Category Archives: Testing

The science education myth

Here’s interesting piece of research that undercuts the persistent rhetoric about the failure of schools to prepare students for the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

The Urban Institute’s report Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand says that the evidence does NOT support recent policy report claims that the United States is falling behind other nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of scientists and engineers. The report argues that:

U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient to attract qualified college graduates.

The report, written by B. Lindsay Lowell and Harold Salzman, shows U.S. student performance has steadily improved over time in math, science, and reading. It also found enrollment in math and science courses is actually up. For example, in 1982 high school graduates earned 2.6 math credits and 2.2 science credits on average. By 1998, the average number of credits increased to 3.5 math and 3.2 science credits. The percent of students taking chemistry increased from 45% in 1990 to 55% in 1996 and 60% in 2004. Scores in national tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, and the ACT have also shown increases in math scores over the past two decades.

Why the discrepancy between the evidence and the rhetoric about STEM achievement and jobs? Salzman told Business Week

that reports citing low U.S. international rankings often misinterpret the data. Review of the international rankings, which he says are all based on one of two tests, the Trends in International Mathematics & Science Study (TIMMS) or the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), show the U.S. is in a second-ranked group, not trailing the leading economies of the world as is commonly reported. In fact, the few countries that place higher than the U.S. are generally small nations, and few of these rank consistently high across all grades, subjects, and years tested. Moreover, he says, serious methodological flaws, such as different test populations, and other limitations preclude drawing any meaningful comparison of school systems between countries.

The latest bribes for giving into the tests

The New York Times: A Plan to Use Cellphones to Reward Good Grades

Free cellphone airtime could be a reward for high-performing students if the city adopts the newest idea from the Education Department’s chief equality officer.

In New York City public schools, cellphones are considered contraband. But free cellphone airtime could be a reward for high-performing students if the city adopts the newest idea from the Education Department’s chief equality officer.

That official, Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who is leading the city’s program to pay cash to some students who do well on standardized tests, told an undergraduate economics class at Harvard last month that his next proposal would include a plan to give cellphones to students, and reward free minutes to those who do well — an idea that is at odds with one of the city’s most contentious school policies, the ban on students having cellphones in school. The ban has been attacked by parents and politicians, who call it a draconian policy that endangers students. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who would have to approve Dr. Fryer’s proposal, has repeatedly refused to budge on the ban despite the outcries.

After the City Council overrode the mayor’s veto of legislation to allow children to carry their phones to school, City Hall officials emphatically pointed out that nothing would change and that cellphones would still be banned inside schools.

Dr. Fryer’s comments were described by several people who were present at the Harvard lecture on Oct. 10, part of his course titled “Race in America.” They did not want to be identified because, they said, Dr. Fryer had chastised his class for communicating with reporters about the lecture.

Most of Dr. Fryer’s work has been closely guarded by the Education Department, where officials have repeatedly said that it is still in the “developing stages.”

Dr. Fryer did not return telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking comment.

“This is one of several student-motivation proposals that the department is considering,” said David Cantor, a spokesman for the city Education Department. He said that “this is a proposal that neither the mayor nor the chancellor has signed off on.”

The proposal is in line with the larger incentive program that Dr. Fryer is running, as well as with programs offering bonuses to teachers and principals based on student performance.

Last month, the city embraced a plan by a private foundation to reward students who pass Advanced Placement tests with thousands of dollars.

Under the newest proposal, the cellphones would be donated at virtually no cost to the city and students would be unable to make calls during school hours, Dr. Fryer said, according to people who attended the lecture. The free phones would have a fixed number of minutes of air time. Students who excel would be rewarded with additional minutes, Dr. Fryer told the class, the people said.

If officials approve, the first batch of free phones, flip-style models donated by Motorola, would be delivered to several hundred students this month, Dr. Fryer told the class. He said that the program, if approved, would eventually attempt to include one million students in city schools.

Dr. Fryer also told the class that celebrities, including the hip-hop artist Jay-Z, might be asked to record ring tones.

Chuck Kaiser, a spokesman for Motorola, said in an e-mail message that the company is “aware of the concept,” but that it would be premature to comment on it because “the project is under consideration and no commitments have yet been made.”

