Common Sense Approach to Common Core Math

Posted on 28/09/2014 by Barry Garelick
I’m writing a series of articles for Heartlander on a Common Sense Approach to Common Core. In these articles, I show that there are interpretations of CC that can be made that aren’t as ridiculous as the ones we’re seeing on YouTube and other venues. 
Barry Garelick
Part I
 
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Undoing the “Rote Understanding” Approach to the Common Core Math Standards

Posted on 26/09/2014 by Barry Garelick

What has been used as a help in older textbooks and in Singapore, is turning out to be a hindrance in the U.S. under the current interpretations of Common Core. Insisting on calculations based on the “making tens” and other approaches are in my opinion not likely to prove useful for all first graders. Teachers should be free to differentiate instruction so that those students who are able to use these strategies can achieve those goals. It is unrealistic and potentially destructive to interpret the Common Core math standards as requiring that all first grade students use these strategies in the name of “understanding”. That should be the real objection voiced to demonstrations of this method under Common Core—not the method itself.

Read all about it here.

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Press Release: Study Finds Common Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College STEM Curriculum Lower standards, alignment of SAT to Common Core likely to hurt low-income students the most

Posted on 08/09/2014 by Richard P Phelps

https://pioneerinstitute.org/download/study-finds-common-core-math-standards-will-reduce-enrollment-in-high-level-high-school-math-courses-dumb-down-college-stem-curriculum/

BOSTON – Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course. This weak Algebra II course will result in fewer high school students able to study higher-level math and science courses and an increase in credit-bearing college courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

The framers of Common Core claimed the standards would be anchored to higher education requirements, then back-mapped through upper and lower grades. But Richard P. Phelps and R. James Milgram, authors of “The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the U.S.,” find that higher education was scarcely involved with creating the standards.

“The only higher education involvement was from institutions that agreed to place any students who pass Common Core-based tests in high school into credit-bearing college courses,” said Phelps. “The guarantee came in return for states’ hoped-for receipt of federal ‘Race to the Top’ grant funding.”

“Many students will fail those courses – until they’re watered down,” he added.

Perhaps the greatest harm to higher education will come from the College Board’s decision to align its SAT tests with Common Core. The SAT has historically been an aptitude test – one designed to predict college success. But the new test would become an achievement test – a retrospective assessment designed to measure mastery of high school material. Many high-achieving countries administer a retrospective test for high school graduation and a predictive college entrance examination.

The new test will also be less useful to college admissions officers, since information gained from the retrospective test will duplicate data they already have, such as grade point average and class rank. David Coleman, the lead author of Common Core’s English language arts standards, is now president of the College Board and announced the decision to align the SAT tests with Common Core when he became president.

The change in the nature of the SAT will be most harmful to low-income students. An achievement test is far less useful as a vehicle for identifying students with high science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) potential who attended high schools with poor math and science instruction.

Retrospective tests are also more susceptible to coaching, which provides another advantage to students from families who can afford test preparation courses.

Low-income students will also be hurt the most by the shift to weaker math standards. Since the Common Core math standards only end at a partial Algebra II course, nothing higher than Algebra II will be tested by federally funded assessments that are currently under development. High schools in low-income areas will be under the greatest fiscal pressure to eliminate under-subscribed electives like trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus.

Research has shown that the highest-level math course taken in high school is the single best predictor of college success. Only 39 percent of the members of the class of 1992 who entered college having taken no farther than Algebra II earned a college degree. The authors estimate that the number will shrink to 31-33 percent for the class of 2012.

Two of the authors of the Common Core math standards, Jason Zimba and William McCallum, have publicly acknowledged the standards’ weakness. At a public meeting in Massachusetts in 2010, Zimba said the CCMS is “not for STEM” and “not for selective colleges.”

Indeed, among students intending to major in STEM fields, just 2 percent of those whose first college math course is pre-calculus or lower ever graduate with a STEM degree. Proponents claim the Common Core standards are internationally benchmarked, but compulsory standards for the lower secondary grades in China are more advanced than any CCMS material.

The highest-achieving countries have standards for different pathways based on curricular preferences, goals and levels of achievement, and each pathway has its own exit examination.”A one-size-fits-all academic achievement target must of necessity be low,” Milgram said. “Otherwise politically unacceptable numbers of students will fail.”

Richard P. Phelps is editor or author of four books – Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing (APA, 2008/2009);Standardized Testing Primer (Peter Lang, 2007); Defending Standardized Testing (Psychology Press, 2005); and Kill the Messenger (Transaction, 2003, 2005)-and founder of the Nonpartisan Education Review.

R. James Milgram is professor of mathematics emeritus, Stanford University. He was a member of Common Core’s Validation Committee 2009-2010. Aside from writing and editing a large number of graduate level books on research level mathematics, he has also served on the NASA Advisory Board – the only mathematician to have ever served on this board, and has held a number of the most prestigious professorships in the world, including the Gauss Professorship in Germany.

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Wayne Bishop’s Response to Ratner and Wu (Wall Street Journal)

Posted on 23/08/2014 by Wayne Bishop

Making Math Education Even Worse, by Marina Ratner,

https://online.wsj.com/articles/marina-ratner-making-math-education-even-worse-1407283282

