2016 Medley #6

America's Priorities, Charters,
Testing, TFA, Reform

WHAT ARE AMERICA'S PRIORITIES?

A Bill of Rights for School Children

If we really cared about the future of this country we'd make our children a national priority. They are the ones who will lead this country through the 21st century and beyond. Right now we have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world. We guarantee a dismal future when we allow nearly a quarter of our children to grow up in poverty. All the posturing of politicians are empty words to those children. They'll grow up, as Carl Sagan has suggested,

...as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with the society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them. This is stupid.

The U.S. needs to join the rest of the world and ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children should be guaranteed safety, food, education, health care, equality, the right to free expression, and the right to play. These would guarantee children the right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Public education advocate and blogger Russ Walsh has written A Bill of Rights for School Children. We would do well to adopt this as well...

1. Every child has a right to a free, high quality, public education.

2. Every child has a right to attend a well-staffed, well-resourced, clean and safe local neighborhood school.

3. Every child has the right to be taught by well-informed, fully certified, fully engaged teachers who care about the child as a learner and as a person.

4. Every child has the right to a school that provides a rich and varied curriculum that includes the visual and performing arts, integrated technology, and physical education.

5. Every child has a right to a school that provides a rich and varied extra-curricular program including athletics, clubs, and service learning opportunities.

6. Every child has a right to instruction that is well-planned, engaging, and collaborative.

7. Every child has a right to instruction that is developmentally appropriate.

8. Every elementary school child has a right to daily recess.

9. Every child has the right to go to a school with adequate support personnel including librarians, nurses, guidance counselors, and learning support specialists.

10. Every child has a right to an element of choice in the educational program, including the right to choose to take advanced level courses. 

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Mother of Girl Berated in Video Assails Success Academy’s Response

You've probably seen the video that went viral of the teacher at one of Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy charter schools berating and belittling a first grader. This article brings up a very important point which many parents aren't aware of when they engage with a charter management organization. There may not be a way to file a complaint or discuss the problem when the school doesn't have to be accountable to a publicly elected school board.

Seeking to hold someone accountable for what happened to her daughter, Ms. Miranda went into a Department of Education building in Brooklyn to ask about filing a complaint, but was told that Success was independent from the school district. She said that Ms. Nicholls, the principal, had given her information about how to reach Success’s board of trustees, and that she had sent a letter, but she was not optimistic that she would get a response.

You can write to the corporate board, but there's nothing making them pay any attention other than corporate profits. These people are for-profit which means that children are secondary. A commenter named Patricia wrote [emphasis added]:

This parent went to the DOE to file a complaint and was told that Success was independent of the district; how are we to expect major changes in a system when parents don't even understand how that system works. My guess is that this mother represents many hardworking parents who simply want a good public, local education for their children; they have no idea that they're actually handing their kids over to a private school completely outside the purview of local government that's funded with their own tax dollars.

National Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for Reigning in Charter Schools

Speaking of parents who want a "good, public, local education for their children..." here's an article discussing a poll which shows that parents want neighborhood schools!

America's public school system, through each state's system, supposedly guarantees a free, appropriate, public education. It's never been perfect, but destroying it, instead of fixing it isn't rational. Parents and communities want improved schools in their neighborhoods not unaccountable charter schools. [emphasis added]

• Overwhelming majorities, as high as 92%, back proposals to strengthen transparency and accountability, improve teacher training and qualifications, implement anti-fraud measures, ensure high-need students are served, and make sure neighborhood public schools are not adversely affected.

• 92% of voters support requiring companies and organizations that manage charter schools to open board meetings to parents and the public.

• 90% of voters support requiring companies and organizations that manage charter schools to release to parents and the public how they spend taxpayer money.

• “School choice” ranks last in a list of the biggest concerns voters have for K-12 education, with only 8% listing it as a concern.

• Far more popular than “school choice” or unaccountable charter schools is the concept of community schools, which serve as community hubs, ensuring that every student and their family gets the opportunity to succeed no matter what zip code they live in. 

Whom Do Charter Schools Serve?

Finally, the money keeps flowing from the taxpayers pockets to the charter operator's bank accounts with little or no accountability.

And now, irony climbs atop irony. Charter schools that have creamed high scoring students from the public schools are labeling high percentages of the students "autistic" to increase their state allotment from under $10,000 per regular student to about $20,000 per "autistic" student. And then they report no expenditures for special programs.

TESTING

Teacher: Why Am I Testing This Child?