In June, when Dr. Fryer was first brought in as a close adviser to the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, he said he would be looking at ways to “rebrand academic success,” and would consider a marketing campaign aimed at children in the public schools, particularly black, Latino and low-income students. But Dr. Fryer has been tight-lipped publicly about the details.

During a speech at the Schomburg Center in Harlem on Tuesday — his first public appearance in New York this year — Dr. Fryer alluded to some frustrations with dealing with the education politics of the city, saying that he was often asked by top officials, “What is the union going to think of this?”

To that, Dr. Fryer said, he responds, “This is a personal mission between me and the 10-year-olds in Harlem.”

While Dr. Fryer’s incentive program has been criticized by some educators who say that it undercuts the idea that learning should be for its own sake, he faced a largely receptive audience on Tuesday and has been welcomed by several leading black leaders in the city.

“We need to support Dr. Fryer in his efforts because, without any reservation, he is going to do in the 21st century for education what W. E .B. DuBois did in the 20th century,” said the Rev. C. Vernon Mason, who runs a youth development program and spoke at Tuesday’s event.

When one principal asked Dr. Fryer what he planned to do to change a culture in which students’ success is mocked, he responded that he understood the urgency of the problem.

“We are talking about a movement where we get kids to succeed. We’re not talking about a slogan campaign,” he said. Then he added, “All I can say is stay tuned.”
Next Article in New York Region (6 of 16) »

Ken Goodman: It’s time to Resist NCLB: A Post-reauthorization Strategy

Literacy scholar and U of Arizona professor Ken Goodman on the resisting NCLB:

It’s time to Resist NCLB: A Post- reauthorization Strategy

Ken Goodman
Guest Columnist EdNews.org

The time has come for educators, parents and the general public to develop a post NCLB reauthorization strategy. We’ve essentially lost the fight to modify NCLB in any significant way or get rid of it. It’s time for an organized campaign of resistance. We must resist NCTE at every level in every practical way we can to save our students from its terrible effects and to save public education.

Within the next few weeks the House Education Committee will send to the floor of the House its revision of NCLB. Some time thereafter the Senate committee will send its revision to the floor of the Senate. They are likely to face only token opposition and little debate. The press will continue to largely ignore and misrepresent the real threat continuing NCLB poses to public education and American democracy.

What will result, as it now appears, is a slightly softer version of NCLB. It will provide a little more flexibility in how the law impacts English language learners and those with special needs.

But it will not change in any fundamental ways. And so far there is no indication that the Department of Education will make other than cosmetic changes in the way it interprets and enforces the law. Just last week, for example, a new review panel rejected the Reading First proposal of Puerto Rico because it didn’t conform sufficiently to DOE mandates.

In particular the Reading First section (Title X) will continue to define reading and reading research in such a way that the DOE will continue to impose absurdly narrow methods, materials and tests on states and local school districts. And the contracts illegally imposed on the states according to the Office of Inspector General reports will remain in force. The consultants who the OIG said have made obscene profits from imposing their own materials and tests on states and districts will not only go unpunished but their profits will continue. The astrologists of reading will continue in charge of the reading space program.

There is little reason to suspect that a change in the White House or an increased Democratic majority in Congress will further modify or abandon NCLB. Democrats George Miller and Edward Kennedy have committed themselves too deeply to NCLB to admit that it is a failure. Both have accepted the false and exaggerated claims of Bush and Spellings that NCLB and Reading First are working.

Though there has been a notable demand that NCLB be discontinued and ESEA revert to its pre-NCLB form, and a few members of Congress have agreed, getting rid of the law never got real consideration. Attempts at informing the decision making in Congress to produce the basic changes needed in NCLB to change it from a negative punitive law destructive of public education into a real reform have largely failed. The unions failed to rally their members and the public: AFT was coopted to support NCLB from the beginning and NEA was too timid in using its potential political strength to make any real difference. Movement conservatives with massive financial and tactical support from the National Business Round Table and rich right wing foundations have successfully kept NCLB out of the presidential campaign as they did in 2004.

