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No shit. Public school is all about teaching to the tests. There's no time to actually learn anything useful, because everything is focused on bringing up the

by douche 11y ago

No shit. Public school is all about teaching to the tests. There's no time to actually learn anything useful, because everything is focused on bringing up the state test scores, which influence funding. Not only are you spending all this time teaching what is going to be on the standardized test, and how to structure essays and do your work according to what the test graders expect, but there's the two weeks taken out of instructional time just to take the damned tests. So you see everything that doesn't support that goal get stripped back. Home economics? Shop? History? Real literature? Gym? Programming/technology/spelling/philosophy? Nope, we're going to spend 80% of your time honing your five-paragraph essay skills and pushing everybody kicking and screaming through pre-calc.

SilasX 11y ago
Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on the content of the tests. You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?" If no, then it's fair to criticize them for having to spend time teaching this, and instead achieve a lower proficiency but teach a broader skill set. But if yes, then any criticism of "teaching for the test" falls flat: this is stuff students need to be able to do, and to the extent that you're finding it hard to do, then you were failing all along, and removing the tests would just hide that. [1] (Plus, it's not like a student that can't meet this minimum is going to somehow do just fine in "real literature".) However, to conclude a "no" answer to that question, you would need to cite specific questions from the tests, and go on record saying "nope, no reason a graduate of our system needs to know that, so why are we making sure they can answer it?" So I'm confused as to why such testing critics never discuss this crucial piece of evidence, instead relying entirely on innuendo about suppose dangers of "teaching to the test". [1] Which, of course, doesn't means the teachers specifically were the cause; in the extreme case, if students are literally starving, then you need to fix that. But regardless, any root-cause analysis must start from the detection of a failure, irrespective of where it ends.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - SilasX 11y ago
    "You wouldn't understand until you've been there" is not a valid policy argument. Not everyone can be everywhere, and yet we still have to debate policy. >Have you ever tried reading teachers’ magazines? Do you follow research in pedagogy or curriculum design? No, but you did, and your deep assimilation of the insights therein has enabled you to substantively answer challenges such as the one I posed. And it doesn't matter, but yes, I volunteered weekly for six years in a fourth grade classroom. I still wouldn't tolerate the response you just gave for anyone claiming to be an expert on some topic, including myself. "Expertise" has to mean something other than "criticizing others for not having read the same books." It should mean a self-consistent, accurate, predictive worldmodel that can deftly show the errors of an invalid one without attacking the presenter.
- smelendez 11y ago
  Here are some of the arguments I've seen: -- testing itself takes a lot of time away from instruction, sometimes days at a time for each of multiple tests. -- In addition to learning the material that's officially tested by an exam, students are forced to study the idiosyncracies of the exam: how questions are phrased, how graders expect to see written answers, etc. That takes more time away from studying actual curricular material and forces students to focus on something they, their parents and their teachers all find silly and boring, reducing respect for the education system. -- The material that's on the test is often the lowest common denominator for what students should know, calculated over a US state or group of states. This means there will be material that's not on the test but that everyone thinks in a particular community thinks kids should learn (history, art, music, etc.) or even that most people in a state think should be taught but a vocal minority oppose (comparative religion, black history, evolution, etc.). That material will be left off the test, and a teacher won't have time to cover it because he or she has to spend all the class's time on stuff on the test. If a science test will never mention Neil Armstrong or Neil deGrasse Tyson, a teacher has no incentive to mention either of them, and may even be penalize for doing so at the expense of more practice with the density formula. -- Teachers are evaluated based on test scores, often to the exclusion of other factors. This stresses teachers out at test time, which causes them to stress students out. Students come to dislike school and learn less. -- The tests are sometimes flawed, but by the time people realize the results are wrong, their results have already factored into policy, personnel decisions and student placement.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    So suppose you have a test which covers reading, writing and arithmetic only (3R). Assuming the teacher has already effectively taught 3R, and has time to spare, there is nothing to prevent them from teaching black history. If the teacher hasn't effectively taught 3R with time to spare, I'd suggest that black history is a topic of far less import than 3R and the teacher should skip it. This stresses teachers out at test time, which causes them to stress students out. Students come to dislike school and learn less. tl;dr; Teachers are unprofessional and just generally horrible people who inflict their problems onto innocent third parties.