The number one enemy of education is still on the loose in our schools: high stakes testing. Policy makers, pundits, and politicians all bow down to the gods of accountability, even though high stakes tests don't measure what they use them for.

Diane Ravitch wrote, "Tests should be used only for the specific purpose for which they were created."

Any other use constitutes test misuse and abuse.

Student achievement tests are created to measure how much of a particular curriculum students have learned. We still misuse the tests and abuse schools, teachers, and students by

• punishing students for not learning

• punishing teachers for having students who don't learn 

• punishing schools for having students who don't learn

And probably sooner, rather than later, we will begin punishing schools of education for graduating teachers who have students who don't learn.

The important phrase here is "students who don't learn." There are dozens of reasons why children struggle to learn, and most of them have little to do with school or teachers.

“In all seriousness, the level of absurdity is reached when a profoundly disabled student is required to be tested and the testing looks something like this… a teacher pulls a chair up to the student’s wheel chair and reads a test question to the student. The student has nearly no use of his limbs or body but can turn his head. Then the teacher reads the possible answers “A”… blah blah blah “B” … blah blah blah and then the teacher holds up a sheet with letters on them and tracks the students eyes trying to guess at where the child’s eyes are looking at A, B, C or D! Meanwhile most of the test material (if not all) is not even relevant to the child or part of the child’s learning day. His day is focused on physical therapy to learn to swallow or to increase motor movement in his very stiff arms and legs. He is well below grade level because along with his physical issues there are cognitive ones too. Is this really the best use of this child and teacher’s valuable time to force him to endure a grade level test based on his chronological age because EVERYONE MUST BE TREATED EXACTLY THE SAME so that data crunchers are happy?”

The Flawed Premises of Reform

Tests measure what the designers wrote them to measure. In recent years states have asked testing companies to make tests which will measure that which cannot be measured. Anxious to keep the money flowing from the states' treasuries, the testing companies have complied, even when the results are invalid and unreliable.

People want education reduced to a single number that they can rate as good or bad. The public doesn't want to be bothered by such things as disabilities, poverty, or social unrest. Those and other variables, which determine the validity of the tests, aren't interesting enough for politicians, journalists, and test-makers to discuss with the general public. Since people don't understand science and statistics, they don't understand the impact of variables. Politicians get money from test-makers and voters to provide answers. So, tests become the answer to everything that ails public education, and, by extension, the nation.

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... measure whether our kids are meeting them

Also sounds sort of sensible, and yet we do not know how to do it. It really is as simple as that-- we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner. Instead of asking, "What's the best way to measure critical thinking" test manufacturers have asked "What's something we could do on a standardized mass-administered test that would pass for a critical thinking measure?"

TFA: BAD TEACHING, BAD FINANCES

Study examines Teach For America’s impact on costs, hiring at 5 school systems

Fire expensive teachers because they are too expensive...and then hire Teach For America temps who end up costing even more.

Is there even the slightest pretext among "reformers" that they're interested in student achievement?

Five major U.S. school systems – in Atlanta, Chicago, eastern North Carolina, New Orleans and New York – paid finder's fees that ranged from $2,000 to $5,000 per TFA corps member per contract year, a research team found in its examination of the organization's contracts with the school districts.

The financially troubled Chicago Public Schools paid TFA nearly $7.5 million in finder's fees between 2000 and 2014 – a time period when the school system also underwent significant budget cuts, closed numerous schools and laid off thousands of teachers, according to the study, published in Education Policy Analysis Archives.

The research team found similar payouts in Atlanta, where six school districts paid a total of $5.3 million in finder's fees for 690 TFA corps members who taught in the district's schools between 2007 and 2014.

REFORM

How Do You Explain the Corporate Assault on Public Education to Friends Who Know Nothing About It?

...you have to give them examples of what “education reform” actually means....

Like “teachers are evaluated as ineffective or effective by the test scores of their students, even though research demonstrates that this is a flawed method”

Like “uncertified, inexperienced teachers who are assigned to the kids with the greatest needs”

And for a fanfare: “Our nation has pursued failed market-based policies for 15 years. It is time to do what works, based on evidence and experience.”

###

Baseball Interlude: No Foreigners Allowed?

Tis the season, it seems, for anti-immigrant fear mongering.

Phyllis Schlafly, the great-granddaughter of a European immigrant who lived in Canada before coming to the US, wants to ban foreigners from playing on U.S. professional baseball teams.