For seven more years terrible things will happen to children as young as 5 as a result of NCLB and Reading First. And as every independent study has shown by 2014 virtually every school and school district will be failing. In the meantime huge numbers of students will drop out as the hand writing on the wall is clear that they won’t be able to graduate with a diploma from high school. And in a time when a teacher shortage is growing many teachers are leaving the profession and young people are being discouraged from entering. And the campaign will increase its attack on teacher education and higher education in general. Blaming teacher educators for the failures of NCLB.
Legal basis for resistance

There is a strong legal basis for resisting NCLB. The investigations of the Inspector General have laid out in explicit detail the ways in which those given the power in the Department of Education to implement NCLB and Reading First violated the NCLB law itself and the original law establishing the Department of Education. Both clearly prohibited the imposition of curriculum and methodology on states and local education agencies. That means that every state contract under NCLB is null and void. It means that contracts establishing assistance centers to advise the states and LEAs on implementation are void and those centers must be replaced.

And in addition to that the processes were illegal because staff and consultants were and still are involved in blatant conflicts of interest.

Legally, states and LEA’s have every reason to refuse to enforce their NCLB and Reading First contracts and have the grounds, if necessary, to sue the DOE and the offending consultants. Parents, individually and collectively, also have the right to sue on behalf of their children to get rid of the onerous and destructive effects of NCLB on their children’s lives and education.

There is ample documentation both for the illegality of the implementation of NCLB and for the damage it is doing to children.

Pedagogical Basis for Resistance

From a point of view of scientific pedagogy NCLB is riddled with absurdities:

1. It is punitive. Instead of providing financial and professional support for schools with low achieving students it punishes them. It has already led to transferring authority over schools and school districts from professionals and local authorities to politicians. Already many public schools have been handed over to profit makers.

2. In the name of putting “highly” qualified teachers in classrooms it has undermined state teacher certification programs and made it impossible for rural schools and middle schools to retain experienced teachers and recruit professionally educated teachers.

3. It has perverted science by using the phrases “scientifically based research” and “scientifically based reading research” to describe unproven commercial materials and methods which are absurd in design and unteachable. And it has marginalized a wide range of alternate approaches.

4.It has set absurd goals. Ultimately it requires that all students and all sub groups be “proficient” in reading math and science by 2014. Because “proficient” is essentially undefined. Both the press and politicians including President Bush and Secretary Spellings have freely equated that with having all children above grade level by 2014. That makes the goal absurd since by definition only half of the pupils in any grade can be above grade level, which is the mean score achieved on a particular test. Even Diane Ravitch, along term supporter of NCLB has called this goal absurd. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress the term proficient is used to name an arbitrary level above basic and below excellent. Only about 20% of those taking NAEP achieve the proficient level currently.

5. NCLB deprofessionalizes teaching. It limits the ability of experienced, professional teachers to make decisions on how best to serve each pupil. In enforcement, a hierarchy is established by NCLB which subjects effective teachers to interference by inexperienced and unqualified staff members empowered to slavishly enforce NCLB.

6.
It distorts and narrows the curriculum to reading, math and starting in 2007 science and limiting or eliminating everything else including physical education and recess. It’s absurd that our officials are taking fast foods and sugary drinks out of schools but eliminating physical exercise.

7. NCLB diverts kindergarten and even pre-school from their historical purposes to academic pre-first grades. What is more absurd than five year olds being labeled as failing in the first week of kindergarten because of their performance on absurd tests? And what is more absurd than having children repeat kindergarten as academic failures?

8. In the guise of having high expectations for all young people NCTE has required that children with special needs and English language learners to take the same tests and be subjected to the same curricula as all other children. Further, it punishes the whole school or LEA when either of these subgroups inevitably fails to achieve the unachieveable,

Moral basis for resistance

Framed as a reform which would eliminate differences between ethnic and economic populations of students in school success, NCLB has imposed an immoral, one-size fits all set of mandates which hurt all students but hurts those it claims to help the most.

It measures success by learners and teachers entirely by scores on tests of questionable validity. That devalues any learning that isn’t easily testable by simplistic tests and it narrows the curriculum to what is being tested.

It is robbing children of their childhood imposing tedium and guilt on them and making them personally responsible for the failures of the system. It has made successful learners feel they are failures and taught them that conformity is more important than thoughtful response.

