[Previous entry: "Welcome to my blog"] [Next entry: "Appendectomy Surgery"]
06/21/2001: "School Testing"
President Bush, and congress all seem to agree on the necessity for student testing. We will likely see a national law requiring that every student be tested every year. These tests will be used to evaluate schools, school districts, and possibly teachers. We are already hearing the clamor for “accountability” for failing schools. Who could be opposed to this, its seems like a no brainer, interesting choice of words.
Minnesota has had a statewide battery of tests for several years now. I predicted, loudly, to anyone who would listen, 8 years ago, that these tests, would lead to a significant drop in graduation rates. I hate it when I am right! In Minneapolis, according to the district’s latest publications has only a 50% graduation rate. This is incredible! This is the argument that I used.
Bear with me for a little thought experiment. You are an inner city high school principal. Your high school usually does very poorly on the standardized tests, although some of your students do very well. Your teachers insist that the quality of the education here is as good as anywhere, in spite of the evidence of the annual the test scores.
Now you’re are faced with an additional challenge. The state legislature, and the governor have just passed the “school accountability and excellence” bill. This bill would allow the local school district to remove your tenure, or even close down your school, if your average test scores don’t improve. What are your options?
You are involved in many school improvement programs. You have encouraged your best teachers to mentor the ones who need help. You have enlisted the aid of parents and other community members to help with tutoring, and you are using the most successful teaching methods available. Although these efforts are making a difference, you don’t expect the kind of significant test score improvements that the public policy makers want.
There is really only one way in the short term to significantly improve your test scores. That is to drastically increase the drop out rate of the lowest achieving students or take them out of the test pool by some other means, such as putting them in alternative schools, or identifying them as special education students.
All of the energy spent in improving the education of your student body to help the average students and the gifted students will do little to improve your average test scores as much as taking the low achievers out of the pool. This is pretty cynical, but that is the position we have put you in.
The fact is that average test scores of schools tell a lot about the demographics of the test pool, but not very much about the quality of teaching and learning that is going on.
That is what has happened. More are more students are being pushed out of schoolls, by various means, strict enforcement of grade point average for participation in sports, racist and brutal police liason officers and other disciplinary personnel, and fewer and fewer programs to engage low achieving students.
I don’t of course think the schools are totally responsible for the increase in the drop out rate. I am sure that the welfare reform program has resulted in making it difficult for many students to stay in school, but then this was passed by the same people that want to institute a test.
We certainly do need data to compare and improve schools, the tests we are using don’t do the job. These tests tell us a lot about the student population in the school, but we need to have a measure of learning. The current tests we are publishing do not give us any help in this regard.
What is it a parent wants to know about a school in order to make an intelligent choice for their child? Lets say I am considering sending my daughter to Minnehaha Academy, or Washburn High School. I have looked at the average test scores, and they are very different, but then I am intelligent enough to know that that is not the whole story of what is going on in the two buildings.
What I want to know is, if I put my daughter, my specific daughter, with her specific interests, strengths, weaknesses, and challenges, in Washburn, or Minnehaha, how will she come out four years later? What kind of tests could give me that data? I have done school visits, talked with friends, and teachers, but I deserve some data.
There could be data like that, in fact I am saying that there should be. We need to compare the same students year to year, school by school to see how much they learn. This is what educators call “longitudinal” measures. We also need to measure learning on a common measurements. What I am calling “growth points”. We need separate out this data by student’s strengths and weaknesses, (what educators call disaggregating)
If these tests were kept, and published, I could look at a chart find my child’s characteristics, and see which school would server my child better. That is, for students like my child, who entered the school at 9th grade at certain levels of knowledge, how did they (the same students) test two, three, and four years later? In other words, how much learning actually took place?
Certainly it is difficult to develop this kind of measurement, but we have the resources to do it.
Lets go back to our thought experiment. Lets say now that the legislator requires a school to make improvements in “growth” points. Then the legislature has given the principal the incentive to work for the benefit of all of the students. The underachieving students, the ones that were a drag on the average test scores, now are an opportunity. Someone who is reading at 3 years below grade level can add a lot of growth points to your scores if you can keep them in school and figure out how to reach them.
And what about the gifted, or high achieving student? In the first, or static measure, they were important to the principal’s averages score, but there was little incentive to really challenge them. The top few percentiles are not going to help you much if they go up. With the growth point measure, these students do not help your scores unless they continue to be challenged and grow.
All of a sudden we have a system that will give incentives to educators to really teach all students. We will be measuring learning, not demographics, and if we hold schools accountable for that, we would be moving our schools towards excellence.
Why haven’t we done this, and why isn’t it being talked about? The short answer is that it is being talked about. These kinds of standardized tests would shakeup a complacent educational industry. Some say that they would be too expensive but I believe it can be done with current resources.
There is over 2 Billion (that’s billion with a “B”) dollars spent each year in test development in this country. Most of it by textbook manufacturers, but some of it by federal, state, and local governments. We have the resources to create the kinds of measurements that will really improve education. I suggest we demand it.