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They force teachers to teach to the test if they want to keep their jobs. School becomes rote memorization. And there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English

They force teachers to teach to the test if they want to keep their jobs. School becomes rote memorization. And there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids. The response to poor test results is not more funding for underprivileged schools or real reform, it's to fire teachers and close "under-performing" schools. Standardized testing isn't used as a feedback mechanism to learn what works and what doesn't, what can be improved and what's doing fine. It's used as a weapon against public education.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
I can't find an example Colorado test, but here are NY and CA tests: 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... http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf Please explain with specifics how to "teach to the test" in a manner that doesn't increase student knowledge.(If "teaching to the test" increases student knowledge then it's a good thing.) I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". Are clinical trials a "weapon against pharmacy"? Is a sales board a "weapon against salesmen"? Your critique that "there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids" is simply ignorant. If anything, modern testing systems are more difficult for teachers of top students (who have nowhere to go but down). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". Because the specific legal programs making state testing regimes a condition of federal funding were overtly -- by their sponsors -- heralded as tools to provide information to parents that would lead them to opt into private schools (which, those same sponsors proposed, should be subsidized by public vouchers that redirect funds from the public schools), which private schools would not be subject to the same testing requirements.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    ...lead them to opt into private schools (which, those same sponsors proposed, should be subsidized by public vouchers that redirect funds from the public schools) Um, doesn't that make the formerly private schools part of the public education system? The government is still funding schools, after all. It sounds like their sponsors just want to rearrange the public education system a bit. I do agree with you that private schools receiving taxpayer funds should be subject to the same testing requirements.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      Sure, more accurately it's an attempt to divert resources from free, equal, secular, non-discriminatory public schools to schools that can are, after the voucher, non-free, very often religious, and free to discriminate in ways that actual public schools rather then publicly subsidiEd private schools are not, but setting mandated standards which public schools can fail to which publicly-subsidized private schools aren't required to be held.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  > If "teaching to the test" increases student knowledge then it's a good thing. If burning someone alive cures them of AIDS, then it's a good thing. Rote memorization might (temporarily) increase the number of facts in your head. It will not make you an intelligent and productive individual. Instead, it will train you to be dependent on other people to give you information, rather than finding or inferring it for yourself. > I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". I explained that already, but you chose to ignore it as inconvenient to your radical ideology. > * And your critique that "there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids" is simply ignorant.* Since I've seen the devastating effects of NCLB and similar initiatives, I'm quite confident in my critique. Since I've seen many of your posts on HN, I'm equally confident that your extreme ideology will not change, so this will be my one and only reply to you.
  - Tehnix 13y ago
    >Rote memorization might (temporarily) increase the number of facts in your head. It will not make you an intelligent and productive individual. Instead, it will train you to be dependent on other people to give you information, rather than finding or inferring it for yourself. Ignoring your completely dissimilar analogy, from what I saw from the tests that yummyfajitas linked, these are not matters of simple memorization, but actually knowing how to apply knowledge to an area. If the student passes that test, then one can assume they have learned what the test presumed to have been taught beforehand. It's not a simple matter of listing things, but about applying methods to cases.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      They teach the very specific facts and steps necessary to correctly answer the very narrow range of questions they know will be on the tests. They do not teach critical thinking, research skills, or fundamental concepts. Doing so would risk an unacceptably high failure rate. They must drill the precise information necessary to pass the test into every student, no matter their relative intelligence, language skills, or medical conditions, because it would be catastrophic to their careers to have students fail. For seven hours each day, children in need of everything from individualized, therapist-aided teaching methods to nothing more than "here's a library, go nuts" are packed into overcrowded classrooms and drilled on the same crap. Look at that Grade 8 New York test. Realize that is being given to 12-13 year olds. Realize I could have gotten 80% of it right in 4th grade at a school where a few slower kids didn't risk the career of their teacher. This is what standardized testing does.
