Because you can never have enough testing

Ed Week has everything behind a wall now, so this is all I can give you...

For the first time, a select group of states is expected to take part in a 12th grade version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and mathematics, a move that could lay the foundation for even greater state participation at that grade level on the heavily scrutinized test.

The board that sets policy for NAEP , known as “the nation’s report card,” has approved tentative plans to have 11 states voluntarily participate in the exam.

Each of those states would have a representative sample of its high school seniors take part in a reading and math NAEP beginning in 2009.

Already strapped state budgets are going to be asked to come up with money for it, I'm guessing. Actually there is a lot of merit to this idea. We don't know enough about how 12th graders compare between states. There's an awful lot to say about the state of the senior year in American education. Maybe the NAEP could inform some discussion about that.

Read More...

Summary only...

Poker to teach math; making learning fun

I subscribe to a feed that gives me news on the education world, and today's feed gave me two stories that go together perfectly.

The first is about using poker to teach math, and the second was about fun in learning. Seems like a good fit to me.

Charles Nesson is featured in this New York Times story about the benefits of using poker in math courses to teach math concepts and make those concepts real and relevant to students. Definitely a radical concept... Education has been a field in which moral precepts are taken seriously and promoted; it's hard to imagine educators, who tend to be pretty conservative socially, taking up this banner:

A Harvard Law School professor and a group of his students formed an organization this fall — the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society — dedicated to demonstrating that poker has educational benefits. They argue that the game, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment, situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law classes.

“I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as sixth grade, when they’re dropping out of math,” said Charles R. Nesson, the Harvard Law School professor who began the society with a group of his students. “I’m thinking of kids who are into their video games but instead of Halo-3 and World of Warcraft, we lead them into a game environment that has real intellectual depth to it, and feeds their curiosity rather than snuffs it out.”

The society has been working to establish chapters at campuses nationwide. This semester, it has sponsored seminars at Harvard featuring academics and authors to evangelize the wonders of poker. In the spring it plans to hold a workshop on using poker to teach math to children, to be held at the Smith Leadership Academy, a Boston charter school for at-risk kids in the sixth through eighth grades. “We see great potential for reaching our students in an innovative way,” said Karmala Sherwood, the school’s headmaster.

I've heard of Nesson before, and immediately remembered this feature from NPR on his ideas.

Nesson contends that poker is not the same as other types of gambling, because it's as much of a game of skill as it is one of luck. Lobbyists for the game are now trying to persuade Congress to legalize online poker.

The professor uses poker in his classes to teach students about decision making and risk. He describes poker as a game of two skills. The first is making good bets, or good investments. The second is being able to discern your opponent's strategy and story without revealing your own. "You put those two together and you have a dynamite poker player, or a dynamite lawyer, or a dynamite businessman," Nesson says. "You have dynamite."

Unfortunately, it's more and more rare that experimental teaching like this receives a serious consideration in our high stakes world of standardized testing. One of my complaints about the standardized testing movement is that it leads to more traditional approaches to teaching, more rote memorization and direct instruction, which tends to take the fun out of learning. The second story in my inbox is about that phenomenon, the tendency of the pressures of testing to make learning dull. From the UK's Independent:

Ministers have presided over the death of fun and play in the primary school curriculum, according to the results of an inquiry published today.

The inquiry, commissioned by the National Association of Head Teachers, recommends scrapping end-of-term national curriculum tests and primary school league tables.

It argues that they have damaged children's education by putting them off learning through too much repetitive teaching for tests.

Important graf from the Independent piece: "Fun and play are what motivate young children to want to learn and to go on learning."

Amen. Too often we lose sight of the fun in learning. Whatever you think of Mr. Nesson, at least he's remembered to keep learning fun.

Read More...

Summary only...

Kozol on Privatization of Schools

Jonathan Kozol has an essay in the current edition of Harper's, which, unfortunately requires a subscription for on line access. The gist of his argument is that we need to be aware of what's going on with the charter school movement and NCLB, that the ultimate goal is to corporatize public education to the benefit of private school management companies like White Hat, for example. (Threw that in there so the folks at White Hat would find me when doing their oppo research. Thanks Scott. Hi guys!)

I managed to locate the essay on line at Mahablog, but even that site won't allow me to cut and paste. Kozol argues that we are seeing the increasing corporatization of American schools through vouchers and charter schools, and that those who care about public schools should not be naive about the ultimate goal of some policy makers and management groups, and that goal is to fully privatize public education in the U. S. He even shows how investment companies have measured the untapped profit potential from public schools. So go read it, but first, I have a few more thoughts about how testing ties in to the corporatization of education. You see, standardized testing mandated by NCLB (but which most states were already doing anyway) is absolutely integral to corporatization of schools, because it provides the justification. Without the low test scores in many (primarily urban or poor or both) schools, why would anyone consider something so radical as privatizing a public school.

But Kozol doesn't talk about how passage rates lend to this definition of failure in public schools. Think about this: in your local school, or your child's classroom, how is a passing standard set? Well, usually there is an established grading scale, right? 60% score on a test or assignment is considered passing, or something like that. In some schools it's higher, but whatever the number is, everyone knows ahead of time that they have to earn 60% in the class to pass it.

How is a passing standards arrived at on, say, the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT)? It isn't a standard pecentage like 60. It's one of the least transparent aspects of the testing program itself. In fact, on the first administration of the OGT, the cut scores--the score that would determine whether a student had achieved "proficiency" and thus passed a section of the OGT--wasn't even determined until after the administration of the OGT itself! Was there much of a chance, you think, that the cut score was going to cause widespread failure among wealthy suburban districts? Why is the cut rate set where it is? It has to do with setting it where a certain number will pass--in other words, it isn't standards based at all . You can't call it a "standard-based" test if it's designed so that 90% of the students will pass.

My point is that this testing mechanism, which ensures that poor and urban schools will have high rates of failure, essentially provides the justification for corporatizing schemes like the ones that allow White Hat to take over schools and make a profit on them.

So go see a little of what Kozol has to say about it.

UPDATE: After reading some of the comments I want to clarify one point. I'm not suggesting that the ODE intentionally sets passing rates so that poor schools are labelled as failures. I'm just suggesting that the effect of the bar-setting is to allow the majority of suburban districts to be successful. And the act of establishing cut scores is not something that's out in the open. Granted, it's not very exciting, so it's not going to get news coverage, but it sure has a profound effect on students and teachers.

Read More...

Summary only...