The Gloves Came Off!

Well, they sorta did.

After weeks of cheery informational hearings, food prizes for finding “weird” symbols in bill language, and generally agreeing with everything everyone had to say, the gloves finally came off a bit this morning in the K-12 Education Policy Committee.  The reason?  They were taking amendments to the K-12 Education Policy Omnibus bill… an 80 or so page piece of legislation that lays out the education policy changes the legislature wishes to enact.  As a political junky, all the lovey dovey stuff from before gets real old real fast.  The disagreement and debate today, with amendments being defeated and divided and re-written and roll call votes and everything was great.  Two things stood out to me:

I still can’t understand he focus that some legislators have on testing to determine if a student is worthy of receiving a high school diploma.  There is a part of the bill that will create an alternative route to graduation for students who can’t pass the high stakes graduation test… and these legislators tried unsuccessfully to remove it from the bill.  They claim that having students receive diplomas without passing the test amounts to a lowering of 1) our expectations of our students and 2) our academic standards.  I can understand why people might think that, but something that one of these legislators said today didn’t sit well with me.  He basically said that knowledge was most important criteria for determining qualification for graduation.  I guess if you believe in high stakes testing that is what you inherently believe.  This seems to be a rather narrow view of what is important in the world.  Non-cognitive skills are just as important as cognitive skills.  If you ask me, being a decent human being and a good citizen is far more important than any test score for determining graduation.  Again, as I wrote before, we use subjective, non-numerical, non-test-like analysis for almost everything in our lives.  Why should graduation be any different?  Rant over.

Similarly the insistence that teachers’ performance be reviewed based on numerical cost/benefit-ish data baffles me.  I won’t rant about this one because the rant is pretty similar to the one I just had.

In the end, thankfully, most of these amendments were blocked.

They had to recess this morning because they ran out of time, but the committee will be back for round two tonight at 6:30 PM.  Let’s hope the excitement continues!

High Stakes Testing

There’s been a lot of talk this legislative session about student assessments – specifically high stakes testing.  I continue to be amazed at how some people insist on requiring students to pass such a test in order to graduate from high school.  They claim that the requirement is necessary to make sure that our schools are turning out students that are ready for post-secondary life / school.  I just don’t get it.  These summative assessments, required by NCLB, are of great use in assessing two things: 1) what a student knows at a particular moment in time and 2) the effectiveness at a system of teaching the material on the test.  Notice what these tests don’t measure: how well prepared a student is for the next phase in their life.  Or what kind of person they are.  Or how successful they will be.  Spending all of the money that we do on this sort of testing seems to me to be a colossal waste of staff time and money – two things that our schools are perilously short on right now.

These tests were a waste of time for me when I was in high school.  You could have spoken to any one of my teachers.  Or my coaches.  Or my guidance counselor.  Or my friends’ parents.  Or even to me.  They all would have told you that I was a decent kid who deserved to graduate from high school and was as well prepared as I could be for whatever was going to come next.  I’m not saying this to brag – the vast majority of the people I went to high school with would have fit into that category with me.  Everyone knew the kids that we thought were going to struggle when high school was over.  We didn’t need a test to tell us.  All the test did was waste time we could have spent learning, waste paid, on the clock hours of teachers, and waste the state’s money.

Beyond that, the simple idea of tying an overall evaluation of anything to one moment in time seems crazy.  I’m going to use a sports analogy here because… well because I’m me.  It’s a baseball one too:

Let’s say that you are a scouting director for a major league team.  It is your job to analyze young baseball players and sign the best ones for your team.  In a way, you are deciding who gets to graduate from being a high school or college player to being a pro player.  Using a high stakes test to decide high school graduation is like basing your scouting analysis off of one showcase game.  No, it’s worse than that.  It’s like basing your scouting analysis off of the box score of one showcase game.  Hmm, that kid went 0-4.  We’d better not sign him.  Yikes!  That kid went 5-5!  Sign him now!  See how crazy this sounds?  What the box score won’t tell you is that the kid that went 0-4 hit four line drives that happened to get caught.  He has a great swing.  He’s also 6’2”, has incredible speed, and a cannon for an arm.  It also won’t tell you that he was playing third base when his natural position was left field, making him uncomfortable all game.  He will be a quality professional player.  It won’t tell you that the kid who went 5-5 was 5’3” and can barely run or throw.  Three of his hits were broken bat pop ups that happened to fall in between fielders.  One was a swinging bunt that the catcher tripped trying to field, and the last one should have been ruled an error.  He has absolutely no future in baseball.  If you really wanted to do your job well you wouldn’t rely on the statistics from any single game… or even on statistics at all.  You would send scouts to watch the players… see how they run… see what kind of swings they have… how the carry themselves… how they play the game… even talk with them to see what kind of kids they are.  You would talk to coaches and parents.  After gathering all of this information you would sit down and make some decisions.  I know I made a rather extreme example, but on an all or nothing high stakes graduation test the results are pretty extreme – graduate or not.

Instead of sinking time and money into tests, why don’t we sink time and money into school staff?  Get high quality school staff that can accurately judge whether or not a student deserves to graduate and is prepared for the next step in their life.  And then why don’t we trust them?  People who actually interact with the student can judge that far better than a test with an arbitrary graduation cut off test score set by someone sitting in a cube in the Department of Education.  Why are we willing to settle for such one dimensional measures in our education system when we NEVER would in ANY other area of our life.  For hiring someone for a job, for buying a car, for asking someone out, for making friends, for choosing colleges… we always go beyond simple numbers and try to get a feel for someone or something before committing to it.  Why do we settle for so much less when it comes to our K-12 students?