NCLB has turned teachers from committed guides and mentors into automotons powerless to do what they know is best for their students. It has corrupted the moral obligation of teachers to protect their pupils from harm.

It has substituted governmental absolutes for the responsible choices of parents.

Methods of resistance

Educators, their unions and professional associations, educational decision makers, parents, interested citizens and the students themselves all have a range of ways of resisting NCLB.

Only massive resistance can bring it down and get the attention of the politicians.

Teachers and administrators are of course vulnerable. Often taking an overt stand can jeopardize their jobs. On the other hand they are the ones who see most clearly how NCLB is hurting their pupils.Some teachers and administrators will be confident enough to make public acts of resistance. As a profession, educators have tended to self-censor themselves more than is necessary. But as a result of NCLB teachers and administrators will reach a point beyond which their consciences will not let them go. They will refuse to administer certain tests, use certain texts, grade their pupils unfairly. Rather than simply leaving their jobs when they become untenable they will commit acts of resistence and dare their districts to fire them. Groups of teachers in individual schools and districts will of course be more successful if they act together and support each other.

There are ways that teachers and administrators can resist in private ways. Teachers can resist, in the time honored way, by closing their doors and doing what they feel is best for their kids, minimizing the use of absurd tests and materials. And they can keep parents aware of the real progress of their kids and help them to understand why they deviate from mandates. Informed parents are their best defense.

Administrators can protect teachers from some impositions and support their professional decisions for the benefit of their pupils. They can document the effects of aspects of NCLB for parents, school board members and the public. And they can establish a positive atmosphere in their schools that can neutralize some effects of NCLB interventions.

Unions and professional organizations have a responsibility to organize resistence. In Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand teachers unions have had a tradition of including methods and curriculum in their concerns. There are numerous examples of successful campaigns by unions to refuse to administer tests and support their members in their refusal to conform to unprofessional impositions. NEA’s California affiliate went beyond NEA’s position recently and called for abolition of NCLB. They need to take the next step of organizing their members to resist NCLB and supporting them when they do. The unions and professional organizations need to take the lead in organizing local, state, and national demonstrations against NCLB. They are probably the only ones who could bring a million teacher to Washington to show the politicians the professionals care about what happens to their students.

Administrators’ unions and organizations have taken strong positions against NCLB but they haven’t been public enough. They need to call for and support resistence to NCLB.

Parents have a wide range of ways to resist NCLB. They should inform themselves by visiting their children’s classes and observing what NCLB is doing to them. They can talk about NCLB with school administrators and school board members when they see their children being hurt by NCLB. Parents can use the existing PTA to resist NCLB or they can organize parents within schools and school districts to fight use of absurd tests and materials and decisions by school boards that limit the curriculum or eliminate play time. There are a number of specific actions parents can take:

1. They can boycott the tests by keeping their children home when tests are announced or demanding that their permission be obtained for each test. With absurd tests such as DIBELS parents can insist that their children not be tested and that no results be transmitted beyond the school without parental permission. NCLB requires that 95% of each sub group be tested so a few boycotting parents can have a major effect.

2. They can support acts of resistence by teachers and administrators

3. They can contact news media and school board members documenting how NCLB is hurting their children.

4. They can educate themselves and other parents of the political process for electing school board members and support candidates pledged to resisting NCLB.

5.They sue on behalf of their children to protest illegal implementation of NCLB.

Students of course feel the negative impact of NCLB the most. Even young children can, with the support of their parents, resist NCLB. They can write letters and circulate petitions about tests and school policies. For example they can petition the principal to reinstate recess or write to the school board about absurd materials. Children have rights and parents can help them to know how to assert their rights.

Older students in middle school and high school can organize their resistance to NCLB through letters, petitions and demonstrations. It was demonstrations by high school students that eventually brought down the apartheid system in South Africa. Students have the right to a voice in how their schools and classrooms will run.

NCLB came about through the clever manipulation of the democratic system to control Congressional decision making. United, educators, students, parents and the informed public can use the democratic system to resist NCLB and bring it down.

Published October 9, 2007

BC teacher refuses to give test

Here are links to local stories and editorials about Sooke elementary teacher Kathryn Sihota’s refusal to give the District Assessment of Reading Team (aka DART) test.