————————————————
Dear Hung-Hsi,

It pains me to write but in spite of all of your precollegiate mathematics education knowledge and contributions, Prof. Ratner got it right and you “missed the boat” in response:
https://online.wsj.com/articles/if-only-teaching-mathematics-was-as-clear-as-1-1-2-letters-to-the-editor-1408045221
The CA Math Content Standards were – and still are – the best in the country. They have problems; e.g., there is too much specialized focus in its thread on Statistics, Data Analysis, and Probability and, even worse, Mathematical Reasoning. No sensible person can be against mathematical reasoning, of course, but that is exactly the point. Sensible people embed it everywhere and, as a standalone item, it becomes almost meaningless – hence the paucity (as in none) of CA Key Standards in that category. The writers included it to help ensure Board of Ed approval because most professional math educators were strongly objecting to the entire Stanford approach. Perhaps the most egregious, is your characterization of California’s problems using poison words: “rote-learning of linear equations by not preparing students for the correct definition of slope.” This is at best misleading and closer to being flat wrong:
—————————————–
From the introduction to Grade 7:
“They graph linear functions and understand the idea of slope and its relation to ratio.”
This is followed specifically with two Key Standards and examples:
3.3 Graph linear functions, noting that the vertical change (change in y-value) per unit of horizontal change (change in x-value) is always the same and know that the ratio (“rise over run”) is called the slope of a graph.
3.4 Plot the values of quantities whose ratios are always the same (e.g., cost to the number of an item, feet to inches, circumference to diameter of a circle). Fit a line to the plot and understand that the slope of the line equals the ratio of the quantities.
—————————————–
In what way(s) do you find the relevant 8th grade standard in the CCSS-M, Expressions and Equations (EE.8 #5,6), to be conceptually superior? (The word is used once in the intro to Grade 7 but it is not mentioned thereafter.) Formally proving that all pairs of distinct points determine similar triangles so that this ratio is well-defined would be mathematically necessary to be completely logical but I doubt if that’s what you meant particularly since traditional proof has been downplayed so badly even in the high school CCSS-M, much less 8th grade, especially in comparison with the CA Math Content Standards.

Regarding the general concept of competent Algebra 1 (not some pretense thereof), it was, it is, and it will remain standard in 8th grade (if not already accomplished in 7th grade) for self-respecting, academically-oriented private schools. As you well know, the Stanford Math group who wrote the CA Standards started with the egalitarian notion that this should be an opportunity for everyone including those who do not have access to such schools. It cannot be and was not intended to be just imposed that traditional Algebra 1 be the math course for all 8th graders but the group worked backwards from that target step-by-step through the grades in order to get there comfortably (such as developing the concept of slope in 7th grade that you appear to have missed). Is every detail spelled out? Of course not, nor should they be, but the key ideas – even set off as Key Standards – are there and presented considerably more clearly than in the CCSS-M.

There is statistical evidence that the goal did improve the state of mathematics competence in California, but we both know the CA Math Content Standards fell well short of the ideal. It was not – as your words could be interpreted to imply – that they reflect an inherent lack of development of student understanding. The primary villain is the overwhelming mandate for chronological grade placement (age-5) for incoming students and almost universal social promotion. Far too many students are not competent with the standards at their grade levels – sometimes years below – yet they move on anyway. Algebra in 8th grade – Algebra in 11th grade or even Algebra in college – is not realistic for all but truly gifted students who lack easily identifiable mathematics antecedents. A less common problem, but damaging to our most talented students, is the reverse situation. Advancement in grade level (as was done with my son at his private school and now chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Amherst College) is almost unheard of. Although mandated by many districts, and underscored by the API scoring of schools, mandating that all students be in an honest Algebra class in 8th grade without a reasonable level of competence with the Standards of earlier grades was never the intention. It was to be the opportunity, not the mandate.

“Moreover, Common Core does not place a ceiling on achievement. What the standards do provide are key stepping stones to higher-level math such as trigonometry, calculus and beyond.”

Although these words are regularly repeated, reality is the diametric opposite. Across California, CPM (supposedly, College Preparatory Mathematics) is back with a vengeance. Ironically, it was the very catalyst that spawned the now defunct Mathematically Correct and it pulled its submission to California from the 2001 approval process rather than be rejected by our CRP (Content Review Panel). You’ll recall that it and San Francisco State’s IMP were among the federally blessed “Exemplary” programs for which the only mathematician, UT-SA’s Manuel P. Berriozábal, refused to sign off. Weren’t you among the signatories of David Klein’s full-page letter of objection in the Washington Post? One of CPM’s long-standing goals is to have ALL assessments – even final examinations – done collectively with one’s assigned group. It makes for a wonderful ruse – all students can appear to be meeting the “standards” of the course (even if absent!) – while deeply frustrating those students who are “getting it” (often with direct instruction by some family member who knows the subject). Trigonometry, calculus, and beyond from any of CPM, IMP, Core-Plus (all self-blessed as CCSS-M compatible)? It just doesn’t happen. However, from the homepage of Core-Plus:

“The new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) edition of Core-Plus Mathematics builds on the strengths of previous editions that were cited as Exemplary by the U.S. Department of Education Expert Panel on Mathematics and Science”

What did happen – may already be happening again? Beneath the horizon, schools began to offer a traditional alternative to provide an opportunity for adequate preparation for knowledgeable students with math-based career aspirations. What also happened (but may not be successful this time because of the SBAC or PARCC state examinations?) was that other students and their parents petitioned their Boards of Education for an elective choice and, if unfettered choice was granted, the death knell sounded on the innovative “deeper understanding” curriculum and pedagogy.

Finally, you do acknowledge the ridiculous nature of the 6th grade “picture-drawing frenzy” observed by Prof. Ratner but seem to imply it was an isolated incident instead of her description, “this model-drawing mania went on in my grandson’s class for the entire year.” The fact is that such mis-interpretations of “teaching for deeper understanding” are going on for entire years in classrooms – in entire districts – all across the country; they are even taught by professional math educators as mandated by Common Core. You described her observation as a “failure to properly implement Common Core” and I am sure that you believe that to be the case but your conviction is belied by the fact that one of the three primary writers of the CCSS-M and the head of the SBAC-M is Phil Daro (bachelors degree in English Lit). Phil Daro has been strongly influential in precollegiate mathematics education – curricula and pedagogy – across California for decades, my first working acquaintance with him was in 1988, months prior to the first NCTM Standards. His vision for the “right” way to conduct mathematics classrooms (not “to teach”) helped lead to the 1992 CA Math Framework, MathLand-type curricula, and the ensuing California battles of the Math Wars with our temporary respite beginning in late 1997. Unfortunately, his vision is not only reinvigorated here in California, it is now a huge national problem and Prof. Ratner “nailed it”.

Wayne Bishop

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PEER PRESSURE: Academic Incentives & Rewards for Secondary Students

Posted on 22/08/2014 by Will Fitzhugh
 
PEER PRESSURE
Academic Incentives & Rewards for Secondary Students
Heartland Institute
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
2 July 2014
 
 
In their new book, Rewards: How to use rewards to help children learn—and why teachers don’t use them well, Herbert Walberg and Joseph Bast point out that “research makes clear that reward systems can significantly raise academic achievement levels….for adolescents.”
 
