

And, pushed by the holy grail of our current standardized testing mania, the curriculum they study has been narrowed to the points that anything but reading and math is considered a frill.

Instead we should be expanding our concept of what it means to be an educated person to include the ability to communicate using many different tools through multiple channels.

art education, curriculum, education, standardized testing, washington post

I guess the problem with international assessments, the ones that show US kids doing poorly compared to their peers in other countries, is that we’re using the wrong ones.

At least according to the expert Jay Mathews interviewed.

He says the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)) is a bad one because it doesn’t fit “the way U.S. students are taught” and aligns to the “losing” side in the debate over how to teach math.

Which is to say that the designers of the PISA expect that schools are using curriculums that “make math instruction more relevant to the real world, and emphasize mathematical reasoning more than calculation”.

How dreadful to expect that kids should actually be able to understand and apply math concepts!

PISA includes questions like this one:

For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100 m by 50 m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?

A. 2000
B. 5000
C. 20000
D. 50000
E. 100000

Mathews thinks this is a bad question because it involves too many variables, such as the fact that “some people don’t like to get close to at concerts”.

Certainly it’s a lousy item when students are expected to locate the one and only “right” answer, according to the test writers who have been programmed to create just the right kinds of distracters (been there, done that :-).

However, it’s an excellent question when you want them to consider all those different, and sometimes messy, factors that clutter up problems here in the real world.

And if we also expect students to justify their answer, explain the logic they used to arrive at it, and use that interpretation as part of their assessment.

So, is the problem that we’re giving kids the wrong test?

Or that we’re not teaching to the right assessment?

assessment, jay mathews, math, standardized testing

A writer in the Wall Street Journal offers advice for parents about Raising Kids Who Can Thrive Amid Chaos in Their Careers.

Her starting point is the increasingly obvious fact that any sort of “neat, tidy” career path for most of our current students just doesn’t exist.

So what is a parent to do to equip children for this? To ride the job-market surf, workers of the future will need not only the usual technical or professional qualifications, but an additional set of soft, downright squishy skills that experts say must be developed in childhood. A sampling: Adaptability, Exploration, Entrepreneurialism.

Her message is directed at parents but, if the goal of school is to prepare our students for success in the real world, we should also pay attention to the message as well.

After all, none of those skills are assessed on the standardized tests which form the core of our current K12 curriculum.

Even worse, as students progress through most American schools, we actually tend to discourage adaptability, exploration, and entrepreneurialism in favor of creating a uniform, homogeneous product for graduation.

21st century skills, education, standardized testing

It’s that time of year again: standardized testing season.

Increasingly in our overly-large school district, students are taking those tests online, sucking almost all equipment and bandwidth from actual instructional uses for a month or more.

Unfortunately, it’s not just an American phenomena as the BBC profiles a new testing system being tried in Norway.

About 6,000 students in Norway are doing exams on their laptops in a trial that could soon be rolled out across the country.

Every 16-19 year-old in Nord-Trondelag county in Norway has been trying out the laptop-based system.

The secondary students are given a laptop by the government when they turn 16 to help them with schoolwork.

During exams the specially-tailored software springs into life to block and record any attempt at cheating.

Ok, taking tests on the computer and software to stop cheating (I wonder how long it takes before some enterprising student hacks that). Very nice.

What’s really interesting, however, is part about the Norwegian government routinely issuing laptops to students of a certain age.

Apparently, they consider personal computers to be an essential part of learning, something that should be provided from educational funding.

Here in the US we certainly have mastered the talking points about how important technology is to instruction.

We just aren’t as good as other parts of the world about the follow through.

bbc, edtech, norway, standardized testing, technology

In his New York Times column, Mr. World is Flat, Thomas Friedman, takes a brief glance at the quality of American education, comparing it, as you might expect, to that of other countries.

His motivation for the column comes from reading a new study, “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools” (which I can’t find online).

Based on that Friedman comes to the conclusion that things are bad and getting worse. So bad that student “performance” is at least partially responsible for dragging down the economy.

The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

Wow! I have no idea how the researchers arrive at making a direct correlation between education and economic performance, especially since the measurement tools used most often are one-size-fits-all standardized tests that largely assess basic skills.

Anyway, for all his writing about how the world has changed, Friedman, as with way too many other “experts”, still seems to view “education” in terms of the traditional assembly line model from the previous century, one in which generating easy-to-spreadsheet numbers passes for quality control.

And the skyrocketing use of tests such as those cited by him only serves to further lock the American education system into that same industrial model.

I have to admit that part of my annoyance with Friedman’s column comes from the fact that I’m currently listening to the audio version of Ken Robinson’s book The Element (after reading the dead tree edition).

