5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby DomaDoma » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:48 pm

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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Andropov4 » Mon Mar 09, 2015 3:39 pm

Tesseracts wrote:The rise of standardized testing has been a good thing


It really hasn't. Instead of receiving a well-rounded education that tries to tackle several aspects of each subject, students are being taught with a laser focus on what's on the test, which is frequently much different than actually learning what they need to know to be successful either in a trade or college. This is also to the extreme disadvantage of otherwise intelligent and capable students who don't tend to test well- an student who can pull a B in every class but can't get above a D in standardized tests is getting screwed pretty hard.

Furthermore, it gives us an arbitrary way to judge teachers and school districts that ignores all factors but raw scores and results, in amazingly wrongheaded fashion, in already poor districts getting their funding cut and teachers fired. Standardized testing has a place, but the extent to and fashion in which it is now used is detrimental to the overall educational process.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Tesseracts » Mon Mar 09, 2015 3:53 pm

Andropov4 wrote:
Tesseracts wrote:The rise of standardized testing has been a good thing


It really hasn't. Instead of receiving a well-rounded education that tries to tackle several aspects of each subject, students are being taught with a laser focus on what's on the test, which is frequently much different than actually learning what they need to know to be successful either in a trade or college. This is also to the extreme disadvantage of otherwise intelligent and capable students who don't tend to test well- an student who can pull a B in every class but can't get above a D in standardized tests is getting screwed pretty hard.

Furthermore, it gives us an arbitrary way to judge teachers and school districts that ignores all factors but raw scores and results, in amazingly wrongheaded fashion, in already poor districts getting their funding cut and teachers fired. Standardized testing has a place, but the extent to and fashion in which it is now used is detrimental to the overall educational process.

I have issues with the way standardized testing has been implemented at times, but not the concept of standardized testing. I also think it's a good thing to fire bad teachers and close bad schools. Some schools are beyond repair. I know that's an unpopular opinion.

If a student is getting a B in every class but they can't pass a standardized test, that means their classes must have very low standards. These tests are not difficult to pass. That's the whole point of standardized testing, the standards. Teachers have a lot of freedom to make classes easier or more difficult, so you can't accurately determine how much a student knows by their grades. A lot of a grades also depend on things like attendance and homework completion, rather than actual knowledge. I don't think the purpose of school should be training kids in obediently showing up at the same place every day. The purpose should be teaching basic reading, writing, and math, at bare minimum.

Your post criticizes standardized testing but proposes no alternative for making sure special ed kids get an education.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Andropov4 » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:05 pm

Tesseracts wrote:I have issues with the way standardized testing has been implemented at times, but not the concept of standardized testing. I also think it's a good thing to fire bad teachers and close bad schools. Some schools are beyond repair.


The cumulative effect of this is to fire teachers in poor districts, thus making those positions undesirable and ensuring that the poorest kids who are most in need of good teachers end up in overcrowded, underfunded, dilapidated schools with only the most desperate and likely worst teachers available to them because those are the only ones who are willing to take a job there. When they close a school, it turns out they don't actually build a great new one for all those kids to go to. They just send them to the other overburdened schools in the district, further crowding them. It's a bad system that effectively punishes children for being poor.

Tesseracts wrote:If a student is getting a B in every class but they can't pass a standardized test, that means their classes must have very low standards. These tests are not difficult to pass.


You may feel that standardized tests are easy to pass, but I'd wager that there are a whole mess of people who legitimately don't test well who would disagree with you.

Tesseracts wrote:Your post criticizes standardized testing but proposes no alternative for making sure special ed kids get an education.


Talk to basically any parent of a special ed kid right now; the current system certainly doesn't ensure they get a good education. And I don't pretend to know how to fix the educational system, but that doesn't mean I'm simply going to shut up and continue to let it be shitty without saying anything.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Tesseracts » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:15 pm

Andropov4 wrote:
Tesseracts wrote:I have issues with the way standardized testing has been implemented at times, but not the concept of standardized testing. I also think it's a good thing to fire bad teachers and close bad schools. Some schools are beyond repair.


The cumulative effect of this is to fire teachers in poor districts, thus making those positions undesirable and ensuring that the poorest kids who are most in need of good teachers end up in overcrowded, underfunded, dilapidated schools with only the most desperate and likely worst teachers available to them because those are the only ones who are willing to take a job there. When they close a school, it turns out they don't actually build a great new one for all those kids to go to. They just send them to the other overburdened schools in the district, further crowding them. It's a bad system that effectively punishes children for being poor.

