NEWSSTANDARDIZED TESTS

In the weeks before they were supposed to take their Regent's Exam, Jeremy Heyman's chemistry students were staying until 7 o'clock in the evening, studying for the test. But when January 27 came, they were greeted with an unwelcome surprise - an unexpected snowfall meant the city canceled school, and with it, the Regent's exams.

Rather than being excited about a snow day, Heyman's students, and hundreds of others scheduled to take the test that day, were frustrated.

"After all of that effort that I put to get prepared for this test, it is not fair that at the end they decide to cancel the test and all of the effort that we put in was in vain. That is injustice," said Luis Diaz, one of Heyman's students at English Language Learners and International Support Preparatory Academy in the Bronx. "My future is in those tests, and I must get them out of my way."

That's why high school history teacher Rosie Frascella started a petition on Change.org to get the state to schedule a makeup day for the Regent's exam. If they don't, the kids will have to wait until June to take the test, knocking out an opportunity for them to pass the exam and putting their chance at graduating in danger.

Lisa Hudson says no one ever told her she could appeal the decision. Her son's teacher at Black Magnet Elementary School in Chicago had decided to flunk her son from summer school reading, making him repeat sixth grade.

She never even knew he was having trouble in reading. He had been sent to summer school for low math scores.

Hudson is a part of a group of Chicago parents called PURE - Parents United for Responsible Education - that's lodging a civil rights  complaint against the Chicago Public Schools because they say the system overwhelmingly flunks children of color.

PURE executive director Julie Woestehoff says CPS has continued to flunk students by the thousands despite research that shows holding kids back doesn't help them academically and often leads to them dropping out of school at an early age.

"It's like you have a bureaucratic door shut in your face, and then you're left with a child who is unhappy and doesn't want to go to school," says Woestehoff.

And who gets that door shut in their face seems to be related to the color of their skin. PURE says black students were forced to repeat a grade at a rate nearly five times of white students, and Latino students at 1.5 times white students.

The group also objects to how CPS determines which kids are failing. They use ISAT scores - state test scores used to determine how a school is doing - to decide who has to go to summer school. If a child doesn't succeed at summer school, they have to repeat that grade.

But state officials say ISAT scores are for school accountability, not individual student performance. And PURE says historically, students of color perform less well on standardized tests than white students.

PURE has a history of standing up to the Chicago Public Schools - protesting the closing of schools, money diverted to charter schools and making sure parents have a say in their school. This latest complaint is just one move in the line of many attempts to get CPS to pay attention to its poorest students and make sure every Chicago kid has access to a decent education.

Photo credit: Karyn Christner

Perhaps to settle all doubts whether they're the union's most rabidly prejudiced state, Arizona voters last week banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions because it discriminates against white people.

But for this fuzzy logic to pass muster, voters had to ignore or remain blissfully ignorant of the myriad ways the college admissions system is already skewed to favor kids who are rich, mediocre and white.

The SAT  is probably the system's most efficient instrument at creating an uneven playing field. I know this because back in high school I, a mediocre white student of privilege, was a beneficiary of the SAT.

I scored a little over 1200 the first time, but because my family could afford it, I took an SAT prep class,  studied some vocabulary lists, and with minimal effort improved my score by nearly 200 points.

Overnight, I transformed myself into a legit elite private school applicant, and, of course, it had nothing to do with my abilities as a student or my intelligence.

Rich kids have greater access to prep classes, prep books and tutoring than low-income and many minority students, and, thus, are more likely to do well. The College Board, the pseudo non-profit that designs and promotes the test, argues coaching doesn't make a difference, but then why does it sell SAT prep books for $25 a pop?

Thank you to the Change.org members who signed the petition to Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Ramon C. Cortines, demanding that teacher evaluations be far more multi-faceted than the Los Angeles Times' rating 6,000 of the district's teachers based on students' test scores would have us believe.

The Times used student test scores to create their own ranking system of Los Angeles teachers, painting teachers as ineffective if their students' test scores weren't up to par.

The good news: Los Angeles Unified School District responded!

Change.org editors received an email in response to the slew of messages to superintendent Ramon C. Cortines, letting us know that they're keeping teacher evaluations fair:

"We received your letters regarding the LA Times series, Rating the Teachers.  We appreciate your interest in LAUSD, our staff, and, most importantly, our students.  We share your concerns regarding the use of any single measure as the determinant of teacher effectiveness.  Our Teacher Effectiveness Task Force recommended and our Board of Education adopted a set of principles grounded in notion of developing a multiple measure teacher performance review system.  To read more, please visit http://sae.lausd.net.  You can also follow our weekly progress by reading the We Are LAUSD weekly update on the LAUSD home page – www.lausd.net."

The Washingon Post just published a manifesto on what kind of teaching will work in urban schools by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and other city superintendents. Their solution? Stop using seniority as the mark of teacher quality, and help teachers use technology to teach students whose skills differ in the classroom. Hmmm...