I can reinforce that conclusion from 27 years of publishing exemplary academic history research papers by adolescents from 46 states and 39 other countries in the quarterly journal, The Concord Review. In 1987, when the Review was founded, it was hoped that the prospect of publication could encourage high school students to read more history, which would broaden their knowledge of the world, and to work on serious history papers, which would exempt them from remedial writing courses at college and in the workplace, and give them the communication skills almost all professors and employers now complain about.
 
The response of students has been impressive. We have received papers of 8,000, 11,000, 13,000, and even 21,000 words—most done as independent studies. Many students have indeed been inspired by the work of their peers to greater efforts of their own. Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse, wrote:
 
“As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task. At first, I did check out every relevant book from the library, running up some impressive fines in the process, but I learned to skim bibliographies and academic databases to find more interesting texts. I read about women’s history, agrarian activism and Irish nationalism, considering the ideas of feminist and radical historians alongside contemporary accounts. Gradually, I came to understand the central difficulty of writing history: how do you resurrect, in words, events that took place in a different place and time? More importantly, how do you resurrect the past only using the words of someone else?…”
 
She went from a public high school in Indiana to Columbia University, and in fact many of our authors have sent reprints of their published work to admissions officers and by now, they have gone on to: Brown(27), University of Chicago(22), Columbia(21), Cornell(16), Dartmouth(22), Harvard(125), Oxford(13), Pennsylvania(23), Princeton(63), Stanford(51), Yale(104), and a number of other fine institutions, including Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Caltech, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Michigan, Middlebury, MIT, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Reed, Rice, Smith, Trinity, Tufts, Virginia, Washington University, Wellesley, and Williams.
 
Walberg and Bast note that “Older children and adolescents are more likely than elementary students to appreciate less-tangible rewards such as honor and attention from people they admire.” 
 
Here again, the experience of our authors support this finding: as Kaitlin Marie Bergan, from a public high school in New Jersey, wrote: 
 
“When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and the breadth of historical topics covered by the essays in it. While most of the writing I have completed for my high school history classes has been formulaic and limited to specified topics, The Concord Review motivated me to undertake independent research in the development of the American Economy. The chance to delve further into a historical topic was an incredible experience for me and the honor of being published is by far the greatest I have ever received. This coming autumn, I will be starting at Oxford University, where I will be concentrating in Modern History.”
 
One serious problem with external rewards like those at the level of The Concord Review is that most teachers are reluctant to allow their students to see such exemplary academic writing by their peers. There are a number of reasons for this, among them that many history teachers have decided to leave writing to the English department, and student writing then becomes personal, creative, the five-paragraph essay and the 500-word “college” essay, all of which is poor preparation for college writing tasks. Another reason is that, as we found in the only national study done so far on the assignment of term papers in American public high schools, is that teachers do not have the time to ask students to write serious history papers, or the time to guide and evaluate them. When a teacher has six classes of thirty students, it is clear that the system does not think they should be given the time they need to work with their students on serious history research papers.
 

 

 

——————————-
“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Academic Coaches [2014]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog
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Why do Americans stink at math?

Posted on 21/08/2014 by Wayne Bishop

New in the Nonpartisan Education Review: “Why do Americans stink at math. Some of the answer”, by Wayne Bishop. https://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v10n2.htm

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The Gauntlet: How think tanks and federally-funded centers misrepresent and suppress other education research

Posted on 02/07/2014 by Richard P Phelps

New in the Nonpartisan Education Review:

https://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v10n1.htm

The aggressive, career-strategic behavior of researchers in federally funded centers and think tanks creates many problems, including a loss of useful information and bad public policies based on skewed information.

But, two adverse consequences worry me the most. First, these badly behaved researchers are the only ones that most journalists and policy-makers pay any attention to.

Second, the effects of their bad behavior are spreading overseas. The education testing research function at the World Bank, for example, has been handed down over the past few decades from one scholar affiliated with Boston College’s School of Education to another (and all of them Irish citizens). True to form, they cite the research they like, some of which is their own, most of the rest of which comes from the censorial Center for Research in Educational Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), and imply that the vast majority of relevant research does not exist.

More recently, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a one-sided study on educational assessment that ignores most of the relevant research literature and highlights that conducted at a certain US federal research center and several US think tanks. Their skewed recommendations are now the world’s.

Posted in Education policy, K-12, Richard P. Phelps, Testing/Assessment, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

First episode in what will be sequel to Dewey/Finn

Posted on 18/06/2014 by Barry Garelick

The first chapter of “Conversations on the Rifle Range” which will be the sequel to “Letters from John Dewey/Letters from Huck Finn” is now up at Out in Left Field.

 

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Letters from John Dewey/Letters from Huck Finn: A Look at Math Education from the Inside

Posted on 01/06/2014 by Barry Garelick

Being a sometimes useful and always irreverent compendium of letters that examine math education in our public schools, addressed to anyone with the requisite curiosity to read them. 

“Few refuges exist from the multicolored tomes posing as math textbooks. No one is safe from this modern day invasion of the body snatchers. And just like in the movie, those with the power to do something have already been taken over by the seed pods of education school dogma.”

So writes Barry Garelick, using the name John Dewey in a set of letters that chronicles his journey through ed school as he pursues a second career as math teacher after retirement. A few years later, he wrote a second set of letters using the name Huck Finn, this time describing his experiences as a student teacher and then a substitute teacher. As Huck Finn he grapples with the “ideological, political and cultural divide in math education”. In both collections, John Dewey and Huck Finn learn more than they bargained for in ways that are both humorous and, ultimately, very human. 

The letters from John Dewey originally appeared in the blog Edspresso. The letters from Huck Finn (with the exception of Chapter 10) originally appeared in the blog Out in Left Field, also in slightly different form. The letters achieved a following of readers who expressed their agreements and disagreements quite candidly in comments on the respective blogs. It became evident to many that the great divide in math education is quite real.


Amazon page for Dewey/Finn:   

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National Study of Learning, Voting, & Engagement

Posted on 17/04/2014 by Richard P Phelps

The National Study of Learning, Voting, & Engagement (NSLVE) is a new, national research initiative that gives colleges and universities an opportunity to learn the aggregate registration and voting rates of their students. By participating, institutions will help build a national database for future research on learning experiences that cultivate deep civic learning and a commitment to public engagement. Participation is free, confidential, easy, and protective of student privacy.