News stories:
“Teacher in hot water over not giving test” (The Vancouver Sun, September 25, 2007)

“Victoria teacher faces discipline for refusing to test students” (The Province (Vancouver, BC), August 26, 2007)

“Teacher faces hearing for refusing to give test” (The Vancouver Sun, August 25, 207)

Editorials and Letters:

“Teachers have to follow the rules, just like students do” (The Vancouver Sun, September 26, 2007)

“Standardized tests prevent future shock for students” (The Vancouver Sun, September 26, 2007)

“Standardized tests prevent future shock for students” (The Vancouver Sun, September 26. 2007)

“Reading tests offer no benefits” (TImes Colonist (Victoria, BC), September 1, 2007)

A Worldwide Test for Higher Education?

Inside Higher Ed: A Worldwide Test for Higher Education?

For much of the last year or two, debate has raged among American higher education officials and state and federal policy makers about the wisdom and practicality of creating a system that would allow for public comparison of how successfully individual colleges and/or programs are educating their students. Many college leaders have rejected the push, which has emanated primarily from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and the U.S. Education Department, on the grounds that the nation’s colleges and universities — two-year and four-year, public and private, exclusive and open enrollment — and their students are far too varied to be responsibly and intelligently measured by any single, standardized measure (or even a suite of them).

But the thirst among politicians and others seeking to hold colleges and universities more accountable for their performance is powerful, and it is not merely an American phenomenon. Proof of that can be found in the fact that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers who have met quietly in recent months to discuss the possibility of creating a common international system to measure the learning outcomes of individual colleges and university systems, along the lines of the well-regarded test that OECD countries now administer to 15-year-olds, the Program for International Student Assessment.

Hursh: Use an array of academic yardsticks; scrub standardized tests

Here’s good column on what’s wrong with NCLB and some questions to ask regarding how we can move forward with more productive educational reform.

Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY):
Use an array of academic yardsticks; scrub standardized tests
By David Hursh

In my view, No Child Left Behind needs to be significantly overhauled, if not rescinded, and I present below several proposals for change.

However, I would also like to make a more general point: If we are to improve education, it is crucial that we ask the right questions and carefully consider the evidence.

For example, NCLB proponents cite recent research by the Center for Education Policy indicating that more students have demonstrated proficiency in math and reading since the passage of the legislation.

However, the real question should be whether the percentage of students achieving proficiency since the passage of NCLB is increasing faster than it did before the law, and the answer is no.

What we were doing to improve student learning before the passage of NCLB would have likely resulted in the same increases.

Moreover, even the Center for Education Policy cautions that its data showing improvements in students’ test scores should not be used to conclude that the new policy is working.

It writes that improved test scores may “reflect easier tests … changing rules for testing, or overly narrow teaching to the test.”

We should also question whether improved test scores demonstrate that students are learning more. Recent reports show that while students’ scores on state standardized exams have increased, their scores on the national standardized test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have increased only in some subjects and grades.

My own view echoes that of 137 national education, civil rights, religious, labor and disability groups that have signed a joint statement on NCLB that concludes high-stakes standardized tests fail to adequately inform us about student learning, and that argue “the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.”

As reported by Fairtest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (fairtest.org), the recommended changes to NCLB, which I support, include:

# Replace over-reliance on standardized tests with the use of multiple achievement measures to provide a more comprehensive picture of student and school performance.

# Supplant arbitrary proficiency targets with ambitious achievement targets based on rates of success achieved by the most effective public schools.

# Enhance the knowledge and skills that teachers, administrators and families need to support high achievement and improve state and district capacities to assist them.

# Increase NCLB funding to cover a substantial percentage of the costs that states and districts will incur to carry out these recommendations.

# Fund research and development of more effective accountability systems that better meet the goal of high academic achievement for all children.

Over the next several months, the federal government will consider revamping NCLB. In my view, it needs substantial overhaul.

But whether or not you agree, now is the time to become informed about the policy through Web sites (Fairtest, U.S. Department of Education, The Coalition for Common Sense in Education) and public hearings, and to voice your opinions to federal representatives on how you would like the law changed.