When I first saw that I thought it was a joke...an article from the Onion. But no. It's no joke. Schlafly, whose great-grandfather emigrated to the United States from Scotland, wants to ban all foreigners from playing professional baseball in the U.S.

Why?

THEY CAN'T SPEAK ENGLISH AND ARE STEALING JOBS

First, because they

cannot speak English

Should we deny people jobs because they can't speak English?  Perhaps Ms. Schlafly has forgotten that this country was taken from the natives – who didn't speak English – and then built by immigrants – many of whom didn't speak English.

A good portion of the food Schlafly puts into her anti-immigrant mouth every day was likely picked and processed by people who don't speak English.

And what about stealing jobs? Does Schlafly make sure that everything she puts on her native born body or into her home is manufactured by native born Americans, in American factories, owned by Americans? What about her cell phone? What about the computer she uses to write her poison? What about the car she drives, the TV she watches, the microwave in which she heats up her coffee.

The hypocrisy takes my breath away...

LITTLE LEAGUE GRADUATES

Second, we shouldn't allow foreigners to play baseball because they

did not rise through the ranks of Little League

I didn't make this up. She actually wrote this.

Yes, it's true that Little League baseball was started in the US in 1939, but as of 2016 Little League International supports baseball for children in 80 countries around the world including places rarely associated with baseball such as Uganda and Turkey. So, saying that no foreign born player has risen through the ranks of Little League is very likely untrue, especially those who hail from the baseball rich cultures of the Dominican Republic, Venezuala, Mexico, and Japan.

And...what? Little League is now a prerequisite for playing professional baseball? Where did all the pre 1939 baseball players come from? Where did Honas Wagner play Little League? What about Christy Matthewson? Was Three-finger Brown a pitcher in Little League before he lost parts of two fingers in a farm implement accident?

Just to be sure I'll check the article to make sure it's not from the Onion...

NO GIRLS NEED APPLY

Third,

Baseball is a wonderful activity for boys and young men.

If you are going to write about Little League and baseball, you ought to know something about it. Little league (unlike organized, professional baseball) is not gender exclusive. Girls are actually allowed to play baseball with boys. In fact, a girl, Mo'ne Davis of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pitched a shut out – a two-hitter – during the Little League World Series in 2014.

I wonder...if Mo'ne Davis decides to pursue a career in professional baseball would Schlafly approve because she's an American, and came up through the ranks of Little League.

AMERICANS ARE BETTER?

Fourth,

All six of the six recipients of the top awards this past season are native born American, but more than a quarter of Major League Baseball players are foreign-born

Yes, I knew that all six of the six recipients of the top awards in 2015 (MVP, Rookie of the Year, and Cy Young) are native born Americans.

Past winners, however, include Dominicans, Cubans, Venezualans, Canadians, Mexicans, and Japanese. True baseball fans recognize names of stars like Albert Pujols, Miguel Tajeda, José Abreu, José Fernandez, Miguel Cabrera, Félix Hernández, Joey Votto, and Ichiro Suzuki. Cherry picking one year of award winners does not mean that all the players descended from immigrants are better than all the players who are immigrants.

BASEBALL, HOT DOGS, AND APPLE PIE

Let's just carry this a step further. Does Ms. Schlafly want us to ban all foreign born workers from getting paid for jobs in the U.S.? How about actors? Should we keep them from working on movies or TV programs made in the U.S.? Should we ban all foreign born writers? all foreign born musicians? Why single out baseball players...let's ban all foreign born professional basketball players, soccer players, tennis players, hockey players. Think of all the jobs that could go to Americans!

But baseball, and other sports, reflect the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The anti-immigrant/false patriotism spouted by bigots like Schlafly has no place in any professional sport in this country. Indeed, it has no place at all in our nation.

In the best tradition of this nation, immigrants like the players mentioned in the paragraphs above, come to the U.S. to improve their lives, just like Schlafly's Great-Grandfather Stewart did when he came to the U.S. in 1851 from Scotland. If the U.S. had Schlafly's no-foreigners-allowed policy back then, chances are Phyllis Schlafly would have grown up as a Canadian.

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

We live in a smaller world than humans of the past. National boundaries are not corporate boundaries. Goods and services are mobile. Even those things "Made in USA" are likely to have foreign parts.

People, too, are more mobile than before. It doesn't take 2 months to sail from Europe to North America any more. We've seen the Earth from space...national boundaries aren't visible.

Sooner or later people are going to have to accept that all of us live together on one, small planet.