WHY participate? NSLVE’s goals are to:

  • study patterns in college student voting,
  • provide campuses with new, good data,
  • build a national database for future research, and
  • correlate certain learning experiences with political engagement.

Each participating college or university will receive a tailored, confidential report reflecting the number of students eligible to register to vote, the percentage that registered to vote, the percentage that voted, and their voting method (traditional or absentee ballot). See a sample report here.  If enough colleges and universities participate, institutions can also learn valuable comparisons with (anonymized) peer institutions or established groups of institutions. To increase the value of your report, NSLVE will work with you to identify and help recruit members of comparison groups most relevant to your institution.

HOW does it work? NSLVE researchers have designed a process for matching enrollment records with voting records that is secure and fully protects student privacy. The NSLVE database will consist of only de-identified student lists.

So what are campuses doing with this data?

  • Adding it to their Carnegie Community Engagement Classification application
  • Using this information as a baseline assessment for community, service-learning and civic programming
  • Bringing this information to their student government and using it as a conversation starter for talking about civic engagement on campus
  • Comparing their voting rates with their peers by Institutional Carnegie Classification
  • One campus administrator shared “We signed up for the NSLVE this past year, and are using the results as an assessment of our institutional learning outcome focused on civic engagement.”
  • Another campus administrator shared “This is good data, and we would never have had any other way to get it.”

What’s the process?

  1. Your Institution sends student enrollment data to the Clearinghouse regularly (without participating in this study)
  2. Your institution signs up for NSLVE by signing an authorization form (click here to access)
  3. Signing this authorization form allows the clearinghouse to match your institution’s student enrollment data (already in their possession) with publicly available voting records
  4. Once this match is made, de-identified student voting data is sent to us at CIRCLE, the matched information is destroyed and never analyzed by any individual
  5. CIRCLE cleans the data and generates a tailored report for your institution
  6. Your institution is then enrolled in the study until 2018 and will receive reports regularly for every upcoming general election and presidential election

What about Student Privacy?

  • The study is in compliance with FERPA (click here to learn more)
  • CIRCLE only receives de-identified student data.  This means that if you have one student from Alaska attending your institution, the clearinghouse will not send us this student’s information to ensure students are not identified
  • 260 campuses participated in the first round, 90 of these campuses are extremely resourced, some of which have entire law firms in house.  In every situation that NSLVE was brought to one of these attorneys, the campus signed the next day

How to sign up:

  1. Download the authorization form here.
  2. Sign the form (Form must be signed by a President, Vice-President, Provost, Chief Enrollment Officer or Director of Institutional Researcher)
  3. Send a scanned copy to charlotte.ringle@tufts.edu  by APRIL 28th, 2014

Seth Avakian, Ph.D.

Researcher, National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement

Tufts University

805.451.7070

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MEDIA BLACKOUT

Posted on 08/02/2014 by Will Fitzhugh

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
8 February 2014
 
 
In the United States, our media are not allowed to report on or discuss exemplary student academic achievement at the high school level. For example, in the “Athens of America,” The Boston Globe has more than 150 full pages each year on the accomplishments of high school athletes, but only one page a year on academics—a full page with the photographs of valedictorians at the public high schools in the city, giving their name, their school, their country of origin (often 40% foreign-born) and the college they will be going to. 
 
The reasons for this media blackout on good academic work by students at the secondary level are not clear, apart from tradition, but while high school athletes who “sign with” a particular college are celebrated in the local paper, and even on televised national high school games, the names of Intel Science Talent Search winners, of authors published in The Concord Review, and of other accomplished high school scholars may not appear in the paper or on television.
 
Publicity offers encouragement for the sorts of efforts we would like our HS students to make. We naturally publicize high school athletic achievements and this helps to motivate athletes to engage in sports. By contrast, when it comes to good academic work, we don’t mention it, so perhaps we want less of it? 
 
One senior high school history teacher has written that “We actually hide academic excellence from the public eye because that will single out some students and make others ‘feel bad.’”
 
Does revealing excellence by high school athletes make some other athletes or scholar-athletes or high school scholars feel bad? How can we tolerate that? I know there are some Progressive secondary schools which have eliminated academic prizes and honors, to spare the feelings of the students who don’t get them, but I don’t see that they have stopped keeping score in school games, no matter how the losers in those contests may feel.
 
 

SAMPLE MEDIA COVERAGE OF HS ATHLETES

Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Signing Day Central—By Michael Carvell

11:02 am Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

“Welcome to the AJC’s Signing day Day Central. This is the place to be to catch up with all the recruiting information with UGA, Georgia Tech and recruits from the state of Georgia. We will update the news as it happens, and interact on the message board below.

University of Georgia’s TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY…AND RESULTS

Lorenzo Carter, DE, 6-5, 240, Norcross: UGA reeled in the big fish, landing the state’s No.1 overall prospect for the first time since 2011 (Josh Harvey-Clemons).   Isaiah McKenzie, WR, 5-8, 175, Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) American Heritage: This was one of two big surprises for UGA to kick off signing day. McKenzie got a last-minute offer from UGA and picked the Bulldogs because of his best buddy and high school teammate, 5-star Sony Michel (signed with UGA).   Hunter Atkinson, TE, 6-6, 250, West Hall: The Cincinnati commit got a last-minute call from Mark Richt and flipped to UGA. I’m not going to say we saw it coming, but … Atkinson had grayshirt offers from Alabama, Auburn and UCF.   Tavon Ross, S, 6-1, 200, Bleckley County: The Missouri commit took an official visit to UGA but decided to stick with Missouri. He’s signed.   Andrew Williams, DE, 6-4, 247, ECLA: He signed with Auburn over Clemson and Auburn. He joked with Auburn’s Gus Malzahn when he called with the news, saying “I’m sorry to inform you….. That I will be attending your school,” according to 247sports.com’s Kipp Adams.   Tyre McCants, WR-DB, 5-11, 200, Niceville, Fla.: Turned down late interest from UGA to sign with USF.”

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, of course, in the coverage of high school athletes that goes on during the year. I hope readers will email me any comparable examples of the celebration of exemplary high school academic work that they can find in the media in their community, or in the nation generally.