- jessedhillon 11y ago
  Don't you think there's a qualitative difference involved in teaching for the purpose of instilling enough knowledge to pass an exam, versus teaching to instill a passion for the material? Making dioramas, drawing political cartoons, and wearing togas while reciting Mark Antony's speech from Julius Caesar were the kinds of things that kept me motivated to read and understand material in which I held no innate interest, and all of that seems superfluous to a test-driven approach.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    It's far more important that students can add than that they got to goof around in togas. Ideal world? They can do both. But if they can't do the math, then the togas just have to wait.
    - jessedhillon 11y ago
      Sounds like you have a lot of experience teaching.
- 6d0debc071 11y ago
  > You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?" Uhm, I don't feel like I do? Or at least insofar as I do, that set feels like it should be really small, because: Which graduate? There are many things that we'd like a graduate to do, but we don't need for every graduate to be able to do. I would quite like my CS grads to understand big O notation - I would not attempt to teach it to everyone. I would quite like my history grads to be able to perform independent research - I don't really care if my receptionist can. There are basic low level things that everyone should be able to do. Addition, multiplication, subtraction, division. But that set is quite small, and it beggars belief that one needs a hundred plus tests to figure out where someone is with respect to those things. Structured within that context, the idea that it's a good model to teach the tests; to have a list of things that you'd like graduates to be able to do and if they don't do that they're failing and the school's failing (and so on); seems supremely wasteful. If the students do some maths in the mean time and discover a passion for some particular element of it, great, but it's not useful to attempt to make them meet some idealised standard that doesn't reflect reality, rather than focusing on teaching people where their inclinations and skills lie.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Here are some real standardized tests. Which students don't need to be able to answer "Roberto paid $43.08 for 3 CDs. All 3 CDs were the same price. How much did each CD cost?" Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)? http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1... http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/042610book1w.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261... Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed?
    - 6d0debc071 11y ago
      > Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed? I think you've somewhat missed the point, though I'm happy enough to play that game. My question would be which adults need to know those things? You ask me, "Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)?" And I would be inclined to answer anyone who doesn't want to go into some field that uses a lot of mathematics; accountancy, physics, computer science, biology, et cetera et cetera. Outside of the education system, for a lot of people, that knowledge has no value. And it's the same with the questions upon angles, the questions about area... people who aren't going to be working in particularly quantitative professions do not need to know these things. Your secretary does not need to know (taken from the sheets you posted) what an angle given by a line bisecting two parallel lines is. They don't need to know what 833,000 is written in scientific notation. They don't need to know what 2 over 3 to the power of four is, or which of the following: the square root of 144, the square root of 16, the square root of four, the square root of three - is an irrational number. They don't need to know what a 20% discount on a price of $37.50 is, it will be marked on what they want to buy. They do not need to know what has the same value as 5 to the power of 6 multiplied by 5 to the power of -2. Or what (jk)^-5(jk)^3 is. They do not need to know what the value of 4 to the square root of X is when X is 100. Or which graph shows that Y is equal to minus X squared. These things all have a use, but they don't have a use to everyone. They don't have a use to nearly everyone. Most people do not work in a profession