by Alain Jehlen in Schools and Youth
Posted on January 30, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Last Modified on February 17, 2008 at 3:47 pm
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Is high-stakes testing “the civil rights issue of our time” or a strategy for avoid the hard steps we need to take to improve education? See what you think.
Continued from MCAS and Somerville kids: Adam Sweeting’s forum
In this excerpt from Adam Sweeting’s MCAS forum, the debaters are Greg Nadeau and Jim Kaplan, and they agree–sort of.
Listen to hear them debate link
Greg Nadeau:
I think that people have made a lot of great points. The thing that I feel is missing from this conversation is the impact that MCAS and education reform and No Child Left Behind has had on our public education system, to refocus us on the kids most in need. And we as a country traditionally did a terrible job with the kids who were at the lowest part of the education system. As the superintendent said—we had a 50% drop-out rate—our public ed system was a sorting system where we sorted the kids through the door A or door B and we just failed kids for generations.
That is changing and it’s changing in very significant way because of MCAS and ed reform and No Child Left Behind. There are problems with it, there are things that certainly can be improved. Carl’s bill, I think, gets to—and the study, there’s a lot of things to have multiple measures, to do growth models so you’re looking at the gain for each kid, there’s a lot of things that can be done better, but I think that somehow or another I feel like that we’re missing in this conversation just how profoundly public education has resynched itself to focus on the kids who are most in need.
I mean, for me, MCAS is the most important civil rights initiative of our life, and I don’t understand how we can talk about the failing urban kids and how it’s, you know, that it’s creating anxieties or test… I mean the truth is, it has completely refocused our public education system.
Jim Kaplan:
I actually want to agree with Greg, that No Child Left Behind and Unz and MCAS have changed education tremendously. I think they’ve been tremendously successful in shifting the debate.
For years, I’ve worked on desegregation and that’s off the agenda, that’s totally off the agenda now. We’re going straight back to hyper-segregation and that’s not under discussion. The Boston Latin School gets unleashed from racial balance. The Supreme Court says every remedy is unconstitutional—every remedy; any time you calculate a remedy, they’ll knock it down as unconstitutional, whether it’s affirmative action or busing or geographically wider districts for desegregation; every single remedy. There’s one or two that might work. But desegregation is really off the agenda.
So I think that’s the triumph of No Child Left Behind, it just got race and segregation totally off the agenda.
Carl Sciortino:
That’s actually not so good.
Jim:
No, I didn’t say “good,” I just said “successful.” It was intended to do this, and it has done it.
Another big success is that it has shifted off of strictly educational issues such as class size, because class size is very expensive. If you reduce class size, if you divide, say, 60 kids into four classes, that means four teachers; into three classes, only three teachers; and if you have thirty kids per class, you only need two teachers.
So, if you go from thirty kids per class to 15 you need not just two teachers and classrooms, you need four classrooms and that means you need new buildings and then that means you’ll end up hiring more teachers. But you’ll end up paying for bricks and mortar and the building fund has to go up and that’s off the agenda too.
That’s all going to take more money.
Well that’s a tremendously successful bill, right? It’s totally taken our eyes off of class size, it’s totally taken our eyes off of putting up new buildings. Even in Somerville, with state aid, we’ve been scraping to get money for building again.
I agree with Greg. It’s been tremendously successful: it’s been successful in resegregating the schools, promoting dropping out among minority kids, increasing segregation in the labor force by language, by ethnicity, and by race, and taking our eyes off of class size and new buildings: tremendously successful.
Greg:
It’s just not true that ed reform was not accompanied with more money. Ed reform more than doubled the amount of state aid [and] race is one of the subgroups that you’re now accountable for.
Continue on to MCAS and Somerville kids, Part 3 for the last part of the forum discussion
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High-stakes testing is one of the most-studied strategies there is for helping kids learn. We have six years of No Child Left Behind. Even before that, many states, not just Massachusetts, had high-stakes tests. And plenty of scientists have pored over the results.
Those results are clear: high-stakes tests turn out to have essentially no effect on student achievement as measured by test scores. Some studies find a small improvement. Some find a small decline. Nobody has found an important improvement.
I’m not talking about scores on the high-stakes tests themselves–of course those are up. Which proves that it’s possible to teach to a test if the test is repetitive enough from year to year.
But on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only real national achievement test we have, the effects of No Child Left Behind are invisible. Schools don’t do special prep for the NAEP, partly because there’s no reporting by school, so there’s no punishment.
But it’s not that nobody knows how to help kids learn better. During the time of the War on Poverty and school desegregation, the “achievement gap” between black and white kids was cut in half.
That worked.
During the period of high-stakes testing, there’s been almost no change.
Yes, people are paying more attention to kids who score low, and that’s a good thing. But the kind of attention they’re getting doesn’t seem to do any good.
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High-stakes testing is an attempt to quantify learning, which we’ve known for a long time can’t be done. But by assigning a number and choosing acceptable ranges, we remove the deep accountability questions that would require solutions that everyone knows would be costly. It’s a passing of the buck.
But what is enforced mediocrity costing us in the long run? On the national level, deficits in innovation. And locally, beating the love of learning out of our youth with the constant drumbeat of “certification is all that matters” sacrifices excellence on every level.
It’s a cost that no one politician will be called to account for, and nobody making decisions now will ever be held responsible for it. But I’d be willing to bet that it’ll cost us more in the long run than would staffing and equipping schools adequately now to actually teach, taking into account students’ learning differences.
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