Slashdot Mirror
Study: Standardized Tests Overwhelming Public Schools (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new study examined the amount of time U.S. public schools spend on government-mandated standardized tests, and found that the requirements are detrimental to both students and teachers. On average, students will take 112 standardized tests during their K-12 education. From grades 3-11, students spend over 20 hours per year on standardized tests alone. "It portrays a chock-a-block jumble, where tests have been layered upon tests under mandates from Congress, the U.S. Department of Education and state and local governments, many of which the study argues have questionable value to teachers and students. Testing companies that aggressively market new exams also share the blame, the study said."
The U.S. Department of Education has issued an action plan to school districts outlining ways to reduce useless tests and eliminate redundant ones. President Obama even posted a video pledging to reduce the test load of American students. "Standardized testing has caused intense debate on Capitol Hill as lawmakers work to craft a replacement for No Child Left Behind. Testing critics tried unsuccessfully to erase the federal requirement that schools test in math and reading. Civil rights advocates pushed back, arguing that tests are an important safeguard for struggling students because publicly reported test scores illuminate the achievement gap between historically underserved students and their more affluent peers."
The U.S. Department of Education has issued an action plan to school districts outlining ways to reduce useless tests and eliminate redundant ones. President Obama even posted a video pledging to reduce the test load of American students. "Standardized testing has caused intense debate on Capitol Hill as lawmakers work to craft a replacement for No Child Left Behind. Testing critics tried unsuccessfully to erase the federal requirement that schools test in math and reading. Civil rights advocates pushed back, arguing that tests are an important safeguard for struggling students because publicly reported test scores illuminate the achievement gap between historically underserved students and their more affluent peers."
the biggest problem with No Child Left Behind is it turns out to be No Child Allowed to Excel.
So we need to fix Teach The Test first.
Maybe education should be back in the hands of the states, like it used to be. Yes, I know that'll result in ignorant morons who will be taught to scorn evolution, or consider Pi to be 3 (that's a myth, though, but funny), but then people can choose which states to live in... which was the whole point of allowing states to operate largely independently to begin with.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
180 school days * 7 hours per day = 1260 hours. 20 hours is 1.6% of that time.
The teachers just don't like accountability.
There are so many people in upper leadership who are completely clueless and base all decisions on "studies". Now, using statistics to back up decisions make sense, but you first need to apply some rationale to the decision being made first. Just because a lot of people want you to teach alternate theories to evolution doesn't make it right.
"tests are an important safeguard for struggling students because publicly reported test scores illuminate the achievement gap between historically underserved students and their more affluent peers."
Even the "civil rights" people have realized that the score gaps aren't going to close, so now all we do is make sure you can still see them. What a staggering waste of money.
Fragmentation. Everyone wants to be a contender, everyone wants to join the bigbiznez club in every market, every arena, and data (test scores) is no exception.
What, you already have eight different math book publishers in your state? I don't give a fuck, the cash cow is big enough to split nineways and still come out margin. Sorry kids, player nine has entered the game.
It's the same story for various bullshits, including the article's metrics bullshit.
9 months school x 20 days/mo x 8 hrs/day = 1440 hours.
1.3% of their time is spent on test. So what? They spend more time than that at lunch, at recess, or even in the toilet (10min/day = 30 hours/year)
If they're going to attack standardized tests, at least have an argument that withstands even basic contextual comparisons.
So now we'll go back to not having any objective tests at all.
Students still will not learn (because we obviously have not found IT yet) and in 10 years the cry will be that we have no way to compare districts.
This report, by the Council of the Great City Schools, is brought to you by the Teacher's Unions, who oppose any attempt to evaluate teacher performance.
Show me where the federal government is given the authority to regulate education in our constitution.
You can't because control over education was not granted to the federal government in our constitution.
Schools are staffed, managed and financed locally. Local control over education means that you have a say in how your kids are educated. If you are unhappy with your schools, you can elect a new school board. If that fails, you can always move to another school district.