 
 
—————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
Varsity Academics®
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Brief sketch of the problem…

Posted on 06/02/2014 by Will Fitzhugh

In the United States, we pay attention to and celebrate the work of HS athletes.
We carefully ignore the exemplary academic work of diligent HS scholars–the results follow as you might expect—we get what we want.

Will Fitzhugh

———————————
HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETES COLLEGE SIGNING NEWS!!—GEORGIA!!
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
11:02 am Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
AJC’s Signing Day Central

By Michael Carvell

Welcome to the AJC’s Signing day Day Central. This is the place to be to catch up with all the recruiting information with UGA, Georgia Tech and recruits from the state of Georgia. We will update the news as it happens, and interact on the message board below.

UGA’S TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY…AND RESULTS

Lorenzo Carter, DE, 6-5, 240, Norcross: UGA reeled in the big fish, landing the state’s No.1 overall prospect for the first time since 2011 (Josh Harvey-Clemons).
Isaiah McKenzie, WR, 5-8, 175, Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) American Heritage: This was one of two big surprises for UGA to kick off signing day. McKenzie got a last-minute offer from UGA and picked the Bulldogs because of his best buddy and high school teammate, 5-star Sony Michel (signed with UGA).
Hunter Atkinson, TE, 6-6, 250, West Hall: The Cincinnati commit got a last-minute call from Mark Richt and flipped to UGA. I’m not going to say we saw it coming, but … Atkinson had grayshirt offers from Alabama, Auburn and UCF.
Tavon Ross, S, 6-1, 200, Bleckley County: The Missouri commit took an official visit to UGA but decided to stick with Missouri. He’s signed.
Andrew Williams, DE, 6-4, 247, ECLA: He signed with Auburn over Clemson and Auburn. He joked with Auburn’s Gus Malzahn when he called with the news, saying “I’m sorry to inform you….. That I will be attending your school,” according to 247sports.com’s Kipp Adams.
Tyre McCants, WR-DB, 5-11, 200, Niceville, Fla.: Turned down late interest from UGA to sign with USF.

UGA COMMITS TO WORRY ABOUT? NOPE

Lamont Gaillard, DT, 6-3, 310, Fayetteville (N.C.) Pine Forest: This was probably the biggest scare on signing day. Gaillard’s coach said he signed with UGA over Miami at 9 a.m but UGA didn’t announce it until 10:35 a.m.
Gilbert Johnson, WR, 6-2, 190, Homestead (Fla.) Senior: Speedster scared UGA after he told Rivals.com on Sunday night that he would sign with Bulldogs, South Florida or Louisville .. and then went MIA. UGA can relax after he was one of team’s first signees.

Kendall Gant, safety, 6-2, 180, Lakeland (Fla.): He flipped from UGA to Marshall on Tuesday due to “academic reasons,” according to his coach, who also claimed his offer “got pulled” by the Bulldogs.

For the rest of UGA’s Big Board for 2014, including a rundown of commitments, go HERE

GEORGIA TECH’S TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY

Myles Autry, ATH, 5-9, 170, Norcross: Georgia Tech fans are always screaming about wanting to have a high-profile recruit commit on signing day on national TV. Autry picked Georgia Tech over FSU on ESPNU cameras. His older brother plays wide receiver for the Yellow Jackets.
Mike Sawyers, DT, 6-2, 300, Nashville, Tenn.: He signed with Tennessee after taking an official visit to Volunteers on the final weekend before signing day.

For the rest of Georgia Tech’s Big Board for 2014, including a rundown of commitments, go HERE

======================================

FOR COMPARISON, HERE IS SOME EXEMPLARY HS ACADEMIC WORK, BY DILIGENT HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, WHICH THE MEDIA (completely) IGNORED. We take it for granted that the media (including their coverage of education) should ignore the exemplary academic work of HS students, but we also ignore the consequences of doing that.

[height and weight of authors omitted…]

High School History Students”Teach with Examples”The Concord Review reports:

Nathaniel Bernstein of San Francisco, California: Bernstein, a senior at San Francisco University High School, published an 11,176-word history research paper on the unintended consequences of Direct Legislation in California. (Harvard)

Gabriel Grand of Bronx, New York: Grand, a senior at Horace Mann School, published a 9,250-word history research paper on the difficulties The New York Times had with the anti-semitism of the day and also in covering the Holocaust. (Harvard)

Reid Grinspoon of Waltham, Massachusetts: Grinspoon, a senior at Gann Academy, published a 7,380-word history research paper on the defeat of legislation to allow eugenic sterilization in Massachusetts. (Harvard)

Emma Scoble of Oakland, California: Scoble a senior at the College Preparatory Academy, published a 9,657-word history research paper on the Broderick-Terry Duel, which defeated pro-slavery forces in California in 1859. (NYU)

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On Writing

Posted on 22/01/2014 by Will Fitzhugh
“First, we stopped demanding that students read anything very challenging in school, and then we stopped holding our teachers or students accountable for the quality of student writing.”
On Writing
National Center on Education and the Economy
By Marc Tucker on January 17, 2014 10:21 AM
 