- vizeroth 13y ago
  If the test is below the level of education students were receiving before the test, it can not possibly increase the level of knowledge. In fact, the schools spend an enormous amount of time not only administering the tests, but also preparing specifically for the test, when they should be educating the children. The California tests have expanded from something required every 3 or 4 years (I think I took them twice, but I opted out in high school) to something required every year starting in second grade. They also expanded in terms of the length of the tests. California does have specific programs for children from homes in which English is not spoken or is a second language. I spent 10 years in Virginia and sent my daughter to public school for ~2 years there. During that time, I noticed a trend in the way that state used the standardized testing and recommendations of "No child left behind". They closed schools that either did not meet the average on the tests (umm... what's an average again?) or could not increase their scores year after year. After a few years of this, two themes started recurring: - close an under-performing school, bus the kids further to other schools which are now more crowded and trying to improve the performance of the students that were not doing well enough to keep their previous school open - good schools started having trouble increasing their scores in subsequent years When it was an under-performing school that closed, very few people other than the parents of children at those schools (and maybe the surrounding schools) had a problem with it. When the best schools in the state (at least according to the test scores) started to fail the requirements (how do you improve test scores every year?), it still took a while for people to realize that the law (whether accidentally or otherwise) was going to close the doors of every public school in the state.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    If the test is below the level of education students were receiving before the test, it can not possibly increase the level of knowledge. If the students already know everything on the test, then there isn't much need for prep. Take maybe 1 day to explain the test mechanics, another 1-2 days to administer, and you've spent maybe 3 days/year on testing. You still haven't answered the question. How do you "teach to the test" (real tests, not tests written by straw men) without increasing student knowledge?
- zmmmmm 13y ago
  You're right of course, metrics invariably improve for exactly the things that are tested. In fact, that's exactly the problem. They increase far out of proportion with their actual educational value, leaving behind everything else. ie: it's the things that aren't tested (and in many cases aren't testable at all) that are the problem. Think about it this way: all humans are different. We have short ones, tall ones, fat ones thin ones. Some can run a marathon almost without trying while for others it would nearly kill them. So everyone is different, and for kids especially they are different not just because their final state will be different but because they follow dramatically different paths developmentally. Teaching is an art form, a fine skill or understanding and nurturing each student along their unique path to realize the best outcome for each child. Standardized testing is like a club to this: it smashes down on children and insists they and their teachers follow one defined path that is almost completely inappropriate for many children. It actively interferes with a teacher's ability to tailor an educational path for a child. For example, if a child is not ready to learn a particular level of math, force feeding them a higher level is almost certainly counter productive and will have highly negative consequences. Yet that is what the standardized test encourages (even demands, once things like salaries and funding get linked to the results).
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    I don't understand - could you be more specific? Since you clearly won't read the tests I linked to, I'll copy&paste from it: At night Belle [the authors nickname for the Brooklyn Bridge] was dressed in tiny lights that spanned her limbs. On a cloudless night like this one, she was a sight like no other sight in the whole city.... When does this passage take place? Is it short or tall students who don't need to be able to read the above paragraph and determine when the passage takes place? Do fat students not need to know how to compute area or simplify (x^2 y^3)(x^4 y^2)? They increase far out of proportion with their actual educational value, leaving behind everything else. Of the topics on the 3 specific tests I linked to, what material is "far out of proportion with it's actual educational value"? I'm asking for problem #s with explanations. Use your critical thinking skills and reference the source material, don't just repeat talking points that you learned via rote memorization.
- rbehrends 13y ago
  Honestly, the part that shocks me is that these are grade 8 tests (especially the math one). I knew that the US was lagging 1-2 years behind the rest of the world in mathematics [1] (also, from personal experience). The above isn't a math test, it is a kiddie pool. Where elsewhere in the developed world students are expected to do proofs at this age (even if they are simple ones), this test checks memorized knowledge by multiple choice. (Seriously, none of my teachers in secondary school would have been caught dead doing a single multiple choice question.) Please explain with specifics how to "teach to the test" in a manner that doesn't increase student knowledge. There's a difference between rote knowledge and understanding. I mean, seriously: Asking what a trinomial is (multiple choice, too, so you can guess pretty well) or calculating the area of a rectangle in eighth grade??? [1] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-core-curriculum-standards-in-math/ http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-cor...
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    There's a difference between rote knowledge and understanding. You didn't answer the question: how would you make scores on these tests go up without also making understanding go up (i.e. "teach to the test")? I'm now convinced that "teaching to the test" is likely a myth - not a single proponent of the idea has actually explained how to do it. (Incidentally, I'm not sure why you think the test I linked to is based on memorization. What would you memorize to make your score go up?) We might be giving a 6th grade test to the 8th grade - that's a flaw of the curriculum, not of the test.