In it he tells the stories of many people who are successful in spite of their formal education, while discussing how every person is intelligent in some way, with passions and talents that don’t necessarily fit the patterns dictated by society.

While some of his subjects found their “element”* with the assistance of an insightful teacher, more than a few simply abandoned the whole process of school and developed their unique skills through other forms of learning, sometimes long after their formal education ended.

We are rightly concerned about the rising drop out rate in the US and I’m sure some of that is built into the formulas used to determine the economic toll of this “international achievement gap”.

However, I wonder how many students we have currently sitting in our high schools who will add their numbers to the graduation rate without acquiring at least an inkling of something at which they are both talented and passionate.

To me that is a far more important problem than all the low test scores and negative economic statistics over which Friedman frets.

* Robinson defines a person’s “element” as the point at which natural talent meets personal passion.

Update: Thanks, Brett for finding the link to the study. He knows how to use the Google better than me. :-)

high school, ken robinson, standardized testing, thomas friedman

According to the op-ed page of this morning’s Post, Bill Gates recently dropped by to let us all know how to fix American education.

… Gates names two priorities: helping successful charter school organizations, such as KIPP, replicate as quickly as possible; and improving teacher effectiveness at every other school.

First of all, despite the endorsement of Post writer Jay Mathews, KIPP is not a solution that works for all kids. Indeed, there are many facets of their program that cannot (and should not) be replicated.

As for “teacher effectiveness”, that, of course, is almost exclusively measured by standardized test scores.

Which is not a bad thing since President Obama and his secretary of education both have expressed the need for better standardized tests, right?

And just for good measure, we need to throw in the teacher improvement proposals of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of DC public schools, also focused almost entirely on individual teacher performance based on test scores.

See, fixing schools is very simple: better tests and training to better teach to those tests.

bill gates, school reform, standardized testing, teachers, washington post

Why should students learn to play a musical instrument? Because some researchers believe it might lead to higher test scores.

Why do we doing anything in public education these days?

Anyway, in a new study being conducted in a Pennsylvania school district, 130 kindergarten students will be taught to play the violin, theorizing that the instruction will “boost performance on standardized tests”.

“The object isn’t to learn to read music or even to learn to play the violin well,” said Schuylkill Valley Superintendent Solomon Lausch. “It’s to see if learning to play music by imitation has a positive impact on cognitive development such that it improves general academic performance.”

There’s something very sad about that attitude towards arts education.

education, music, standardized testing

Joel Klein, currently Chancellor of New York City schools, has been mentioned in several places as a possible Secretary of Education in the next administration.

Considering his love of standardized testing, I hope he stays in NYC.

In an article about Barack Obama’s education policy in today’s Wall Street Journal, Klein criticizes the idea of holding schools and students accountable without relying on standardized tests. Obama has pledged to reform the federal No Child Left Behind law in part by decreasing accountability systems’ reliance on standardized testing.

However, while the new administration may be looking for an alternative to our over-reliance on standardized testing, there are other groups, like the Gates foundation, who believe the problem is not the philosophy, it’s that the tests themselves that are “low-quality”.

Foundation officials said that the moves are motivated by their frustration with current tests and standards for what children should know, which each state drafts individually as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of education programs, said the result is a “testing crisis in this country,” in which tests are losing credibility among teachers, who see them as so low-quality that they are useless.

The only “testing crisis” we have in this country is the incredibly stupid concept that the only way to assess student learning is by using an annual machine-scored, lower-common-denominator exam, the taking of which a large part of the instructional year is dedicated.

government, reform, standardized testing

We need more local school officials and parents who think like this woman.

“Accountability is a good thing. Learning standards are a good thing. But is focusing on one test a fair measure of student success? I think that answer is, ‘No,’ ” said Laura Salomons, a School Committee member since May and a mother of four.

Salomons has submitted a proposal that seeks community support for allowing teachers to avoid tailoring their lessons to the MCAS. Instead, she would like to see teachers directed to instruct students on skills the district has deemed necessary for survival in the 21st century, including critical thinking, invention, problem-solving, and multicultural collaboration.

“I have come to the conclusion that we, as a school district, may be overly consumed with doing well on MCAS,” Salomons began in her eight-page proposal. “The focus is a detriment to reaching the school committee and superintendent’s goal of ‘providing students with . . . learning opportunities that encourage lifelong learning skills and that support a student’s artistic, social, emotional and physical development.’ “

Let’s face it. We do need to assess student learning. We certainly need accountability for teachers and schools.

What we don’t need is the idiotic concept embedded in No Child Left Behind which assumes every student, every classroom, every school is exactly alike.

And the even worse idea that our current educational structure and curriculum is still going to work in a world that is completely different from the one in which it was created.

education, nclb, reform, standardized testing