Federal control over education standards will be politicized like everything else in Washington. Do you really want the dysfunction that is Washington DC ending up in your kid's classroom?
Ron Paul is right. The federal government needs to be out of the education business entirely.
30 hours a year! Why, if spread out over the 32 weeks of school (185 days = one school year, if there are 5 school days per week, then 185 / 5 = about 32 weeks) that comes out to less than 45 minutes a week, or put another way, about three full school days out of 185, or about 2% of school time per year...
Something that occupies 2% of student class time per school year is overwhelming students?
No, it isn't. The teachers unions have made standardized testing the only metric allowed to measure their performance, and now they want to remove even that metric.
Ken
The whole problem with standardized testing is that there is nothing useful that can feasibly be done with the results.
Use the results to fire the poorest-performing teachers? Nope, the unions won't allow it.
Use the results to change school funding formulas? Nope, the politicians won't allow it.
Use the results to decide which schools to turn over to for-profit companies to run? Nope, those deals are made behind closed doors.
112 standardized tests, and the only thing we can ever do with them is to wring our hands over how poor the results are.
Oh yes, Bush pushed his education program, and the 'success' of Houston's school district. We then get No Child Left Behind. Oh wait, W took credit for NCLB, but didn't actually write most of it. Oh well, he pushed something, and took credit for something that he didn't understand. Just like Iraq.
In my mind, George W. Bush's big screwups were NCLB, and Iraq. No wonder his brother is having trouble.
Kids who test well don't say much about how well the school population is actually learning anything. Just fairly basic tests can tell you if the kids at any given school are learning much in the way of writing or arithmetic, both key....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Burden the public schools with standardized tests, cut funding and then privatize. Pocket billions in a huge rent seeking scheme. As an added bonus further undermine people's faith in govt so you can cut back on social services and pocket that money too I beloved believe it's called "Starve the Beast". Which sounds good until you realize that beast was a watchdog.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The group that has profited from standardized testing is the company that makes, administers and grades the tests. What school should be doing is teaching kids how to learn and the love of learning. Everything else basically doesn't matter. Saying every kid needs to know the same damn thing is freakin stupid. Everyone is different and learns differently. Blame both parties for pushing the standardized testing, since they were getting paid off by the testing companies.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The 20 hours the tests take per year aren't a problem. The real issue is that funding is tied to the performance of how the school does on the tests which leads the teachers to focus only on material that will appear on the tests. This means that the children are receiving the all of the material. Unfortunately because the tests have to cover such large areas they can't take into account the different curriculum for each state so you get a lowest common denominator.
When I read this story I immediately thought of this
...the public education system's spent the last fifty or so years frittering away the faith of the public so something's going to result. Testing's one the results but there are more then a few others.
Charter schools, now in forty-four states are probably the most widespread result but testing is right up there. Coming up pretty quickly is vouchers/education savings accounts.
The days of the school district as the one solution to the problem of educating the next generation are coming to an end.
Get used to it.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Why aren't there federally-mandated tests to check whether school board members are capable of critical thinking?
Just wondering...
Requiem for the American Dream
However, to me it feels like, if they were left to their own devices, half the counties in the US would be teaching creationism
And the problem is???
Seriously, why do you even care about that? At the grade school level I don't care if they are teaching kids to worship Satan or God or to be Vegan Atheists - as long as they are learning spelling and math the rest will work itself out.
What kids will be personality and belief wise is in no way determined by what schools try to force down kids minds. In fact if anything whatever a school tries to force will probably be looked on with GREATER dubiousness by the kids who do not want to buy into the message offered by "authority".
If you truly didn't want kids to buy into creationism you would be CLAMORING to have public schools teaching it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Primarily, certain states (TX, AL), would be teaching kids about Jeebus and other Magical Sky Zombies
Because so many kids taught at strict Catholic schools turned out to be catholic...
Oh wait. In fact that doesn't matter at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Article 1, Section 8, Section 1: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."...and Section 18: "To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Congress controls the money, and they can use it any way that is "necessary and proper" for the "general welfare" of our nation. Pretty broad power.