    - rbehrends 13y ago
      It's not just a curriculum issue. There are fundamental differences between math education in the US and math education elsewhere, which is where the curriculum issue comes from. As part of the 1998 TIMSS, a couple hundred videos were made of math teaching in the US, Germany, and Japan. James W. Stigler and James Hiebert then wrote a book, "The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom", on the content of these videos. They observed: "When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something different. Now we were struck by the similarity among the U.S. lessons and by how different they were from the other country’s lesson. When we watched a Japanese lesson, for example, we noticed that the teacher presents a problem to the students without first demonstrating how to solve the problem. We realized that U.S. teachers almost never do this, and now we saw that a feature we hardly noticed before is perhaps one of the most important features of U.S. lessons - that the teacher almost always demonstrates a procedure for solving problems before assigning them to students. This is the value of cross-cultural comparisons." "For example, presenting a problem in Germany sets stage for a rather long development of a solution procedure, a whole-class activity, guided by the teacher. In Japan, presenting a problem sets the stage for students to work, individually or in groups, on developing solution procedures. In the United States, presenting a problem is the context for demonstrating a procedure and sets the stage for students practicing the procedure." Or, as a review of the book on Amazon summarizes: "In Japan, mathematics teaching is a method that aims to develop students' understanding of mathematical relationships and properties. This system of mathematical knowledge is taught to children in lessons that are highly coherent, hierarchically linear, and based on teachers' own research of what lessons promote student learning. Further, these lessons typically involve "structured problem-solving," where math concepts are induced from challenging problems, where these concepts are concretized through well-considered examples, and where mathematical relationships are proven as following necessarily from given premises. "In contrast, mathematics teaching in the U.S. seeks to train students in mathematical procedures. These procedures are taught to students by demonstrating one correct procedure for solving an easy problem, and then students are asked to imitate that procedure for many highly similar problems. More often than not, the lessons for imparting these skills are incoherent--with many non-mathematical discursions and interruptions. Further, lessons almost never involve math inductions and proofs; rather, teachers state math relationships explicitly and immediately tell students how the relationship should be used to solve simple problems. Last, lessons are developed by education researchers not only without the collaboration of teachers, but specifically so that the lessons are 'teacher-proof'." That's the difference: other countries teach problem solving and (deep) understanding. The US teaches simple, repeatable procedures. That's what then becomes "teaching to the test".
xux 13y ago
This reminds of the Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." No, standarized tests aren't ideal. But what do you propose instead. Let each of the millions of teachers create his/her own standard?

yummyfajitas 13y ago

I can't find an example Colorado test, but here are NY and CA tests: 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... http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf Please explain with specifics how to "teach to the test" in a manner that doesn't increase student knowledge.(If "teaching to the test" increases student knowledge then it's a good thing.) I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". Are clinical trials a "weapon against pharmacy"? Is a sales board a "weapon against salesmen"? Your critique that "there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids" is simply ignorant. If anything, modern testing systems are more difficult for teachers of top students (who have nowhere to go but down). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling

dragonwriter 13y ago
> I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". Because the specific legal programs making state testing regimes a condition of federal funding were overtly -- by their sponsors -- heralded as tools to provide information to parents that would lead them to opt into private schools (which, those same sponsors proposed, should be subsidized by public vouchers that redirect funds from the public schools), which private schools would not be subject to the same testing requirements.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  ...lead them to opt into private schools (which, those same sponsors proposed, should be subsidized by public vouchers that redirect funds from the public schools) Um, doesn't that make the formerly private schools part of the public education system? The government is still funding schools, after all. It sounds like their sponsors just want to rearrange the public education system a bit. I do agree with you that private schools receiving taxpayer funds should be subject to the same testing requirements.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    Sure, more accurately it's an attempt to divert resources from free, equal, secular, non-discriminatory public schools to schools that can are, after the voucher, non-free, very often religious, and free to discriminate in ways that actual public schools rather then publicly subsidiEd private schools are not, but setting mandated standards which public schools can fail to which publicly-subsidized private schools aren't required to be held.
nknighthb 13y ago
> If "teaching to the test" increases student knowledge then it's a good thing. If burning someone alive cures them of AIDS, then it's a good thing. Rote memorization might (temporarily) increase the number of facts in your head. It will not make you an intelligent and productive individual. Instead, it will train you to be dependent on other people to give you information, rather than finding or inferring it for yourself. > I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". I explained that already, but you chose to ignore it as inconvenient to your radical ideology. > * And your critique that "there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids" is simply ignorant.* Since I've seen the devastating effects of NCLB and similar initiatives, I'm quite confident in my critique. Since I've seen many of your posts on HN, I'm equally confident that your extreme ideology will not change, so this will be my one and only reply to you.