Hursh is an associate professor at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and a member of Rochester’s Coalition for Common Sense in Education dedicated to improving public schools.

New York City decides to pay students cash for test scores

Rather than investing money in improving the learning and teaching conditions in schools or addressing the systemic economic and social inequalities that are the root of the so-called “achievement gap” in schools, The New York Times reports today that the NYC school chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have decided to move forward with a pay for test score scheme in New York City Public Schools that could pay out as much as $500 a year to individual students.

The announcement came on the same day the University of California, Berkeley released a study finding that high school grades are the best predictors of academic success in college. The study by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices notes that “high-school grades provide a fairer, more equitable, and ultimately more meaningful basis for admissions decision-making” than standardized tests like the SAT.

Geiser and Santelices found that:

HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample;
surprisingly, the predictive weight associated with HSGPA increases after the freshman year, accounting for a greater proportion of variance in cumulative fourth-year than first-year college grades; and
as an admissions criterion, HSGPA has less adverse impact than standardized tests on disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students.

The NYC plan is based on the work of Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, who has been meeting with NYC school officials pushing the program. Fryer has turned is research into a new job as the NYC Department of Education’s “chief equality officer,” a member of the chancellor’s senior staff.

The pay for test scores scheme is part of a larger antipoverty incentive program that Bloomberg has instituted, which also includes other cash payments, all raised privately ($53 million), to influence behavior and reduce poverty. Those in the pilot plan can earn up to $5,000 a year by meeting criteria related to health, education, and work, including: $150 a month for keeping a full-time job; $50 a month for having health insurance. Families will also receive as much as $50 per month per child for high attendance rates in school, as well as $25 for attending parent-teacher conferences.

See Sandra Mathison’s “Bribes for Tests” for a critique of the pay for test score strategy and Alfie Kohn‘s Punished By Rewards on why carrot and stick approaches in education are wrong-headed.

Bribes for Tests Scores

Sandra Mathison critiqued the “bribes for tests” strategies in US schools a couple of years back in Z Magazine where she wrote:

It remains common nonsense that extrinsic rewards lead to internal motivation. Indeed much research has demonstrated the deleterious effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation. Over the years, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have repeatedly demonstrated this and recently their work points to the likelihood that using state tests for motivational purposes will likely lead to poorer education overall.

Now, unfortunately, it looks like the bribes for test strategy is gaining some serious traction in New York City as the Mayor Bloomberg and the school chancellor Joel Klein are considering a plan that would pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests.

Dismantling NCLB and Refocusing Accountability

Refocusing Accountability: Using Local Performance Assessments to Enhance Teaching and Learning for Higher Order Skills, a Briefing Paper Prepared for Members of The Congress of The United States, by George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Monty Neill and Pat Roschewski, is on the FairTest website.

You can link from it to legislative language to change NCLB in line with the recommendations of the paper. These recommendations are very consistent with the legislative proposals of the Forum on Educational Accountability, based in turn on the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB. The FEA recommendations and the Joint Statement are also at www.edaccountability.org.

The text of the executive summary of “Refocusing Accountability” follows:

Executive Summary

Refocusing Accountability:
Using Local Performance Assessments to Enhance Teaching and Learning for Higher Order Skills

By George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Monty Neill and Pat Roschewski

Performance based assessments, often locally controlled and involving multiple measures of achievement, offer a way to move beyond the limits and negative effects of standardized examinations currently in use for school accountability. While federal legislation calls for “multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding” (NCLB, Sec. 1111, b, I, vi), most assessment tools used for federal reporting focus on lower-level skill that can be measured on standardized mostly multiple-choice tests. High stakes attached to them have led schools to not engage in more challenging and engaging curriculum but to limit school experiences to those that focus on test preparation.

Performance assessments that are locally controlled and involve multiple measures assist students in learning and teachers in teaching for higher order skills. These tools engage students in the demonstration of skills and knowledge through the performance of tasks that provide teachers with an understanding of student achievement and learning needs. Large scale examples involving the use of such performance-based assessments come from states such as Nebraska, Wyoming, Connecticut and New York, as well as nations such as Australia and Singapore. The evidence from research on these and other systems indicate that through using performance assessments schools can focus instruction on higher order skills, provide a more accurate measure of what students know and can do, engage students more deeply in learning, and provide for more timely feedback to teachers, parents, and students in order to monitor and alter instruction.