Which is the more "American" policy? Locking our door in fear of the stranger, or welcoming the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"

It's time we outgrew our antiquated tribalism.

###

2016 Medley #5: Indiana Republicans (still) Hate Public Education

Indiana's "reformist" Politics

Indiana's legislature is run by a supermajority of Republicans. The Hoosier state is nearly all "red" and has only gone for a Democratic presidential candidate twice in the last 75 years (1964 and 2008).

The supermajority legislature and the Republican appointed State Board of Education has been attacking public education, public school teachers, and teachers unions regularly and in 2011, passed laws to eliminate teacher seniority rights, do away with tenure (due process) for teachers, stop paying teachers for extra education, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and restrict collective bargaining rights to money issues (salary, insurance).

The General Assembly is so solidly and heavily Republican that when they talk about "compromise" they're talking about the House Republicans compromising with the Senate Republicans. Democrats are apparently only there to delay the inevitable through objections and speeches. Rational discourse between parties is met with Republicans figuratively putting their hands over their ears and mumbling, "I can't hear you."

It won't get any better either. The governor and his lackeys in the legislature have been bought and sealed by the Koch Brothers and ALEC. Is there hope that enough people might cross party lines and vote some of the rascals out" Not likely. Most of the citizenry, outside of a couple of major cities, are life-long, "my-daddy-was-a-Republican-so-I'm-a-Republican-too" Republicans.

[There are some who are more thoughtful, of course. But they continue to vote Republican even if they disagree on education issues, because of traditional Republican issues like abortion and GLBT rights.]

Indiana Democrats try their best, but the odds are not in their favor. As long as Republicans keep getting elected then the leadership (Bob Behning and Brian Bosma in the House, and David Long and Dennis Kruse in the Senate) will continue to do what they can to keep the campaign dollars coming from "reformers."

THE MISUSE OF TESTING

Guest column: Schools should be about children

This excerpt from a behind-a-pay-wall article was written by a Bloomington, IN mom. In it she calls out the state testing program for all the damage it has done. Grading schools, labeling children, and evaluating teachers is a waste of time and just one more piece of the ALEC plan to completely privatize public education.

(Bloomington area readers, the author suggests you subscribe to your local newspaper.)

At one time, testing was only part of the overall assessment for how kids and schools were doing. We relied on teachers to tell us the rest. After all, teachers are with our kids every day and are professionals who know where students fall on the continuum of development and learning. We trusted teachers.

Now, thanks to the state Legislature and governor, the test has become the focus of our kids’ education. It is no longer a temperature check for how kids are learning; it is the (state’s) objective...

[...]

Does slapping an “F” on a school and stigmatizing the teachers and children within, help those kids? Does a threat of takeover and privatization by the state ameliorate the effects of poverty? No. It creates a pressure cooker for children and teachers.

High-stakes testing provides fertile ground for the profit-making idea of “school choice.” Prove public schools are failing and offer alternatives. Charters, voucher schools and public schools compete for tax dollars in a game that is rigged. Test companies grow richer.

The laws that created this marketplace of education all come from the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC’s goal is to create more competition in education and to privatize it. There is even an Indiana Reform Package of model legislation on their website. Our governor has written the introduction to the ALEC report card.
The A-F grading of schools, tying teachers’ pay to test scores, the pass-a-40-question-reading-test-or-fail third grade law — these are all from ALEC. They were not backed by research of what are best practices in teaching. Most reflect the opposite.

SHUTTING DOWN UNIONS

Schooling lawmakers: Education bills have predictable consequences

The editorial writer in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette seems to think that this year's anti-teacher, anti-public schools legislation will mobilize teachers around the state to fight back. Turnout is always largest during a presidential election year, which, I hope will favor those who are against further damaging public education.

One of this year's bills, which the House wrested from the (slightly) less-hateful-of-teachers Senate, takes us back to the day where nepotism and corruption ruled the hiring and firing of teachers. The Republican leaders in the Senate claimed the law was part of a solution to the teacher shortage and that it was "misunderstood." They killed the House version because of all the outcry from teachers and their supporters.

The House leaders, on the other hand, led by a florist-turned-self-declared-education-expert, are in the process of pushing the Senate version through to the Governor's desk. If the Governor should sign it (and it's an election year, so he might listen to the outcry against it) it will become law and the collective bargaining agreement between teachers and school boards can be overruled by back-room conversations and deals with no public input or accountability.

