So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have.
This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely assuming you are correct.
In fact, the evidence which is staring us in the face indicates that you are not correct, and that we were far better off before we decided to let No Child Left Behind and a group of for-profit "education" companies co-opt our system and turn it into a giant standardized-test machine.
You want an alternative that works better? No problem. Go back to doing things the way we did them before January 2001. By the way, this would emphatically NOT mean that we had "no metric at all", of course...we had testing before 2001. We just didn't structure our entire system around constant standardized testing and force teachers to teach to those tests, that's all. We also had other metrics, such as observing how students do in college.
Talk to any teacher or administrator who gives a shit about their students and were teaching before 2001. I come from a family of teachers and school administration and they all point to NCLB as a huge turning point downward in education. Even the ones who favor more standardized testing as a way of finding teachers who aren't up to snuff say the test score has to be one input to the equation, not the only thing. Making the test score all-important skews teaching the same way making one metric in business all-important skews the business toward that metric.
For anyone that knows anything about the current system, its almost obvious. Education in the states is much more of a wreck now than it was BB (Before Bush). The only thing kids have improved at now is....taking standardized tests.
If you have kids, do you really want them to be educated in fill-in-the-bubble hell? Because that is how school is these days, teachers don't teach, they do test prep and then administer those tests, and the testing companies have gotten rich in basically a corrupt cycle. Read the linked article for crying out loud.
Also, NCLB passed with bipartisan support at the beginning of Bush's term, it wasn't his fault, but it was symptomatic of the simplistic shallow thinking that he would use the rest of his term. States are finally able to opt out, thank god, and you can bet I will make sure my kids are educated in one of those states.
Why are standardized test scores a good metric? A more accurate metric might be standardized testing company profits...mission accomplished!
The US educational system is evaluated against other countries, and we've only gotten worse in our rankings despite paying those testing companies all that money. Does Finland have standardized tests? No, they kick our butt simply by treating teachers as professionals and paying the, accordingly.
We do have another metric: The teachers', who spend 5 days a week with the kids, knowledge. They have a dataset infinitely deeper and more multi-dimensional than a standardized test can give. Of course, it doesn't lend itself well to making graphs, but that's the nature of complex data.
The subjective opinions of a teacher are not a metric, they are merely a noisy data set.
They are also nearly worthless scientifically - they are incomparable (how do you compare the opinion of teacher A to that of teacher B) and non-reproducible (how can one repeat an observation).
All true, of course. But numerically accurate data on a proxy quantity that you don't care about are not necessarily inferior to numerically inaccurate data on the quantity you care about. Both pose challenges to interpretation. It's easy to be seduced by clear numbers and worry less about what the numbers mean. We can argue about which fields count as "science", but many fields try to learn from non-reproducible data.
(And I say this having spent my career in the physical sciences. There's too much noise induced by people who present statistically solid analyses of numbers whose connection to the core questions is much more tenuous...)
Standardized tests claim to measure those quantities. To be fair, my school system was quite good, so I don't think I suffered too greatly from teaching to the test, but I did read quite a few of the study/test guides put out by Kaplan and their ilk. Much of it was tricks based on the structure of the tests; the "types" of question that will be asked and type-specific solution strategies. These tests are not about basic understanding and skill at adding, reading comprehension, etc., but rather a well-defined subset of those skills. The assumption is that skill in the subset is a good proxy for fundamental skills in the student. If teachers are evaluated solely by these partial measures, it is in their best interest (and, in the eyes of the administrators, produces the best results) if they optimize for these partial measures; the argument from standardized testing opponents is that teaching for these partial measures has not been shown to produce general understanding.
In that sense, NCLB created a race to the bottom; schools that performed below-average got less funding, so if any schools successfully "taught to the test", they all had too or face budget cuts (that's my understanding, IANAT).
Is there evidence that these partial measures reveal and/or necessarily lead to a more general understanding?
Please explain why you feel it doesn't adequately measure the ability of students to "read, write, and compare rational numbers in scientific notation (positive and negative powers of 10) with approximate numbers using scientific notation" (as well as the other topics listed).
Or, similarly, can you explain specifically what "teaching to the test" means and why it is suboptimal for learning the aforementoined topics?
Sorry for the delay, I didn't realize you had replied (is there some global notification UI element I should look for?) I don't know if you'll see this, but I'll reply anyway.
I'm not from California, nor have I studied their tests, nor did I claim that standardized tests themselves are flawed, so your first demand is misleading, at best. I will grant that, having done further research, my first examples of teaching to the test were flawed; I'll try to summarize it (and my position) below.