 
I read a news story the other day that made my heart sink.  It was written by a professor in a business school at a public university.  He told a tale in which his colleagues agreed that the writing skills of their students were miserable, but none would take responsibility for dealing with it.  They were not, they said, writing teachers, and could not be expected to spend time doing what those miserable souls in the understaffed writing labs were expected to do.  This was just as true of the professors in the English department as it was of all their other colleagues.  The author of the article was pretty astute about the causes of that refusal.  Teaching someone to write well takes a lot of time and individual attention, he pointed out.  Professors in university departments are not compensated for that time.  Teaching students to write will take time away from what they need to do to advance in their profession.  And it is not likely to earn them the esteem of their colleagues.  So it was no surprise that his colleagues suggested that the students would be going into a business environment in which presentations were usually done with power points, so maybe the students did not have to learn how to write anyway.  Yes, they said that!
A year ago, my own organization reported on a study we had done of what is required of freshman in their first-year credit bearing courses in a typical community college.  We reported that the texts they are assigned are generally written at an 11th or 12th grade level and the students cannot read them, so their instructors are now used to summarizing the gist of the texts in power points they prepare for their students.  In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they assign little or no writing to their students.  They have evidently anticipated the suggestion of the business school faculty I was just quoting that they solve the problem by assuming that their students would not have to write.
But surely, you might be saying, it cannot really be that bad. Oh, but it can.  The attitudes of the college faculty I just reported on are not new.  The departmental faculty might have been prepared in the past to help their students with the technical aspects of writing in their particular field, but they never expected to have to teach basic competence in writing.  They assumed that would be done in our schools.  So what happened?
Two things happened.  First, we stopped demanding that students read anything very challenging in school, and then we stopped holding our teachers or students accountable for the quality of student writing.
I did not learn how to write from a writing manual.  I mostly learned to write by reading good writing, a lot it, some of it fiction, much of it non-fiction. And I had instructors in high school and college who were themselves good writers and took the time to coach me.  My friend William Fitzhugh tells us that very few students are ever asked to read a single non-fiction book from end to end in their entire school career, much less many such books.  More to the point, they are rarely asked to write very much and the expectations for what they do write are, on the whole, absurdly low.
And why is that?  Because we do not hold our teachers accountable for the quality of student writing.  Under prevailing federal law, we hold our teachers accountable for student performance in English, mathematics and, to a minor degree, science.  But the tests we use to hold them accountable for student performance in English typically do not require them to write anything, and, when they do, it is rarely more than a paragraph.  And why is that?  There is only one way to find out if a student can write a well-crafted 15-page essay and that is to ask them to write one.  And, if they are required to write one, someone has to read it.  To make sure that the scores given on the essay are reliable, it may be necessary to have more than one person read it.  That is time-consuming and expensive.  So we talk about English tests, but they do not really test speaking, listening or writing skills. They test reading skills.  The teachers know this, so they don’t waste their time teaching writing, probably the single most important skill we can teach.
It is unclear whether they could if they wanted to.  They could certainly ask students to write more, but most teachers of English do not have the time to do more than skim student written work and give it a global grade and maybe a comment or two.  But that is not going to help a developing writer very much.  Extended coaching is needed, at the hands of a good writer and editor.  And, by the way, we have no idea whether our teachers are themselves good writers, never mind good editors.  Many come from the lower ranks of high school graduates, and those are the same young people whose low writing skills I described at the beginning of this essay.
I have a cognitive dissonance problem.  There is a lot of talk about implementing the Common Core State Standards.  The Common Core calls for much deeper understanding of the core subjects in the curriculum, the ability to reason well, and to make a logical, compelling argument based on good evidence, which in turn requires the student to be able to marshal that evidence in an effective way.  Sounds like good writing to me.
But we talk about implementation of the Common Core as if it can be accomplished by giving teachers a workshop lasting several days and handing them a manual.  I don’t think so.  I would argue that there is no single skill more important to our students than the ability to write well.  Is there anyone who believes that students whose college instructors have discovered that they cannot write will somehow now emerge from high school as accomplished writers because their teacher got a manual and attended a three-day workshop on the Common Core State Standards?  That would qualify as a miracle.
If my analysis is anywhere near right, making sure our students have the single most important skill they will ever need requires us to 1) make sure that our teachers read extensively, write well and have the skills needed to coach others to be good writers; 2) organize our schools so that teachers have the time to teach writing, give students extended writing assignments, read carefully what the students have written and provide extensive and helpful feedback on it (all of which would required major adjustments in teacher load and school master schedules); and 3) change the incentives facing teachers, so that those incentives are based to a significant degree on the ability of students to write high quality extended essays.  If we don’t do that, we are just whistling Dixie.
 

————————–

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
Varsity Academics®

 

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Large-scale educational testing in Chile: Some thoughts

Posted on 21/01/2014 by Richard P Phelps

Recently in the auditorium of Universidad Finis Terrae, I argued that Chile’s Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU) cannot be “fixed” and should be scrapped. I do not, however, advocate the elimination of university entrance examinations but, rather, the creation of a fairer and more informative and transparent examination.

Chile’s pre-2002 system (PAA plus PCEs) may not have been well maintained. But, the basic structure of a general aptitude test strongly correlated with university-level work, along with highly focused content-based tests designed by each faculty is as close to an ideal university entrance system as one could hope for.

I have perused the decade-long history of the PSU, its funding, and the involvement of international organizations (World Bank, OECD) in shaping its character. Most striking is the pervasive involvement of economists in creating, implementing, and managing the test, and the corresponding lack of involvement of professionals trained in testing and measurement.

In the PSU, World Bank, and OECD documents, the economists advocate one year that the PSU be a high school exit examination (which should be correlated with the high school curriculum), then the next year that it be a university entrance examination (which should be correlated with university work), or that it is meant to monitor the implementation of the new curriculum, or that it is designed to increase opportunities for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (in fact, it has been decreasing those opportunities). No test can possibly do all that the PSU advocates have promised it will do. The PSU has been sold as a test that can do anything you might like a test to do, and now does nothing well. It is time to bring in a team that genuinely understands how to build a test, and is willing to be open and transparent in all its dealings with the public.

The greatest danger posed by the dysfunctional PSU, I fear, is the bad reputation it gives all tests. Some in Chile have advocated eliminating the SIMCE, which, to my observation, is as well managed as the PSU is poorly managed. The SIMCE gathers information to be used in improving instruction. In theory, a school could be closed due to poor SIMCE scores, but not one ever has been. There are no consequences for students or teachers. Much information about the SIMCE is freely available and more becomes available every month; it is not the “black box” that the PSU is.

It would be a mistake to eliminate all testing because one is badly managed. We need assessments. It is easy to know what you are teaching; but, you can only know what students are learning if you assess.

Richard P. Phelps, US Fulbright Specialist at the Agencia de Calidad de la Educacion and Universidad Finis Terrae in Santiago, editor and co-author of Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing (American Psychological Association, 2008/2009)

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WHEELBARROW

Posted on 13/12/2013 by Will Fitzhugh

“Wheelbarrow”
13 December 2013

There is an old story about a worker, at one of the South African diamond mines, who would leave work once a week or so pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. The guard would stop him and search the sand thoroughly, looking for any smuggled diamonds. When he found none, he would wave the worker through. This happened month after month, and finally the guard said, “Look, I know you are smuggling something, and I know it isn’t diamonds. If you tell me what it is, I won’t say anything, but I really want to know.” The worker smiled, and said, “wheelbarrows.”