I need to look more into how the system influences poor districts before I have an opinion on this.

You may feel that standardized tests are easy to pass, but I'd wager that there are a whole mess of people who legitimately don't test well who would disagree with you.

What does it mean exactly to not test well? How can a student have the knowledge to pass a test but still fail the test?

I personally don't test very well because I have ADHD. Schools would accommodate my disability by giving me an extra quiet place to take a test and giving me extended time.

Talk to basically any parent of a special ed kid right now; the current system certainly doesn't ensure they get a good education. And I don't pretend to know how to fix the educational system, but that doesn't mean I'm simply going to shut up and continue to let it be shitty without saying anything.

I find this patronizing. As I said earlier my younger sister has autism. That means my parents are the parents of a special ed kid. As someone with ADHD I also have a lot of personal experience in the system. I have talked to many many parents and many many students trapped in the hell known as special education.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Tesseracts » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:20 pm

Tests, standardized or not, are now, and have always been, our best way to determine knowledge. Of course tests are not perfect, but I don't see what the alternative is. Is it simply giving everyone a high school diploma because they feel like they deserve it? That would render a high school diploma meaningless. We need a way to determine who is actually learning and who is not.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Andropov4 » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:21 pm

Tesseracts wrote:What does it mean exactly to not test well? How can a student have the knowledge to pass a test but still fail the test?


I don't really have the time to adequately address all of this right now (I'll be back this afternoon), but any sort of problems with (as you pointed out) ADHD, stress, or anxiety can have a massive impact on a student's ability to test well.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby DomaDoma » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:22 pm

If you look at standardized tests for elementary school in the '60s or '70s, you'll be appalled at how easy they've become since. And that's to say nothing of the entrance exams for high school up to the 1920s.

Not to say teaching to the test isn't a definite thing - my parents were very involved with my education, making sure I got herded toward all the most helpful/rigorous teachers they could find, and I still got a lecture on multiple-choice voodoo at least once a year. But if you adequately teach the subject, then your pupils will pass the test with no voodoo needed. It's only that we've come to expect far, far less of kids than they can actually perform, and the textbooks and tests are both symptom and cause of that.

In that respect, Common Core is a step in the right direction. Except for those moments where the curriculum takes a sharp non-Euclidian turn toward the moon, anyway.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby Andropov4 » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:23 pm

Tesseracts wrote:Tests, standardized or not, are now, and have always been, our best way to determine knowledge. Of course tests are not perfect, but I don't see what the alternative is. Is it simply giving everyone a high school diploma because they feel like they deserve it? That would render a high school diploma meaningless. We need a way to determine who is actually learning and who is not.


I feel that a more personalized evaluation process that relies on our teachers and faculty to have a semblance of a clue as to who is learning and who is not would be a superior system, but it's difficult to be sure.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby DamianaRaven » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:27 pm

I'll concede that as a means of ensuring a minimum standard of academic progress, standardized testing was almost a good idea. The biggest problem isn't that some kids don't test well, it's that the federal government sets out to punish bad schools rather than fix them with additional resources and/or administrative guidance. Budget cuts mean fewer teachers and smaller salaries for the ones who DO stay, so the school gets even worse.

Again, I blame the public for wanting to have their cake and eat it too. We demand better schools and more educated kids, but will howl like a cage of howler monkeys if anyone tries raising taxes to pay for it. Result: we end up looking for cheap options that give the illusion of improvement.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby DomaDoma » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:39 pm

As far as funding goes, school systems are ridiculously top-heavy; administrators outnumber teachers by 100% or more. You could get rid of half the administrators without impacting the quality of learning in the slightest, and their salary's more substantial than the teachers', too.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby cmsellers » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:51 pm

@Pov and Tess

I feel like you two might be arguing past one another to some degree. Tess supports standardized testing. Pov hates high-stakes testing. I agree with both points.

I always do really well on standardized tests; I overperform the grades I get in school (and I get pretty good grades in school) because I don't have to budget my time, don't have to deal with classmates, and don't have to interpret vague instructions.

Also, from middle school onwards I got special accomodations, namely use of a computer for writing sections, and I extra time. However I don't need the extra time most of the time (the only time I actually used it was on the essay portion of the SAT), and computers are becoming standard in standardized testing (I'm so glad that computers were normal when I took the GRE, because it meant I didn't have to request special accommodations for that, which would have been a pain).