But, to clarify, Congress does not require any state to follow the educational laws they have passed. If they refuse to do so, they just cannot receive desperately-needed federal funding. The constitution allows it, as opined by the Supreme Court in South Dakota v. Dole.
The heaviest testing load falls on the nation’s eighth-graders, who spend an average of 25.3 hours during the school year taking standardized tests, uniform exams required of all students in a particular grade or course of study. Testing affects even the youngest students, with the average pre-K class giving 4.1 standardized tests, the report found.
Those of us in or related to education know what a total clusterf*ck NCLB made of public education in America. If we don't restore our public education system, it will collapse and horrific for-profit companies will completely control education in this country and only the wealthiest will get decent educations.
ef you dont hev standerd testes thin yu well neva no ef ur kidz r lerned the rite stuf u dont went alot off stuped peeples runin stuf.
I took maybe 1 standardized test a year, I didn't even know/care it was coming except for the SAT. 10 a year sounds like a cluster fuck.
Someone needs to link the John Oliver episode about standardized testing which goes into why the system is FUBARed in more detail.
I'm unfortunately stuck behind the chinese firewall at the moment and can not.
In theory, tests should be utilized for two purposes: determining the effectiveness of a curriculum and how it is taught (i.e. the teacher), and determining a specific student's retention. Unfortunately, making test scores part of a student's permanent record (via Grades) leads to discrimination against those who do poorly on tests, which leads to the dysfunctional practice of 'cramming'. Cramming leads to much-reduced retention compared to other learning techniques, and further testing (e.g. final exams) will lead to more cramming rather than more learning in ways that improve retention. Sudden pop-quizzes could be utilized instead, where the students don't know to cram for them, but I'm skeptical these could be done in a cram-proof manner, particularly if they are regular occurrences.
The solution is for test results to not be associable with individual students or affect grades. Pop quizzes can be used to determine who needs additional instruction to understand the material. Only 1 standardized test should be necessary annually, not 10 like the summary says is average. Furthermore, only giving funding to schools who score well leads to a positive feedback loop, where rich schools get higher scores and thus get more money they don't need, while poor schools get low scores and don't get the money they badly need. There's too much graft involved with the boondoggles that aren't helping, and I imagine standardized tests are a part of that. The lack of nationwide homogenization in schools is a double-edged sword: some happen to do something right, somehow, that the federal govt. wouldn't have thought of, yet others fall into easily-avoided traps that the dept. of education could ward off.
Rant mode:
Even in pre-NCLB public schools, I wasn't taught what breadth of endeavors and fields of study there were. I didn't know what Sociology was until college, for example. I don't necessarily think every high-schooler should take a Sociology course, but they should at least know it exists. There are countless things that exist that schools fail to notify students about: "hey, this exists. it's a thing. check it out maybe." One's world can seem to feel like it holds nothing more than what's taught in one's courses. Many students aren't interested in (at least some of) the few things their public schools offer, leading some to come to dislike learning in general, which leads to anti-intellectualism. Some people will just never have the patience for learning things that are abstract or not immediately obvious to be relevant to them, so teaching them things like math or geography are a waste of time compared to teaching them practical hands-on things like carving furniture. Worse, it's condescending for some teachers to suggest that "if you do bad at $my_subject then you're doomed to be a burger-flipper for all your days" as if that's a horrible inevitable fate. There are LOTS of blue-collar jobs of all different types, which can be done by someone without even a high school education, some of which a given person may enjoy.
It seems that certain subjects are considered 'sacred cows', and are rarely justified for why they are taught, particularly for as many hours as they are. For example, Algebra is great, as a programmer I use it all the time; there's certainly enough knowledge of Algebra to fill 50, 100 or maybe 1000 hours of class time... but does the average high school student really need more than 5 or 10 hours to learn the most important elements of it they're most likely to actually remember and use? If some obscure element is required to be understood primarily for the purpose of understanding something in a later class, it can be explained in that later class right before what builds upon it, saving time for those who never take that later class. In high school did I really need to be taught the details of WW2 three separate times? The teachers went into more depth each time, sure, yet I learned about names and dates of battles and who won them and why rather than stuff like the Nuremberg Trials and w
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If we get rid of Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays from the school system, that's 4 days of time the testing could be shifted to.