where that sort of maths is useful. Your taxidriver does not need to be able to understand algebra, your secretary does not need to be able to understand geometry, your customer service representative does not need to be able to do calculus. And it is a waste of time, effort, money, and passion to try to teach them to do so if they are not interested. I would suggest, in the place of general standardised tests, a system more similar to the badges given out for scouting: pass fail assessment of a particular skill, voluntary participation, fine-grained certification. You have kids in a school, and if they want to go for their level 1 geometry badge, or whatever, then you help them do so. You retain the absolute basics that everyone has to have in order to get by in society, like addition, multiplication, division. And everything else you take out into a much finer-grained system that vouches for specific skills. That would allow both a better analysis of the sort of skills that are being promoted in particular areas by particular schools and it will allow children to pursue their aspirations rather than being shoehorned into a process that is not suitable for everybody and manages to say very little with respect to specific careers. People shouldn't end up shit-listed for life because they ended up studying a bunch of stuff they had no interest or passion for but which unfortunately, because of the way the system was set up, is the only way that their employer had to assess anything about their education.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rcthompson 11y ago
  Standardized tests measure students' ability to take standardized tests. This loosely correlates with their knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, and correlates more tightly with knowledge of test-taking strategies specific to the test they are taking. So no, most of what students need to know to pass the tests is not useful real-world knowledge. To put it another way, knowing the material is not the easiest way to pass the test, so even if the test nominally evaluates useful real-world knowledge, a high score won't guarantee that a student actually possesses that knowledge.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  "Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions, studying previous years, knowing exactly what you can sacrifice coverage of, how to guess multiple choice questions when you don't know the answer etc. Basically over-optimizing to fit an imperfect model. Now, I'm a good test taker generally, and it has always helped me in life, and I will ensure my children know the rules of the game. But from the perspective of the country or planet, that's not time and effort well spent, it's a zero-sum arms-race that could have been better spent. There's more to this, e.g. the fact that the tests are really testing the teachers (again very imperfectly), that some people want to privatize education and so on, but "teaching to the test" is a well known anti-pattern for good reasons, even though the individual incentives push us in that direction.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    >"Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions... Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all.
    - Natanael_L 11y ago
      Or you're a good teacher with students learning what they should, but the other classes got higher numbers despite not knowing the topic as well, so now you're under pressure to copy them.
    - cjslep 11y ago
      > Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all. But the teacher that does this will have students with higher scores, so by all metrics they are not the incompetent ones. Like in software engineering, metrics lose meaning once they are used to justify rewards and punishments.
    - themartorana 11y ago
      Says someone with I'm guessing no teaching experience, and no background in education. Teach the test, get better scores... Better teacher? Not likely.
themartorana 11y ago
Came here to say "no shit," beaten to it, because it's the most obvious conclusion.
rayiner 11y ago
Five paragraph essays are way more important than home ec or shop or literature.
- gizmo686 11y ago
  Reading (good) literature does more for your writing abilities than learning about five paragraph essays. That is not to say that you do not need to practice writing, just that five paragraph essays are not a good way to practice.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    No way. Most literature is terribly structured for the workaday communications people actually need to do in real life.
teaneedz 11y ago
Spot on. Since we've been homeschooling, education has become an enjoyable experience once more with the exception of mandated standardized testing. I'm glad that California put a pause on the CAHSEEs because from personal experience, it just doesn't serve a real world practical need. Too many questions are just worded so poorly and often designed to trick students. I've been through the public school system and did quite well. I'm glad not to be forcing someone's antiquated testing and grading philosophies in our home now.

