teacherken's musings on everything

This blog is a copy of a comment I posted on dailykos today here in response to this

EXCEPT that I have gone through and cleaned up the typos!!!

Define "Well-Designed" testing program :

because what I have seen teaching in Maryland and Virginia is hardly what I would call well-designed, and what I have tracked around the country while I was doing doctoral work was hardly well-designed.

Tests can provide one piece of information, but in isolation, since usually a test is but a sampling of a domain, regardless of where you set test scores you will get errors  -- either false positive, that is, people who pass that administration because of an artificially high score when the cut score is set too low [to eliminate false negative];   or false negatives, when a person scores artificially low on that particular administration and the cut score is set too high [to elmiinate false positives],   --  or a mixture of both because the cut score is set somewhere in the middle.

Most of the tests that are being used are NOT designed to measure a minimum competence level, but to sort people.  That's one problem.   Another is that a test that allows valid inferences to be drawn for one purpose, that is, how well the student is performing, is almost certainly not designed to allow the drawing of valid inferences for other purposes, that is, how well the school is performing.   The two are not the same.  And the problem is even worse when using only multiple choice items that allow for only one correct answer in domains where another answer may be partially right  -- this binary scoring fails to give meaningful information even about what the student knows or does not know.  And that assumes that the question is well designed, which I assure you is quite often NOT the case.

You want to argue first things first.  NCLB is not just the testing, it is how the tests are being misused.  The entire way Annual Yearly Progress is being measured, incluidng in subgroups,  pretty much guarantees that most schools are going to be found not to measure up  .. and that is clearly the intent, regardless of what is stated.

We are taking guidance on testing from people from Texas.  May I remind you that the so-called Houston Miracle under Rod Paige was FAKE  -- students were tested in 10th grade, but minorities were held back in 9th grade for two or three years 'til they dropped out.  But they didn't count as dropouts because they would be coded as intending to get a GED.  You had high schools in Houston claiming dropout rates of less than 5% when the system as a whole ws graduating less than 40% of those who entered in 7th grade.  Walt Haney of Boston Colelge took all this apart BEFORE Congress passed the monstrosity of NCLB.

First things first  -- people learn to read by reading, and learn to do math by doing math.  The real purpose of tests should be to inform both the student and the teacher of what the student does not understand and for which s/he needs help.  But these tests serve no such purpose.  And the measuring of this year's group of 10th graders against next year's tells you nothing  --  you have no idea how the characteristics [prior knowledge, socioeconomics, reading or math ability, etc.] compare between the two cohorts.  Uncontrolled variance in the cohorts may account for as much as 90% of the difference in performance.

We have been down this road many times before.   This bill is designed to bash public schools, transfer money to testing companies   [gee, Harcourt is based in Texas,  and Harold McGraw is a close personal friend of the Bush family], try to shift funds to charters [did you know the Jeb Bush forced the Florida Teachers' pension -- for public schools teachers  -- to buy the controlling interest in Edison Schools, that disaster of a for-profit business founded by Chris Whittle and touted by the likes of Bill Bennett and Lamar Alexander] and tutoring companies [Kaplan must be loving this, and remember, they are the MOST profitable division of the company that owns the Washington Post and Newsweek].

I tried to persaude people in Congress that this program would be a disaster.  I exchanged emails with George Miller.  I lobbied my own Congressman and talked with his point person on education.  Democrats went along because they thought they would get more Federal money for public schools.   Hah.   They got more mandates, which more than  exceed in cost any additional money, and some of the money they already had will be transfered away from them.

NCLB is a sham.  That is why Republican legislatures are objecting.  The only reason the Utah legislature did not formally oppose before the election is that they were warned if they did so they might find a military base or two suddenly being closed.  

NCLB has done more damage to public schools than  did that atrocity and inaccurate report entitled A Nation at Risk  (whose executive summary did not even agree with its own contents, and whose main assumption, that we were going to suffer disastrously in economics to places like Japan, has clearly been demonstrated to be false), and that is saying something.

Hey, Democrats are as much to blame.  Mark Warner here in Virginia has bought into the idea of testing.  Bill Clinton was head of NGA when they helped produce the atrocious GOALS 2000 during the Bush I presidency  [remember, we were going to be First in the World in Math and Science by 200  --  so what happened?   is it possible tht the changes we made then DAMAGED our public schools?  Have we learned NOTHING??].

Sorry, on this one I not only disagree, I do so vehemently, not just from my experience as a classroom teacher, but as one who is published on the subject, who has done extenseive reading in the literature on educational policy and the effects in particular of various testing regimes.

FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME OFFLINE at kber@earthlink.net Comments, suggestions and even rude remarks are welcomed! Preface any messages with "teacherken" so I know they are not spam.