[Hoosier voters, write to your House legislators today and tell them to reject SB10 (which eliminates more collective bargaining rights) and SB334 (which expands the nation's most expansive giveaway of public funds to private schools through vouchers)]

There’s little Indiana lawmakers could do to further marginalize teacher unions, although some believe they’ve found a tool.

But Senate Bill 10 might be just what the struggling associations need to remind teachers of the value of collective bargaining. It gives superintendents the authority to pay some educators more than others, as they did in the days when some school chiefs paid male teachers more than their female colleagues or when a board member could insist on extra pay for a daughter-in-law. There’s no provision to limit the extra pay to teachers in hard-to-fill disciplines like math or special education.

Arbitrary compensation systems and other unfair management practices gave rise to Indiana’s collective bargaining law in 1973. A return to those practices will mobilize teachers in numbers the bill’s supporters can’t imagine.

Zombie teacher-pay bill rises from the dead

That should have been that. But Rep. Robert Behning, chairman of the House Education Committee, picked up the supposedly dead SB 10 and waltzed it through the committee by a 7-4 party-line vote on Monday, the final day for committee action. It now goes to the full House.

Expect Behning to block any attempt to amend the bill. Any change would send the bill back to the Senate, which has said it won’t pass the measure again.

DAMAGE TO TEACHERS

The big trouble in Indiana public schools, as explained by a troubled educator

What do teachers think about all this? Here's a sample.

The looming teacher shortage in Indiana is the same as in other parts of the nation. Fewer people are going into teaching because of stagnant salaries, lack of professional autonomy, and general disrespect of educators.

Yes, the mess in education isn’t just affecting those of us who are in education. First, legislators thought we weren’t doing our job, so they legislated the pay scale so good teachers would get paid more for their efforts. In reality, the legislature has capped teacher salaries, not allowing years of experience or education to fiscally matter. Being a highly effective or effective teacher results in a minuscule stipend, maybe enough to get the brakes fixed on your car.

Salaries for teachers statewide are stagnant. Your income does not rise over time. Families cannot be supported on a teacher’s salary over time, and yet college costs the same for them as it does to be an engineer.

I wonder why there’s a teacher shortage.

DAMAGE TO STUDENTS

In 1954, for those old enough to remember, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education, that "separate educational facilities [for black and white children] are inherently unequal."

In a second ruling, PARENTS INVOLVED IN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS v. SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1 ET AL. in 2007, the Court essentially stripped Brown v. Board of Ed of all it's power. It told (emphasis added)

...local school districts that they cannot take even modest steps to overcome residential segregation and ensure that schools within their diverse cities themselves remain racially mixed unless they can prove that such classifications are narrowly tailored to achieve specific educational benefits.

The Justices who passed PARENTS, would argue that it didn't overturn Brown, but in the meantime, school districts around the nation were suddenly free to ignore segregation and close their eyes to continued separate facilities.

Study finds Indy charter schools increased segregation

Charters have added another level to the continued segregation of children in public schools. The charter school movement has increased segregation all over the country. The cure to the so-called "bigotry of low expectations" has made things worse.

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University education professor Marc Stein and published last summer in the American Journal of Education, found that charter-school choice in Indy led to “higher degrees of racial isolation and less diversity” than in the public schools the students were leaving.

African-American students were more likely to enroll in charter schools with a higher concentration of black students than the neighborhood schools they left; and white students more likely to enroll in schools with a higher percentage of white enrollment.

The average white student in the analytic sample chose a charter school that enrolled 13.9 percentage points more white students and 13.1 percentage points fewer black students than their previously enrolled school. Concomitantly, black students chose to enroll in charters with enrollments that were 9.2 percent more black and 5.6 percent less white than their former schools.

As a result, charter schools were becoming more racially isolated. In 2008-09, only one charter school in the study met the city desegregation target of having its enrollment of black students within 15 percentage points of Indianapolis Public Schools. When the charter schools opened, five met the target.

###

It's "That Time of Year" Again

THE WRONG KINDS OF TESTS

While the supermajority in the Indiana legislature is busy thinking of ways to label students, further reduce collective bargaining for teachers, and divert even more taxpayer money to private schools through expansion of the nation's most expansive voucher program, teachers in the state's public schools are still trying to do the best they can for their students during a difficult part of the school year.

Yes, it's "that time of year" again, and instruction time will be limited while the tool used almost exclusively for labeling, blaming, and punishing, is filled out, and shipped off for grading.

It's time to take...