It's easy enough to implement, Just identify the schools that struck the word "Christmas" and teach that Native Americans got screwed.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Typical mid management philosophy also applies to public education I see.
If you are unsure of what to do and do not know how to fix something. Just come up with anything to change something so people do not think you don't know what you are doing. If other people are doing it too, great! It must work.
We must do something, let's add more standardized testing!! Sounds great. Next on the list..
What's good for the teacher is generally good for the student, that I'll give you.
But it's not always true. What about rules where a teacher can't be fired for poor performance or even a conviction for something like child abuse?
I think there needs to be is a balance of power between the teacher's union, administration, and parents.
I don't read AC A human right
The needs of the teacher leads to the needs of the student. Not the other way around.
No, the needs of the profession lead to the needs of the student. The profession needs to attract competent teachers and ensure that incompetent ones are removed. It needs to ensure that academic standards are high and that there are adequate resources.
The needs of teachers are that they remain employed with the highest salary and best benefits they can get. There is some overlap between the two sets of needs but they are not the same. Worse even the needs of the teachers are not the top priority for the unions the needs of the union are./
Public education is in a bad spot right now. You have the right wingers trying to privatize most of it, demonizing teachers and teachers' unions, and meanwhile the students have to deal with it. I am of the opinion that teachers should be paid well and treated like true professionals. Everyone loves to quote the "rubber room" story and point out how hard it is to fire a teacher, but what about the good ones? Why should they have to suffer under a flawed standardized testing regime that will cost them their jobs if they can't force their students to pass the tests?
Back in the Stone Age when I went to school in New York (upstate, not the city) the state board of regents had (and still has) a standardized set of exams administered at the end of high school courses that every student in the state took. We did spend a lot of time "preparing" for the exams, but their content was 100% mapped to the course curriculum, and exams were written by the same branch of the education department that administered curriculum. Students who failed the exam failed the course, period. This meant that the passing bar was set pretty low but there was a reasonable assurance that someone who passed the exam got _something_ out of the course. The big controversy in NY now is that these exams are now more Common Core based, written by a third party and are being used to evaluate teachers. Tenure rules still apply, but I'm sure the right wing anti-union crowd is frothing at the mouth waiting for their chance to dismantle those as well.
I guess my problem is that teacher evaluations based on testing will devolve into a political tool and benefit no one. Political tinkering is why tenure exists in public education, not to give teachers a free ride like the anti-union crowd thinks. I think teachers should have a strong union, be paid and treated like professionals, and not be subject to capricious corporation-style evaluation systems. For those of you who work in large companies, think of the idiotic HR evaluation/performance review systems you have been subject to over the years. Now imagine you're a new teacher. In New York, and probably elsewhere, new teachers have to start out in crappy schools. This means a perfect combination of poor students, disinterested or absent parents, and no support from anyone. On top of this, you now have to get the majority of your students to pass a standardized test battery of dubious quality, _and_ convince your principal and other administrators that you deserve tenure after 3 years. When the majority of your students are below grade level, and have zero interest in doing better, the deck is stacked against new teachers. Oh, and the charter school crowd is trying to siphon off any kids who have a chance of increasing your class's pass rate, because of course the free market is the best way to run an education business.
I'm not a teacher, but I definitely support them on this one. Even if I do pay a lot in property taxes, it's worth it to not have the bottom of the barrel teaching kids. Taking away the one thing teachers have -- stability and guaranteed career progression via tenure, and offset by lower pay -- just to satisfy a political constituency is a bad idea, and you certainly won't attract the best people.
Not much of a union if it only has one member.
