I guess I've seen this happen too many times to even feel much sympathy any longer.

Sylvia James hardly considers herself clueless in mathematics. After all, she finished sixth grade with a B-plus in the subject and made the Honor Roll, which she saw as a victory in a challenging year of fraction conversion and decimal placement.

But what happened when she took the state math test?

She flunked it.

I'd come up with a list of reasons that could explain this outcome, but the Washington post already does that for me.

Students and teachers offer an array of explanations for why test scores sometimes fail to match up with grades. Some students don't take the exams seriously. Some freeze up. Still others trip over unfamiliar language. And teachers sometimes are not prepped in what the exams cover, especially when the tests are new. Occasionally, some school officials suspect, classes aren't rigorous enough to prepare students adequately.

How about all of the above. I've got students who don't do well on the sort of standardized tests that are used to test competency by the various states -- heck, my class valedictorian scored lower than me on both the SAT and ACT despite making straight As for four years of high school except in PE. Some kids do come in and just start bubbling -- or put their heads down and take a nap instead of testing. In some cases, teachers have not covered what will be on the test -- in my state, tenth graders take World History but the Social Studies TAKS covers primarily the pre-Civil War American History they took two years before in eighth grade and which I have time to only spend three or four class periods reviewing in the week or so before the test.

And then there is course rigor.I hear stories from teacher friends about what they do -- indeed, what they are required to do -- to keep the grades up and prevent too many students from failing. I've heard about principals walking into faculty meetings and telling teacher that no period may have a failure rate of more than 10% -- and that teachers who exceed that rate had better start polishing up their resumes. I know of one district that requires (in a policy adopted by the school board in open session) teachers to take any late work up until three days before the end of a marking period, and that further requires that any kid who fails a test be permitted to come in and correct it for a grade of 70% (the minimum passing grade) any time during the marking period. Do such grades really reflect learning -- or simply the ability of students to copy late assignments and make better guesses with wrong answers eliminated?

I won't even get in to the question of how some states, like Texas, change standards after the test is taken to ensure that the passing rate (or failing rate) isn't too high -- during the first year of the TAKS test, the test was "re-meaned" and the number of correct answers needed to pass was raised, causing six of my students to fail despite achieving the score that school districts had been told all year constituted a passing grade.

Quite frankly, the current testing regime around the country is a failure. It doesn't show what the government thinks it shows. What needs to be implemented is a set of rigorous start-of-course and end-of-course tests that show where a student begins and ends the school year, and how much actual learning has gone on in between. Otherwise, we have a free-floating measurement that doesn't show what a student learns, and is instead a mere snapshot of where kids are on a given day during the year.

But then again, the two-test strategy might actually reveal something relevant about student learning, rather than serve as a club to use against all of us crappy public school teachers.

Posted by: Greg at 02:43 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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