Teaching for the test is explained pretty well here: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/teaching-test and on wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test ]. Note that this definition of teaching to the test isn't necessarily bad, only when applied wrong. Punishing/rewarding schools based on student performance on a small set of tests creates an incentive to have student "learn" by mercilessly practicing on those tests, to the exclusion of other approaches. As per the sources on wikipedia, this doesn't impart a "general understanding," nor does it necessarily raise test scores. Other people here have linked stories where teachers and schools actually helped their students cheat on standardized tests. Standardized tests themselves aren't the problem; we've had them for decades, and they can provide valuable insights in some cases. The problem is when we focus on standardized tests to the exclusion of all else, putting a perverse pressure on schools. I believe you previously supported evaluating by standardized tests because they're the only quantitative measure we have; maybe this means we can't reliably quantitatively evaluate the impact of a single teacher on a small set of heterogeneous subjects. Demonstrate we can, then I'll reconsider NCLB.
edit to add another thought: I'd liken this to the problem of overfitting in machine learning. You have a way of measuring the performance of your system, and try to improve the system via that feedback. It's easy to overfit it, making it work beautifully on the provided data, but lack generality. The problem isn't in how we measure "fitness," necessarily, it is in how we update the system based on that result. That is, standardized tests may be a fine measure among students with that "generalized understanding"; I've not been convinced we are using those results intelligently.
Thanks for responding. I appreciate you taking the time to explain what you mean. I didn't mean to imply you criticized a specific test, I'm just trying to understand what critics of testing actually mean by "teaching to the test".
I suppose our probable point of disagreement is fundamentally that I don't think classes will ever impart a "general understanding". I consider the purpose of a class to be imparting a specific skillset, and most of the skillsets taught in school are quite amenable to testing.
You are also correct that my arguments in favor of testing implicitly assume teacher quality matters in a significant enough way to measure - if it doesn't, measuring them is pointless. (Then again, so is trying to use teacher quality as a lever to improve outcomes.)
I'm not certain he had another metric in mind, but it seemed plausible that he may be suggesting that test score performance did not actually increase after No Child Left Behind, or that an increased emphasis on test scores in the last decade had not had a positive measurable impact, even on an imperfect measure like test scores. I don't know what the actual data say but it seems like that was the avenue he was going down.
Classroom work? Like it used to be when we were kids. You went to school, and learned the material in class, and the teacher had a grasp on where everyone in the class. You did homework, and took tests prepared by your teacher. Now teachers in some states have to spend 30 min a day just teaching HOW TO TAKE A STANDARDIZED TEST! "here you go little johnney, fill in the bubble the whole way"
What prevents the teacher from giving his class all the answers so that he doesn't have to work and doesn't get fired for his students grades being too low.
I remember hearing about a school where the teachers assigned a letter to each corner of the room and would stand in the corner of the room that corresponded to the correct answer to each question.
In Atlanta they were having "grading parties" where teachers were getting together on the weekend to erase incorrect answers and fill in the correct ones. They got sloppy.
ITs ok, this types of train wrecks have their own logic - after a while people will cotton onto this part, and then there will be spot checks to ensure that students aren't being given the question paper.
After that they will realize that all tests should come from one standardized system, lets say Pearsons.
Then pearson will conduct tests for all 10th graders and then all high schoolers and so on.
Kids will start spending time coming up with creative ways to cheat and beat the system.
Its happened before in other countries and will happen again.
At the end of this, expect people to enter the test center after going through a metal detector and removing any metallic object.
Huh, I read it as "what is that way to measure school quality absent standardized tests?"
While I think you read it as "What's a better way to run schools?"
Your answer, roll back to before NCLB.
That could be true, but we still wouldn't have an answer to the other question. Absent standardized tests, how can we measure school quality? Hopefully something slightly more rigorous than testimonials from stakeholders... (ie, teachers claiming they like or dislike their school).
If there's a better way to get some standardized measure of student / teacher performance, I'm curious to hear it. I'm not pro-test, I just don't know the alternative metrics advocated by the anti-test community.
Same here in Germany. We got more and more standardized tests and curricula (it mostly started after I left school) and the teachers I really respected seemed to become more and more disillusioned and annoyed by the changes.
My personal opinion is that good teachers make bad politicians and thus bad teachers (or even better, people who never were teachers) make the rules.
This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely assuming you are correct.
In fact, the evidence which is staring us in the face indicates that you are not correct, and that we were far better off before we decided to let No Child Left Behind and a group of for-profit "education" companies co-opt our system and turn it into a giant standardized-test machine.
You want an alternative that works better? No problem. Go back to doing things the way we did them before January 2001. By the way, this would emphatically NOT mean that we had "no metric at all", of course...we had testing before 2001. We just didn't structure our entire system around constant standardized testing and force teachers to teach to those tests, that's all. We also had other metrics, such as observing how students do in college.