I've posted comments in the past from an experienced Indiana teacher who has been writing to me on and off for the last year. The last time was during last year's testing window. The latest email came yesterday.

This year, my teacher friend commented on how developmentally inappropriate the tests are...

[Where is the data] that shows how critical thinking, problem solving, abstract thinking, etc. are developed in the brain? I'm certain there is also data that shows the impact of genetics on these areas, as well as a scale showing that these 'aptitudes' grow/develop in stages in a child. It would also show that these aptitudes, and the time frames by which they develop, vary widely...very widely. Therefore, the tests are fatally flawed as a tool to determine 'skill' levels. Kids develop very differently, and I bet that very bright kids can blossom well after third grade.

I reminded her of the work done in developmental psychology by Piaget and Vygotsky. Given a rational approach to education her questions and my response would be the start of an interesting discussion about Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage (ages 7 through 11) and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, but we don't live in a society with a rational approach to education.

DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE

I put Piaget and Vygotsky aside and instead wrote,

I will assume that this discussion on testing is not about whether we ought to have the tests or not. Because, believe it or not, there was a time when not every grade from K through 12 wasted weeks of the instructional year on testing specifically for the purpose of giving the school and school corporation a grade, evaluating teachers, and giving "reformers" fuel for privatizing public education through the redirection of funds to charters and vouchers. And, despite what you might have heard from legislators and politicians, that IS what the tests are used for. Frequent meetings about "data" are an expensive waste of time. The point of the meetings is finding ways to increase test scores – to "improve the data." The time spent on helping kids learn – really learn, not just improve their test scores – is limited. The tests and everything surrounding them are a monumental waste of time.

The school system in which this teacher works focuses on test scores, not because they aren't interested in true, high-quality education, but because, in order to survive in Indiana, public schools have been forced to obsess over tests, tests, more tests, and even more tests. Administrators, school board members, parents, students, and teachers, are all sick of the testing, because it really doesn't give the teachers anything more than what they already know from professional observation in the classroom and teacher assessments. It should not be used to guide instruction because 1) the results are rarely returned in a timely fashion, 2) it's unreliable information and 3) there are dozens of variables which are never tested that are important to the teaching/learning process. Student test scores based on arbitrary standards are pretty low on the list of what ought to be used to determine what to teach next. Unfortunately, testing companies are still out to make a buck and there are plenty of politicians who are willing to help them for a cut of the profits dumped into their campaign coffers.

Nevertheless, the questions my teacher friend asked were about the developmentally appropriateness of the tests. So I added,

I do think that 8 and 9 year olds are capable of higher level thinking...analysis, elaboration, evaluation, and synthesis. Critical thinking and problem solving are also within the skill range of many 8 and 9 year olds. The problem arises when someone has to come up with a contrived method of evaluating a child's way of using those skills. That's where 8 and 9 year olds have trouble because abstract thinking develops slowly. By 8 and 9 many children have grown to the point of understanding abstracts...but the understanding is still "childish," fluid, and unstable. For example...it's often during second and third grades when kids finally begin to understand the truth about Santa Claus...that he can be understood as an abstract, rather than a concrete human being (or elf). Even those who still believe are beginning to see that something isn't quite right with the story (Every chimney in the world in just one night?), and it takes a while for this understanding to sink in. The development of an internal understanding of abstraction doesn't just suddenly appear...it grows.

So, a well-written achievement test for third graders WOULD include questions about abstract thinking, and higher level thinking skills, because some of the kids might be at that level and a good standardized test always has a sizable amount of material at a higher level to help identify higher achieving students.

The important words in the last paragraph are "a well-written achievement test" and "a good standardized test." Neither of those phrases apply to ISTEP, or IREAD-3, or likely any test based on "standards" as we define them today.

THE WRONG KINDS OF WAYS

In Rise Above the Mark, Linda Darling Hammond said,

The problem we have with testing in this country today is that, number 1, we're using the wrong kinds of tests, and number 2, we're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways.

The tests we use aren't fair because they judge children based on developmentally inappropriate standards. Achievement tests aren't designed to be "fair" or "unfair" in the way they judge students. They aren't designed to "judge" anything at all! They are designed to measure students' knowledge of the tested material.

If standardized tests are used at all they should be used by teachers and parents to identify areas of need for students and guide educators in planning for instruction. If that's not what's happening then we should stop using them. Period.

STOP using test scores to judge children.
STOP using test scores to evaluate teachers.
STOP using test scores to grade schools.

###