by douche 11y ago

SilasX 11y ago

Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on the content of the tests. You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?" If no, then it's fair to criticize them for having to spend time teaching this, and instead achieve a lower proficiency but teach a broader skill set. But if yes, then any criticism of "teaching for the test" falls flat: this is stuff students need to be able to do, and to the extent that you're finding it hard to do, then you were failing all along, and removing the tests would just hide that. [1] (Plus, it's not like a student that can't meet this minimum is going to somehow do just fine in "real literature".) However, to conclude a "no" answer to that question, you would need to cite specific questions from the tests, and go on record saying "nope, no reason a graduate of our system needs to know that, so why are we making sure they can answer it?" So I'm confused as to why such testing critics never discuss this crucial piece of evidence, instead relying entirely on innuendo about suppose dangers of "teaching to the test". [1] Which, of course, doesn't means the teachers specifically were the cause; in the extreme case, if students are literally starving, then you need to fix that. But regardless, any root-cause analysis must start from the detection of a failure, irrespective of where it ends.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- SilasX 11y ago
  "You wouldn't understand until you've been there" is not a valid policy argument. Not everyone can be everywhere, and yet we still have to debate policy. >Have you ever tried reading teachers’ magazines? Do you follow research in pedagogy or curriculum design? No, but you did, and your deep assimilation of the insights therein has enabled you to substantively answer challenges such as the one I posed. And it doesn't matter, but yes, I volunteered weekly for six years in a fourth grade classroom. I still wouldn't tolerate the response you just gave for anyone claiming to be an expert on some topic, including myself. "Expertise" has to mean something other than "criticizing others for not having read the same books." It should mean a self-consistent, accurate, predictive worldmodel that can deftly show the errors of an invalid one without attacking the presenter.
smelendez 11y ago
Here are some of the arguments I've seen: -- testing itself takes a lot of time away from instruction, sometimes days at a time for each of multiple tests. -- In addition to learning the material that's officially tested by an exam, students are forced to study the idiosyncracies of the exam: how questions are phrased, how graders expect to see written answers, etc. That takes more time away from studying actual curricular material and forces students to focus on something they, their parents and their teachers all find silly and boring, reducing respect for the education system. -- The material that's on the test is often the lowest common denominator for what students should know, calculated over a US state or group of states. This means there will be material that's not on the test but that everyone thinks in a particular community thinks kids should learn (history, art, music, etc.) or even that most people in a state think should be taught but a vocal minority oppose (comparative religion, black history, evolution, etc.). That material will be left off the test, and a teacher won't have time to cover it because he or she has to spend all the class's time on stuff on the test. If a science test will never mention Neil Armstrong or Neil deGrasse Tyson, a teacher has no incentive to mention either of them, and may even be penalize for doing so at the expense of more practice with the density formula. -- Teachers are evaluated based on test scores, often to the exclusion of other factors. This stresses teachers out at test time, which causes them to stress students out. Students come to dislike school and learn less. -- The tests are sometimes flawed, but by the time people realize the results are wrong, their results have already factored into policy, personnel decisions and student placement.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  So suppose you have a test which covers reading, writing and arithmetic only (3R). Assuming the teacher has already effectively taught 3R, and has time to spare, there is nothing to prevent them from teaching black history. If the teacher hasn't effectively taught 3R with time to spare, I'd suggest that black history is a topic of far less import than 3R and the teacher should skip it. This stresses teachers out at test time, which causes them to stress students out. Students come to dislike school and learn less. tl;dr; Teachers are unprofessional and just generally horrible people who inflict their problems onto innocent third parties.
jessedhillon 11y ago
Don't you think there's a qualitative difference involved in teaching for the purpose of instilling enough knowledge to pass an exam, versus teaching to instill a passion for the material? Making dioramas, drawing political cartoons, and wearing togas while reciting Mark Antony's speech from Julius Caesar were the kinds of things that kept me motivated to read and understand material in which I held no innate interest, and all of that seems superfluous to a test-driven approach.
- SilasX 11y ago
  It's far more important that students can add than that they got to goof around in togas. Ideal world? They can do both. But if they can't do the math, then the togas just have to wait.
  - jessedhillon 11y ago
    Sounds like you have a lot of experience teaching.
6d0debc071 11y ago
> You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?" Uhm, I don't feel like I do? Or at least insofar as I do, that set feels like it should be really small, because: Which graduate? There are many things that we'd like a graduate to do, but we don't need for every graduate to be able to do. I would quite like my CS grads to understand big O notation - I would not attempt to teach it to everyone. I would quite like my history grads to be able to perform independent research - I don't really care if my receptionist can. There are basic low level things that everyone should be able to do. Addition, multiplication, subtraction, division. But that set is quite small, and it beggars belief that one needs a hundred plus tests to figure out where someone is with respect to those things. Structured within that context, the idea that it's a good model to teach the tests; to have a list of things that you'd like graduates to be able to do and if they don't do that they're failing and the school's failing (and so on); seems supremely wasteful. If the students do some maths in the mean time and discover a passion for some particular element of it, great, but it's not useful to attempt to make them meet some idealised standard that doesn't reflect reality, rather than focusing on teaching people where their inclinations and skills lie.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Here are some real standardized tests. Which students don't need to be able to answer "Roberto paid $43.08 for 3 CDs. All 3 CDs were the same price. How much did each CD cost?" Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)? http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1... http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/042610book1w.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261... Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed?