I think of this story when teachers find excuses for not letting their students see the exemplary history essays written by their high school peers for The Concord Review. Often they feel they cannot give their students copies unless they can “teach” the contents. Or they already teach the topic of one of the essays they see in the issue. Or they don’t know anything about one of the topics. Or they know more about the topic than the HS author does. Or they don’t have time to teach one of the topics they see, or they don’t think students have time to read one or more of the essays, or they worry about plagiarism, or something else. There are many reasons to keep this unique journal away from secondary students.

They are, to my mind, “searching the sand.” The most important reason to show their high school students the journal is to let them see the wheelbarrow itself, that is, to show them that there exists in the world a professional journal that takes the history research papers of high school students seriously enough to have published them on a quarterly basis for the last 21 years. Whether the students read all the essays, or one of them, or none of them, they will see that for some of their peers academic work is treated with respect. And that is a message worth letting through the guard post, whatever anyone may think about, or want to do something with, the diamonds inside.

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
And of course some teachers are eager to show their students the work of their peers….

The Concord Review—Varsity Academics®

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Driven to Distraction

Posted on 07/09/2013 by Will Fitzhugh
DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION
 
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

7 February 2013

 
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”—George Orwell 
 
 
While we spend billions on standards for skill-building and the assessment of skills, we don’t seem to notice that our students, in general, are not doing any academic work. This assumes that there is a connection between the academic work of students and their academic achievement, but for most of those who study and comment on education that link seems not to be apparent.
 
The Kaiser Foundation reported in  January 2010, that:
 
“Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media—and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38—almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]”
 
If our students spend that much time, in addition to sports, being with friends, and other activities, like sleep, when do they do their academic work?
 
Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement found most recently that:
 
“Among (U.S.) Public High School students: 
82.7% spend 5 or fewer hours a week on homework.
42.5% spend an hour or less each week on their homework.”
 
 
This may help to explain how they manage to free up 53 hours a week to play with electronic entertainment media, but is there any effect of such low academic expectations on our students’ engagement with the educational enterprise we provide for them?
 
 
Meanwhile, our high school students are reading books written at the fifth-grade level—The 2013 Renaissance Learning Report on student reading levels: “The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools 2011-2012″ found that: “The average ATOS book level of the top 40 books readby ninth–twelfth graders (high school students) was 5.6 overall (fifth-grade level), 5.7 for boys, and 5.4 for girls.”  
 
Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education reported on January 7th of this year that: 


“Gallup research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012. We found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged. Our educational system sends students and our country’s future over the school cliff every year.”

 
The statement of the obvious which applies here would seem to be that we have driven our high school students to distraction, by asking them to do little or no homework and by spending billions of dollars to lead them to prefer electronic entertainment media to the academic work on which their futures depend.
 
On June 3, 1990, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in his regular New York Times column that:
 
“As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized. But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved with it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review‘s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time to take it seriously.”
 
Despite my own bias for having students read history books and write history research papers, I think it may be argued that if we give students nothing to do academically, we clearly contribute to the academic disengagement which we now find.
 
If we don’t take their academic work seriously, neither will they. What they take seriously they have a chance of doing well, and when they don’t take something seriously, they have little chance of achievement there. Verbum Sap.
————————-
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
Varsity Academics®
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Major Players

Posted on 05/09/2013 by Will Fitzhugh
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
3 September 2013
 
 
Who are the Most Important Players in U.S. education debates, and in our schools? Well, let’s see—there are EduPundits, legislators, governors, consultants, professional developers, publishers, the Department of Education, foundations, journalists, state commissioners of education, superintendents, principals, teachers, and who else? Oh, students!…do you think education has something to do with them? No one else does. And if students do have a part to play in their own education and they are not doing it, and this has perhaps some sort of impact on their academic achievement, what can be done about it? They can’t be fired, except by charter schools, and neither can their parents. So let’s not think about them, or their work.
 
In addition, most students have been allowed to believe, and the EdWorld agrees with them, that education is something teachers are responsible for delivering to them, whether they do any actual academic work or not. As to the academic work they actually are currently doing, Indiana University has found that 42% of high school students now do less than one hour of written homework in a week. 
 
Because student responsibility for academic work is not part of our ideas about education, students can feel free to, as the Kaiser Foundation reports they now do, spend at least 53 hours each week with electronic entertainment media. (That would be 53 times as many hours as lots of our high school students now spend on homework each week.)
 
Of course all the current Major Players have something to say and something to do about education, and about students academic achievement, but as long as, for whatever complex of reasons, we continue to ignore student participation in and responsibility for their own educational achievement, we are colluding in some very large, very tragic, and very sad, joke.
 
Try to imagine stories and commentaries on Major League Baseball which completely ignored the activities of the players, and you can see what a monstrous mistake it is for so many influential people in the education debates to pay no attention to whether: A) we are asking our students to do any serious academic work, and B) they are actually doing any.
 
Banishing students from our discussions about the Major Players in education may satisfy some set of needs for our EduPundits and others, but it is a sad and quite clearly doomed misdirection of all efforts to understand ways to improve student academic achievement in this country.
 
 

————————–
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
Varsity Academics®
Posted in Education policy, K-12, Will Fitzhugh | Comments Off on Major Players

The College Puzzle

Posted on 19/05/2013 by Will Fitzhugh

Stanford University

The College Puzzle

A College Success Blog by Dr. Michael E. Kirst

Homework Insufficient In USA Secondary schools

April 17th, 2013

Guest Blogger: Will Fitzhugh

The most important variable in student academic achievement is, of course, student academic work.

Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement found that:

of (U.S.) Public High School kids: [143,000 surveyed) in 2008

82.7% spend 5 or fewer hours a week on written homework…
42.5% spend an hour or less each week on homework…

Korean students spend, on average, 15 hours a week on homework,
added to 10 hours a week of hagwon after school = 25 hours a week.