The only people who are against tests are the people who can't handle failing them. Nobody wants to feel inferior, so they are against testing. God forbid we hurt a feeling or two. How are we supposed to measure whether you know something or not? We need some way to measure whether a person has the ability to understand and use skills. Also, it helps to student know where to improve herself. How can we not have tests, it's silly. What if we made the NFL or NBA select players without seeing what they can do?
I went to private school so I'm not sure if my experience in K-12 (graduated 1985) is anything to compare to but we might have taken ONE standardized test per year (not counting SAT and ACT in high school).
In fact, I'm not even sure we had ANY standardized testing after 5th grade, but I'll allow that maybe we did one and I just don't remember it.
It seems crazy to me that we have so many tests today.
Most schools have close to 900 hours of instructional time per year.
Standardized Tests Overwhelming Public Schools
The problem in America is not the concept of standards, but their execution. The way we have them, they are a Rube Goldberg clusterfuck of a system, done like no one else on Earth. And for what? Supposedly to "fix" the lack of education in this country, compared to other countries such as Finland, Singapore, Japan or Germany.
Which is completely bollocks because the problem with education in this country is that we do not have a sensible way of funding public schools. We fund them primarily with property taxes. And obviously that creates a subsidized segregated system where people living in well-to-do zip codes (like me) get the best resources for their children, whereas people living in poor areas get to send their children to public schools that don't even have soap with which to wash their hands.
The problem is economic segregation, and what we see now are just symptoms that were going to happen, federal government or not. The only good thing I see about standardized tests is that they are the final catalysts that make all this crap come up to the surface.
If the federal government has a say on education, then the federal government must provide a fix % bracket for funding as a function of the number of children in a given school, regardless of zip code.
If we do not want the feds in it, but want the states to fund education, then do the same, have the federal government dictate a minimum % bracket for funding schools as a function of the # of children in them, regardless of zip code.
Either way will solve the root cause of all this crap. Then and only then we should be tackling test standardization.
You can't stop people from prepping for the test; the most you can do is stop people from ostensibly prepping for a test.
Any measure which is used to evaluate a social process will distort that process. Any single, high-stakes measure that is the sole yardstick by which we judge the people involved with that process will inevitably become the sole focus of those people.
Sociologist Donald Campbell crystalized this in Campbell's Law:
On the other hand, if you don't measure things you can't control them. I'd propose using several diverse measures of different things we expect our schools to do, sufficiently diverse that "teaching to the test" becomes impractical. For example you could have an impartial jury judge a portfolio of creative work done by students in music, art, writing and technology. Then add other measures for how well the school serves the special needs population within its service area.
I realize this would effectively make it impossible for a school to score as entirely satisfactory, but I see that as a good thing. That would reflect an underlying truth about education itself.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Next time somebody proposes a new regulation to be added to the ever-growing pile of existing regulations, keep this in mind. Compliance costs eat up an increasing amount of time, money, and energy.
If teachers wanted higher salaries over all else, then why would they buy school supplies out of pocket?
Those are the good teachers who are sadly a vanishing breed. However the unions do not just represent good teachers they represent the bad ones as well. I'd happily support higher salaries for teachers: my mum was a teacher, my sister is a teacher and I'm a professor. Salaries are so low that they are part of the problem at the moment since it is hard to attract excellent teachers to the profession.
My point was not that teachers are not due a raise but that the unions are damaging the profession immensely because their priorities have increasingly little overlap with the priorities of the profession. In the absence of money from government for salaries they negotiate for increased job security (which makes it hard to fire bad teachers) and for a reduced work load (which impacts student learning).
This damage has resulted in a loss of respect for teachers: it's hard to respect your son's teacher when she is telling him that 6/9 is less than 2/3 even when he, and later I, pointed out that they are the same fraction. When a teacher like that cannot be fired for gross incompetence (that was not her only gap in knowledge) you have a serious problem.