  - 6d0debc071 11y ago
    > Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed? I think you've somewhat missed the point, though I'm happy enough to play that game. My question would be which adults need to know those things? You ask me, "Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)?" And I would be inclined to answer anyone who doesn't want to go into some field that uses a lot of mathematics; accountancy, physics, computer science, biology, et cetera et cetera. Outside of the education system, for a lot of people, that knowledge has no value. And it's the same with the questions upon angles, the questions about area... people who aren't going to be working in particularly quantitative professions do not need to know these things. Your secretary does not need to know (taken from the sheets you posted) what an angle given by a line bisecting two parallel lines is. They don't need to know what 833,000 is written in scientific notation. They don't need to know what 2 over 3 to the power of four is, or which of the following: the square root of 144, the square root of 16, the square root of four, the square root of three - is an irrational number. They don't need to know what a 20% discount on a price of $37.50 is, it will be marked on what they want to buy. They do not need to know what has the same value as 5 to the power of 6 multiplied by 5 to the power of -2. Or what (jk)^-5(jk)^3 is. They do not need to know what the value of 4 to the square root of X is when X is 100. Or which graph shows that Y is equal to minus X squared. These things all have a use, but they don't have a use to everyone. They don't have a use to nearly everyone. Most people do not work in a profession where that sort of maths is useful. Your taxidriver does not need to be able to understand algebra, your secretary does not need to be able to understand geometry, your customer service representative does not need to be able to do calculus. And it is a waste of time, effort, money, and passion to try to teach them to do so if they are not interested. I would suggest, in the place of general standardised tests, a system more similar to the badges given out for scouting: pass fail assessment of a particular skill, voluntary participation, fine-grained certification. You have kids in a school, and if they want to go for their level 1 geometry badge, or whatever, then you help them do so. You retain the absolute basics that everyone has to have in order to get by in society, like addition, multiplication, division. And everything else you take out into a much finer-grained system that vouches for specific skills. That would allow both a better analysis of the sort of skills that are being promoted in particular areas by particular schools and it will allow children to pursue their aspirations rather than being shoehorned into a process that is not suitable for everybody and manages to say very little with respect to specific careers. People shouldn't end up shit-listed for life because they ended up studying a bunch of stuff they had no interest or passion for but which unfortunately, because of the way the system was set up, is the only way that their employer had to assess anything about their education.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rcthompson 11y ago
Standardized tests measure students' ability to take standardized tests. This loosely correlates with their knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, and correlates more tightly with knowledge of test-taking strategies specific to the test they are taking. So no, most of what students need to know to pass the tests is not useful real-world knowledge. To put it another way, knowing the material is not the easiest way to pass the test, so even if the test nominally evaluates useful real-world knowledge, a high score won't guarantee that a student actually possesses that knowledge.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
"Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions, studying previous years, knowing exactly what you can sacrifice coverage of, how to guess multiple choice questions when you don't know the answer etc. Basically over-optimizing to fit an imperfect model. Now, I'm a good test taker generally, and it has always helped me in life, and I will ensure my children know the rules of the game. But from the perspective of the country or planet, that's not time and effort well spent, it's a zero-sum arms-race that could have been better spent. There's more to this, e.g. the fact that the tests are really testing the teachers (again very imperfectly), that some people want to privatize education and so on, but "teaching to the test" is a well known anti-pattern for good reasons, even though the individual incentives push us in that direction.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  >"Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions... Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all.
  - Natanael_L 11y ago
    Or you're a good teacher with students learning what they should, but the other classes got higher numbers despite not knowing the topic as well, so now you're under pressure to copy them.
  - cjslep 11y ago
    > Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all. But the teacher that does this will have students with higher scores, so by all metrics they are not the incompetent ones. Like in software engineering, metrics lose meaning once they are used to justify rewards and punishments.
  - themartorana 11y ago
    Says someone with I'm guessing no teaching experience, and no background in education. Teach the test, get better scores... Better teacher? Not likely.

themartorana 11y ago

Came here to say "no shit," beaten to it, because it's the most obvious conclusion.

rayiner 11y ago

Five paragraph essays are way more important than home ec or shop or literature.

gizmo686 11y ago
Reading (good) literature does more for your writing abilities than learning about five paragraph essays. That is not to say that you do not need to practice writing, just that five paragraph essays are not a good way to practice.
- rayiner 11y ago
  No way. Most literature is terribly structured for the workaday communications people actually need to do in real life.

teaneedz 11y ago

Spot on. Since we've been homeschooling, education has become an enjoyable experience once more with the exception of mandated standardized testing. I'm glad that California put a pause on the CAHSEEs because from personal experience, it just doesn't serve a real world practical need. Too many questions are just worded so poorly and often designed to trick students. I've been through the public school system and did quite well. I'm glad not to be forcing someone's antiquated testing and grading philosophies in our home now.