[i.e. 25 times the time some U.S. HS students spend, or at least 5 times as much as the great majority of U.S. HS students…]

===============

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

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GAO Could Do More

Posted on 19/05/2013 by Richard P Phelps

U.S. GAO Could Do More in Examining Educator Cheating on Tests

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a research agency of the U.S. Congress, continues its foray into the field of standardized testing. It started at least as far back as 1993 with a report I wrote on the extent and cost of all systemwide testing in the public schools. Many studies related to school assessment have been completed since, for example, in 1998, 2006, 2006, and 2009.
In the wake of educator cheating scandals in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and elsewhere, the GAO has recently turned its attention to test security (a.k.a. test integrity). For a year or so, they have hosted a web site with the fetching title “Potential State Testing Improprieties”

“…for the purpose of gathering information on fraudulent behavior in state-administered standardized tests. The information submitted here will be used as part of an ongoing GAO investigation into cheating by school officials nationwide, and will be referred to the appropriate State Educational Agency, the U.S. Department of Education, or other agencies, as appropriate.

“Any information provided through this website will be encrypted through our secure server and handled only by authorized staff. GAO will not release any individually identifiable information provided through this website unless compelled by law or required to do so by Congress. Anonymous reports are also welcome. However, providing GAO with as much information as possible allows us to ensure that our investigation is as thorough and efficient as possible. Providing contact information is particularly important to enable clarification or requests for additional information regarding submitted reports.“

I encourage anyone with relevant information to participate, though I would be more encouraging than is the GAO about submitting the information anonymously. In some states, the “State Educational Agency” to which your personal information will be submitted is, indeed, independent, law-abiding, and interested in rooting out corruption; in others, it either does not care much about the issue or itself is an integral part of the corruption.

It would be far better if the information were not submitted to any “educational agencies” but, rather, to state and federal auditors and attorney generals. The problem with education agencies is that they have gotten too comfortable with their own, separate world, with its own elections, funding sources, governance structures, rules and regulations, and ethical code that places a higher priority on the perceived needs of educators than others.

This past week, the GAO released another report with a typically understated title, “K-12 Education: States’ Test Security Policies and Procedures Varied”. Among its findings:

“All states reported including at least 50 percent of the leading practices in test security into their policies and procedures. However, states varied in the extent to which they incorporated certain categories of leading practices. For example, 22 states reported having all of the leading practices for security training, but four states had none of the practices in this category. Despite having reported that they have various leading practices in place to mitigate testing irregularities and prevent cheating, many states reported feeling vulnerable to cheating at some point during the testing process.”

Does one feel better or worse about test security after reading this passage? Is knowing that states are getting their test security policies and procedures at least half right reassuring? Would you trust your life’s savings to a bank that assured you of including at least half of the leading practices in bank security in their policies and procedures?

Though the low percentage may disappoint, I find another aspect of the GAO study more worrisome: it’s entirely about plans and policies and not any actual behavior. In this, the GAO takes its cue from the two associations whose test security checklist it employed in its study: the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the Association of Test Publishers (ATP). Their checklist comprised the “leading practices” to which the GAO refers.

Peruse the list of leading practices, included in the GAO report’s enclosures (starting on p.40) and one may be surprised at how ethereal they are. Schools should have “Procedures to Keep Testing Facilities Secure”, “Rules for Storage of Testing Materials”, “Procedures to Prevent Potential Security Breaches”, and even “Ethical Practices”. There’s no mention of what such rules, procedures, and practices might look like; local schools and districts are free to interpret them as they wish, presuming they even know how. Moreover, there’s no mention of any actual implementation of any of the rules, procedures, and practices; in Ed-speak, test security is about having a test security plan, not actually securing tests.

In a footnote (p.2) the GAO admits “Our survey did not examine state or local implementation of these test security policies.” Even if the GAO had tried to examine state or local implementation, though, what could it have found?

A “leading practice” in the terms of the CCSSO and ATP is not a “practice” at all; it is a plan for practice. That is, it is not about behavior or action, it is about a plan for behavior or action. And even the character of the plan is left to the discretion of the local school or district. Any local school or district with a test security plan in its files can claim that it is following leading practices. As model test security plans are routinely provided by test developers as part of their contract, every local school or district can be a leading test security practitioner by default.

They need not do anything to secure their tests to be a leading test security practitioner.

Borrowing a phrase so often used by the GAO in its review of other government agencies’ work, the GAO “could do more” to study the issue of test security.

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Try Trying

Posted on 18/04/2013 by Richard P Phelps

Educator testing scandals have lit up the news wires recently and some call the cheating unprecedented. It is not unprecedented; journalists simply paid little attention to the issue before now. To my mind, the most profound factoid revealed by the Atlanta schools scandal is that the cheating had continued for TEN YEARS before any responsible person attempted to stop it, and before any journalist paid attention. US public schools are that well buffered from public scrutiny.

 The education establishment declares there to be too much pressure on educators, so we should end the testing or, at least, the stakes attached to the tests. For the moment, set aside the ironies–they want a little bit of oversight lifted so that they are free to operate with none, and they admit that they cannot be trusted to administer tests to our children properly, but we should trust them to educate our children properly if we stop paying attention.

~~~

I’m reminded of a story, popular in universities when I was of the age, and probably still popular today in updated forms:  A young college student of the complementary gender enters a professor’s office and says, “I’ll do anything for an A.” The professor responds, “Anything?” “Yes, anything,” replies the student.

The professor locks the office door, lowers the window blinds, turns down the lights, and repeats the question. “Anything?” “Yes, anything”, the student replies.

The professor leans toward the student and whispers softly in the student’s ear, “Try studying.”

~~~

Some of the school systems caught in these scandals have not yet attempted the easiest, simplest gestures toward test security. Teachers are giving answers to their students during test administrations? Teachers should not even be in the same room with their own students. On test days, teachers should be rotated so that no teacher is administering a test in his or her own classroom.

School administrators get the tests a week in advance and read them, then afterwards erase incorrect responses on answer sheets? School administrators should never see nor touch the test materials for their own school. Tests materials should be delivered not to schools but to test coordinators—persons who do not work at a particular school except on test days. The test coordinators, not school personnel, should distribute sealed test packets to those administering the tests in the classrooms, receive sealed test packets with answer sheets inside at the end of the test period, and take the materials out of the school when they leave each test day. Or, if the materials are to be kept in a locked school safe between test sessions, no one inside the school should be given the key or combination.

Simple. Teachers cannot help their students with test questions if not in the room during the test. School administrators cannot manipulate answer sheets if they never touch them.

First things first. Before abandoning testing, let’s take some baby steps toward a minimally acceptable level of test security.

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