We need high national standards for academic achievement. State's rights, and allowing states to create their own measurements of academic success, are detrimental because they add a bunch more bullshit tests, where students are scolded to memorize facts rather than using that teaching time for helping students to think for themselves. States' rights, like the slavery they preserved, belong in history books.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I keep hearing this line, "only meal for the day". If you have evidence that a child is only getting a single school provided meal you have an obligation to report it as child abuse. This meme is so pervasive that it always comes up in discussions about education.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Education is a business like any other. The product our education system produces are productive members of society. With that as our goal, the true test is evaluating if that goal was met. Interview former students and their employers. Find out if they were prepared enough after leaving school.
There is a drawback to this proposed approach. Obtaining this information will be too slow. It could be up to 20 years before we find out our kindergartners aren't up to snuff. We need a faster way to evaluate the situation. That is where standardized tests come in. The standardized testing allows schools to have cascading control over the students to make sure they stay on the path to becoming productive members of society. It may not be adding value to the students, but it adds value to our system.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The first problem is that the tests should be created in such a way that the test can not be "taught" to the students. The subjects should come as a complete surprise on test day. Secondly it is vital to identify sub standard schools. Obviously nobody wants to accidentally move into a suburb with a lousy school system and it sort of compels businesses to insist upon a high quality, local, school system. Third the no child left behind junk needs to vanish. Should teachers aim at the sharpest kids in a class or cater to the slowest learners? Societies basic needs call for the effort being slanted towards the very best students. those without academic potential need to be diverted into trades types of training such as cooking or learning to paint houses or whatever. As it now stands the presence of slow students is doing great harm to better students. And frankly the reason why the student is slow is not a consideration. I am not saying that the slow students are lesser than faster learners at all but I am saying that a nation will prosper according to the quality of its best students.
We need to look at what other countries do, because they're eating our lunch.
For money! Why test, when you can take our word for it! No matter how much money you give the Democrats, they'll spend it on their salaries/pensions and not on the children.
Standardized tests would work if anyone could standardize to a curriculum or qualification for a teacher. the problem is that you have teacher X with skills Y and teaching ability Z, going up against a teacher T with skills Y and teaching ability U. When the standardized test comes, it's really up to the student to see how well they've managed to absorb the information from the teacher and convert it to a style that will work for the test. The entire system is designed to fail and no one seems to care.
To make this work you'd have to hard line that a teacher must teach to a standard A, they must know material to a standard B and they much have skills C, D and E. Then you'd have to release a curriculum that was designed to hand hold the teacher to teach it as F and allow the students to absorb the information in form G. It will never work and the no one can seem to understand this. It will never work as long as you can't enforce an absolute standard.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The one that correlates the test results to either the funding the district gets, or the shit the district is in if they don't meet the standards?
We're the ones who decided to equate student performance on tests to the resources afforded the schools, instead of truly worrying about what the students are learning.
The Arizona Board of Education just voted to recommend abandoning Common Core ("College and Career Read Standards" in Arizona).
A big complaint was the number of tests required, time lost to testing, expenses, and the inconsistent implementation of automated testing.
Also, the material wasn't meeting student needs, for instance, from the AZ Kids Can’t Afford to Wait! 2015 report:
"Many recent graduates are uneducated on personal finances and what financial pitfalls face newly
independent individuals. This situation is exacerbated in the dropout population"
Just one of the findings.
This has to pass the Legislature and get through the current struggle to fund public education as currently ordered by a judge.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
To tell the government what they already know. Obviously they know the effect this will have on schools, that's why they invented the tests in the first place.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Several tests given in MN have had issues with vendor quality. A test battery given in the last week or so to second graders had to be suspended because the vendor's bandwidth was so low that delays between sections was 10 minutes or more, sometimes requiring that student computers be rebooted. Second graders' attention span is such that they lose focus on the tests, and results may reflect that. Do schools just pinch low bidder without any due diligence?
...is to bloody well leave some children behind. Not everybody has to be good at all the same things, and that's okay! Not everybody needs a formal education to be a productive member of society, especially when it comes at the cost of hampering the ones that are really good at a particular thing.
http://undecidedgames.blogspot.com