Let's play this out for a minute with my own experience. I graduated near the top of my class with a history degree and got a Masters in teaching at Columbia University. But when I got into the classroom, I needed help. If it was not for some excellent veteran teachers, I do not know how I would have improved. It was not a smartboard or using podcasts that made my teaching better (although I love using technology in the classroom). It was experience. I got better every year by getting to know my students, their families, and learning from other teachers.

An effective teacher for Klein and company is simply one that raises student test scores. To them, this need not be tied to experience. An interesting approach, given that the most important thing a teacher can do, according to Yale professor James Comer, is to connect with students' social, emotional, and cognitive needs. This is especially true of struggling learners.

News site VoiceofSanDiego.org's recent article explores the pros and cons of value-added analysis in educational testing data. "Value-added analysis" means that when using test scores to monitor school and teacher performance, it makes more sense to monitor an individual student's test score growth over time than to hope each crop of third graders outperforms the previous crop of third graders (read: No Child Left Behind).

But in San Diego, teachers are not rated based on those scores. Not only was this data not publicized as it was in the Los Angeles Times, but apparently "the San Diego Unified school board, which is strongly backed by the teachers union, has panned the idea of rating teachers with test scores, saying it reduces teaching to test prep."

The L.A. Times' controversial decision to publish 6,000 teachers' students' test scores and rate teachers based on that information is provocative and misleading at best. Sure, to blame one teacher's suicide on a newspaper is sensationalist and unfounded. But many education professionals argue that the very concept of value-added analysis is bogus, given its huge margin of error and its growing preponderance in the circles of education administration and assessment.

Though they won't be ready until the 2014-2015 school year, here's some potentially good news: the U.S. Department of Education is funding a complete overhaul of current standardized tests. This means that once the $330 million is doled out and the project is developed in collaboration with university professors and testing experts, standardized exams will be nationwide, computer-based, and test "higher-order skills" such as how to synthesize information and conduct research projects.

How they intend to do this is, of course, vague, since all of it has yet to be developed, but what a boon for the education system—standardized tests that might, at last, test something meaningful. The idea is that if these tests are well-designed and electronic, then they'll also be able to quickly spit out student data and give teachers instant feedback about what students are learning throughout the school year.

The development phase is two-pronged, with a Florida-led group of states (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and a Washington-led group of states (the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) essentially competing with one another for the best assessment design. Both will emphasize "performance-based tasks" or problem-solving skills —suggesting, for instance, a real-world simulation of a situation that a student must analyze and solve — and both will be aligned with the Common Core Standards, the national curriculum standards that most states have adopted this summer (hopefully amended somewhat since the last time I checked).

And the crusade goes on: How many ways can the public education establishment prioritize a teacher's students' standardized test scores above all else? This time, the  Los Angeles Times will broadcast individual LAUSD teachers' student test-score data over the past seven years, using a statistical technique called "value-added analysis" to rate teachers according to their students' progress over time.

According to some, this is a good thing, because it means bad teachers will be shamed into competing for their jobs.

Here's something from the above link that makes my blood boil: "Unfortunately, we have little idea how to train good teachers. The best we may be able to do is to throw a bunch of people into the classroom and measure what happens but for that strategy to work it needs to be followed up with firings."

Firings? I expected that sentence to end with, oh, I don't know, "better training." Is that so strange?

In the late 1990's, Texas claimed dramatic increases in test scores and high school graduation rates. The jump was so high that observers nationwide were calling it the "Texas Miracle," a phenomenon that led Rod Paige, Houston's superintendent of education at the time onto the national stage. He later served as Bush's secretary of education. By 2004, the "Texas Miracle" was found to be a total sham. Teachers and administrators were fudging data.

Recently in New York City, something similar has been happening. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have been claiming that test scores and graduation rates have been rising too.

Since 2003, the city has been telling the public that test scores on the local state exams have been going up. While there have been lots of cases of cheating, the latest investigation into these scores does not uncover schools gaming the system. Rather state department of education leaders are have found that the high scores are meaningless because the  standards are so low. Student who pass the Regents exams (as they are called in New York state), their study found, are likely to flounder in college, if they get there at all. Unless students pass the exam with an 80 or better (currently the passing score is 55 and going up to 65 next year), they are likely to need remediation in college.

Michelle Rhee has decided that all students in all grades, in all subjects will begin getting tested every six weeks in Washington DC's public schools. A similar testing regimen is in place in my hometown, New York City. Rhee argues, as did Chancellor Joel Klein, that testing can only help teachers make better instructional decisions. But the evidence points in the opposite direction.

First, testing data, especially the kind that Rhee is proposing to use which is collected by an outsourced company, is notoriously inaccurate. There have been scores of examples of invalid scoring. From the "Texas Miracle" in which Texas officials falsely claimed that they raised test scores and lowered dropout rates by record numbers to New York's lowered exam standards so that more students could be shown as passing, there are problems with testing.

Making matters worse, teacher evaluations are tied to test data, so there is an incentive for them to do whatever it takes for their students to do well. In New York City, whole schools are evaluated on their test score data, and incidents of cheating are not hard to find.