- Tehnix 13y ago
  >Rote memorization might (temporarily) increase the number of facts in your head. It will not make you an intelligent and productive individual. Instead, it will train you to be dependent on other people to give you information, rather than finding or inferring it for yourself. Ignoring your completely dissimilar analogy, from what I saw from the tests that yummyfajitas linked, these are not matters of simple memorization, but actually knowing how to apply knowledge to an area. If the student passes that test, then one can assume they have learned what the test presumed to have been taught beforehand. It's not a simple matter of listing things, but about applying methods to cases.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    They teach the very specific facts and steps necessary to correctly answer the very narrow range of questions they know will be on the tests. They do not teach critical thinking, research skills, or fundamental concepts. Doing so would risk an unacceptably high failure rate. They must drill the precise information necessary to pass the test into every student, no matter their relative intelligence, language skills, or medical conditions, because it would be catastrophic to their careers to have students fail. For seven hours each day, children in need of everything from individualized, therapist-aided teaching methods to nothing more than "here's a library, go nuts" are packed into overcrowded classrooms and drilled on the same crap. Look at that Grade 8 New York test. Realize that is being given to 12-13 year olds. Realize I could have gotten 80% of it right in 4th grade at a school where a few slower kids didn't risk the career of their teacher. This is what standardized testing does.
vizeroth 13y ago
If the test is below the level of education students were receiving before the test, it can not possibly increase the level of knowledge. In fact, the schools spend an enormous amount of time not only administering the tests, but also preparing specifically for the test, when they should be educating the children. The California tests have expanded from something required every 3 or 4 years (I think I took them twice, but I opted out in high school) to something required every year starting in second grade. They also expanded in terms of the length of the tests. California does have specific programs for children from homes in which English is not spoken or is a second language. I spent 10 years in Virginia and sent my daughter to public school for ~2 years there. During that time, I noticed a trend in the way that state used the standardized testing and recommendations of "No child left behind". They closed schools that either did not meet the average on the tests (umm... what's an average again?) or could not increase their scores year after year. After a few years of this, two themes started recurring: - close an under-performing school, bus the kids further to other schools which are now more crowded and trying to improve the performance of the students that were not doing well enough to keep their previous school open - good schools started having trouble increasing their scores in subsequent years When it was an under-performing school that closed, very few people other than the parents of children at those schools (and maybe the surrounding schools) had a problem with it. When the best schools in the state (at least according to the test scores) started to fail the requirements (how do you improve test scores every year?), it still took a while for people to realize that the law (whether accidentally or otherwise) was going to close the doors of every public school in the state.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  If the test is below the level of education students were receiving before the test, it can not possibly increase the level of knowledge. If the students already know everything on the test, then there isn't much need for prep. Take maybe 1 day to explain the test mechanics, another 1-2 days to administer, and you've spent maybe 3 days/year on testing. You still haven't answered the question. How do you "teach to the test" (real tests, not tests written by straw men) without increasing student knowledge?
zmmmmm 13y ago
You're right of course, metrics invariably improve for exactly the things that are tested. In fact, that's exactly the problem. They increase far out of proportion with their actual educational value, leaving behind everything else. ie: it's the things that aren't tested (and in many cases aren't testable at all) that are the problem. Think about it this way: all humans are different. We have short ones, tall ones, fat ones thin ones. Some can run a marathon almost without trying while for others it would nearly kill them. So everyone is different, and for kids especially they are different not just because their final state will be different but because they follow dramatically different paths developmentally. Teaching is an art form, a fine skill or understanding and nurturing each student along their unique path to realize the best outcome for each child. Standardized testing is like a club to this: it smashes down on children and insists they and their teachers follow one defined path that is almost completely inappropriate for many children. It actively interferes with a teacher's ability to tailor an educational path for a child. For example, if a child is not ready to learn a particular level of math, force feeding them a higher level is almost certainly counter productive and will have highly negative consequences. Yet that is what the standardized test encourages (even demands, once things like salaries and funding get linked to the results).