Any rate, when standardized testing is testing things like reading and math skills, I think it's a good thing. It would be nice to have an independent assessment of writing skills, it's far harder to design a standardized test for writing skills. The current system is to have students write an essay in a limited amount of time, have two reviewers rate it according to pre-defined set of criteria, and a third reviewer resolve any large discrepencies. The problem is that you're writing one essay in 50 minutes of a high-stress environment, which I'm not sure is representative of student's writing ability.

I'd rather have those same reviewers review several essays by a student on a teacher-assigned topic. The problem with that solution is that A. it would cost more (essay portions are by far the most expensive parts of standardized tests to grade) and B. it would make it far to easy for students to cheat. At a minimum though, I think that essay portions should allow more time, and there should be more of them.

As for Pov's points, I absolutely agree that standardized tests should not be as high-stakes as they are now. Though the SAT/ACT and GRE are declining in importance for college/grad school admissions, using standardized tests as high-stakes tests in public schools is increasingly popular, especially with NCLB.

Using them as a teacher assessment is obviously wrong. Even when you account for the ability of students prior to going into a teacher's class, you'd still have the problem that students on the lower end of the curve are harder to teach than students on the higher end. Even if you account for that, you're still encouraging teachers to teach to the test when their job, salary, and/or school district's funding depends on it.

One complaint that teachers often have about standardized tests is "teaching to the test." I used to have sympathy for this complaint, but I've come to realize that at least in Massachusetts, the subjects which are tested on standardized tests are those which could stand to be more standardized. Math, reading, and writing are the subjects tested in my state, and the teachers who complain most about teaching to the test are English teachers, who feel that they're losing control of their curriculum.

My solution to both the "teaching to the test" complaint and the high-stakes nature of the tests would be to make certain courses in those test-prep courses. Call the math and writing courses "practical mathematics" and "clear writing," and then have several reading courses with different books (Shakespeare, science fiction, American lit) but the same sorts of questions.

Rather than one high-stakes standardized test a year, teachers of these classes would have standardized curriculum for these courses (reading, writing, math, and again, I'd add civics), and the only tests administered would be centrally-produced standardized tests. The results of these tests would determine most of a student's grade on those courses, but have no effect on the school or its curriculum outside those classes.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby sunglasses » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:54 pm

Let's not forget that many of the people who make the standarized tests also sell the damn textbooks.

So they might take something directly out of their newest book. If you're a poorer district, you've probably got an older edition. Therefore, you may know the answer but if it's not the answer the testmaker is looking for, it's wrong.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arc ... ng/374287/

The above is an amazing article, and I really think it explains how the current system doesn't do very well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ans ... ment-test/
Is an interesting piece, because Florida.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm an excellent test taker. I was the kid who'd sleep thru half the class, forget to turn in homework, and ace the test. I've always been good at tests. But I had a method. I knew I had a 25% chance of getting a multiple choice question right whether I knew the answer or not. And most multi-choice questions have at least one 'ridiculous' answer. So you figure out the way wrong one and you've up your odds to 33.33% of guessing the right answer. You have to understand, I was determined to be the first one done with the test. So I'd run through and answer all the questions I absolutely knew the answers to and then go back and work on the ones I'd skipped. But I know people who would obsess over one answer for so long, they'd be out of time and fail. It happens. Some people just don't test well...at least with our current methods and system.

And yes, bad teachers need to go but there's got to be a better way to find out who sucks as a teacher.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby cmsellers » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:55 pm

DomaDoma wrote:If you look at standardized tests for elementary school in the '60s or '70s, you'll be appalled at how easy they've become since. And that's to say nothing of the entrance exams for high school up to the 1920s.

Part of this is that under NCLB, states get to set their own standards. And since federal funding is contingent on student performance, most states set their standards quite low.
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Re: 5 Feel-Good School Programs With Horrifying...

Postby sunglasses » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:56 pm

cmsellers wrote:
DomaDoma wrote:If you look at standardized tests for elementary school in the '60s or '70s, you'll be appalled at how easy they've become since. And that's to say nothing of the entrance exams for high school up to the 1920s.

Part of this is that under NCLB, states get to set their own standards. And since federal funding is contingent on student performance, most states set their standards quite low.


I really, really wish NCLB would get shit canned.
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