Research evidence suggests that in order for performance assessment systems to work, governments must make significant investments in both teacher development and the development of performance tasks. However, this investment is often no greater than the cost of standardized measures. More important, it strengthens teacher quality and student learning. Performance assessment systems can be reliable and valid, having both content and predictive validity when appropriately utilized.

Based on the evidence that performance based assessment better meets the federal agenda of teaching for higher-level skills, reauthorization of NCLB should support and encourage state and local education agencies in developing performance assessments. Congress can amend Section 1111 (b)(3) of NCLB with a new paragraph (D) that authorizes and encourages states to move to performance based assessments and multiple measures incorporated into a system combining state and local assessments. Authorization for adequate funding to support this move should be included in the legislation.

Why does the US government mislead the public about educational achievement?

Well, Jerry Bracey—a fellow with policy groups at Arizona State University and the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation—says the numbers reported in international comparisons of student achievement “are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.”

In short, test scores are used for fear-mongering (among other things) and, as Bracey points out in his May 3 Washington Post op-ed:

If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

A Test Everyone Will Fail
By Gerald Bracey

The world of education is a world of tests these days. But why should tests be only for students? Here’s one for policymakers, politicians and adults in general. Bet you don’t pass.

The National Assessment Governing Board defined the “proficient” rating on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, as the level that “all students should reach.” (The other levels are “basic” and “advanced”; the proficient and advanced levels are often reported together as “proficient or better.”) Given that, and given that Sweden was the top-ranked country among 35 in the most recent international reading study, answer the following:

1. If Swedish fourth-graders sat for our National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test, what proportion of them would be labeled “proficient or better”?

2. If Singaporean eighth-graders sat for our NAEP science test, what proportion would be labeled “proficient or better”?

3. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of 1995, where did American fourth-graders rank in science among the 26 participating nations?

4. What percentage of American fourth-graders were labeled “proficient or better” in the 1996 NAEP science assessment?

5. What indicators of achievement have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office; the National Academy of Sciences; the National Academy of Education; and the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing?

6. What are the first words in set-off text that one encounters in the “Leaders and Laggards” report released in February by the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

Here are the answers:

1. Thirty-three percent.

2. Fifty-one percent.

3. Third.

4. Twenty-nine percent.

5. The NAEP achievement levels: basic, proficient and advanced.

6. “The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics.”

By comparing the results of foreign students and American students on tests administered in both nations, and then examining the American students’ scores on the U.S. NAEP, it is possible to reliably estimate how well foreign students would perform on the NAEP.

And it turns out that only one-third of those high-flying Swedish kids would be considered proficient readers; the NAEP figure for U.S. fourth-graders was 29 percent. The great majority of the remaining countries would have fewer proficient students than the United States. Using the NAEP standard, no country comes close to having a majority of proficient readers.

Under the NAEP standard, Singapore is the only nation in the world to have a majority of its students be proficient in science, and that by a scant 1 percent. Only a handful of countries would have a majority of students proficient in mathematics.

All those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent: Children can’t answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions they shouldn’t be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called “unreasonable” results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations.

Other evidence is easy to come by. In 2000, 2.7 percent of American high school seniors scored 3 or better — the score at which colleges begin to grant credit for the course — on Advanced Placement calculus. Almost 8 percent of seniors (including those who did not take the test) scored above 600 on the math SAT; nearly a quarter (24 percent) of those who took it scored over 600. Yet NAEP said that only 1.5 percent of the nation’s seniors reached its “advanced” level.

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The “Leaders and Laggards” report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.

In the 1980s, the “schools suck” bloc used such numbers to make us fearful that Japan, now emerging from a 15-year period of recession and stagnation, was going to take our markets; today, India and China play the role of economic ogres.

Recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Post that constant references to a “war on terror” “stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue.” Happens all the time in education. The most recent phony alarm comes from Eli Broad and Bill Gates, who are putting up $60 million hoping to “wake up the American people.” If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.