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  I don't understand - could you be more specific? Since you clearly won't read the tests I linked to, I'll copy&paste from it: At night Belle [the authors nickname for the Brooklyn Bridge] was dressed in tiny lights that spanned her limbs. On a cloudless night like this one, she was a sight like no other sight in the whole city.... When does this passage take place? Is it short or tall students who don't need to be able to read the above paragraph and determine when the passage takes place? Do fat students not need to know how to compute area or simplify (x^2 y^3)(x^4 y^2)? They increase far out of proportion with their actual educational value, leaving behind everything else. Of the topics on the 3 specific tests I linked to, what material is "far out of proportion with it's actual educational value"? I'm asking for problem #s with explanations. Use your critical thinking skills and reference the source material, don't just repeat talking points that you learned via rote memorization.
rbehrends 13y ago
Honestly, the part that shocks me is that these are grade 8 tests (especially the math one). I knew that the US was lagging 1-2 years behind the rest of the world in mathematics [1] (also, from personal experience). The above isn't a math test, it is a kiddie pool. Where elsewhere in the developed world students are expected to do proofs at this age (even if they are simple ones), this test checks memorized knowledge by multiple choice. (Seriously, none of my teachers in secondary school would have been caught dead doing a single multiple choice question.) Please explain with specifics how to "teach to the test" in a manner that doesn't increase student knowledge. There's a difference between rote knowledge and understanding. I mean, seriously: Asking what a trinomial is (multiple choice, too, so you can guess pretty well) or calculating the area of a rectangle in eighth grade??? [1] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-core-curriculum-standards-in-math/ http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-cor...
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  There's a difference between rote knowledge and understanding. You didn't answer the question: how would you make scores on these tests go up without also making understanding go up (i.e. "teach to the test")? I'm now convinced that "teaching to the test" is likely a myth - not a single proponent of the idea has actually explained how to do it. (Incidentally, I'm not sure why you think the test I linked to is based on memorization. What would you memorize to make your score go up?) We might be giving a 6th grade test to the 8th grade - that's a flaw of the curriculum, not of the test.
  - rbehrends 13y ago
    It's not just a curriculum issue. There are fundamental differences between math education in the US and math education elsewhere, which is where the curriculum issue comes from. As part of the 1998 TIMSS, a couple hundred videos were made of math teaching in the US, Germany, and Japan. James W. Stigler and James Hiebert then wrote a book, "The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom", on the content of these videos. They observed: "When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something different. Now we were struck by the similarity among the U.S. lessons and by how different they were from the other country’s lesson. When we watched a Japanese lesson, for example, we noticed that the teacher presents a problem to the students without first demonstrating how to solve the problem. We realized that U.S. teachers almost never do this, and now we saw that a feature we hardly noticed before is perhaps one of the most important features of U.S. lessons - that the teacher almost always demonstrates a procedure for solving problems before assigning them to students. This is the value of cross-cultural comparisons." "For example, presenting a problem in Germany sets stage for a rather long development of a solution procedure, a whole-class activity, guided by the teacher. In Japan, presenting a problem sets the stage for students to work, individually or in groups, on developing solution procedures. In the United States, presenting a problem is the context for demonstrating a procedure and sets the stage for students practicing the procedure." Or, as a review of the book on Amazon summarizes: "In Japan, mathematics teaching is a method that aims to develop students' understanding of mathematical relationships and properties. This system of mathematical knowledge is taught to children in lessons that are highly coherent, hierarchically linear, and based on teachers' own research of what lessons promote student learning. Further, these lessons typically involve "structured problem-solving," where math concepts are induced from challenging problems, where these concepts are concretized through well-considered examples, and where mathematical relationships are proven as following necessarily from given premises. "In contrast, mathematics teaching in the U.S. seeks to train students in mathematical procedures. These procedures are taught to students by demonstrating one correct procedure for solving an easy problem, and then students are asked to imitate that procedure for many highly similar problems. More often than not, the lessons for imparting these skills are incoherent--with many non-mathematical discursions and interruptions. Further, lessons almost never involve math inductions and proofs; rather, teachers state math relationships explicitly and immediately tell students how the relationship should be used to solve simple problems. Last, lessons are developed by education researchers not only without the collaboration of teachers, but specifically so that the lessons are 'teacher-proof'." That's the difference: other countries teach problem solving and (deep) understanding. The US teaches simple, repeatable procedures. That's what then becomes "teaching to the test".

xux 13y ago

This reminds of the Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." No, standarized tests aren't ideal. But what do you propose instead. Let each of the millions of teachers create his/her own standard?