Three education policy links this morning:
- China enters the world of standardized testing and kicks ass.
- Bill Gates and Tom Kane unveil new methods for evaluating teachers.
- Michelle Rhee, former DC schools chancellor, organizes Students First, a non-partisan group that she says will advocate for education reform. Rhee intends to raise a billion dollars for programs. The agenda includes recruiting high-quality teachers who are held accountable for student growth, swiftly removing those who do not perform, offering merit pay to reward top educators, expanding school choice and fostering parent and family involvement.
Apt. 11d 
Chinese (in fact, many East Asian; we see it in South Korean students as well) are trained to memorize a lot of data. We have problems, so to speak, with students who, if they know the essay questions ahead of time, can often memorize essays to rewrite them in class. This is a little problematic when you’re testing on-demand writing skills.
I was reading the in-class writing assessment essays for a class of international students one term, and I came across references to the golden lion tamarind in two of the essays. Struck by the coincidence, I looked more deeply and found very similar language in both. We don’t think it was a cheating from one another situation; we think the students knew the question ahead of time and just happened to look at the same source essay on the Internet (which I found). They had done a very good job of memorizing significant passages.
Anyway, just anecdata.
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China more or less invented standardized testing a few thousand years ago, and they were a, often the, main way to rise in society for more than a thousand years, so it’s not a huge surprise that they take to them well and prepare students for them well.
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I like the idea of video taping teachers to try to understand what effective teachers do (as opposed to numerical VAM measures that try to measure effectiveness without defining what it is).
I’ve found videotaping lectures/seminar presentations a good way of figuring out what’s working and what’s not (and so have students I’ve used the technique with — Kevin Karplus, who blogs at Gas Station Without Pumps has a nice description of how he uses videotaping with students).
The Gates project is much bigger, but I can imagine large scale video taping being an effective tool, as long as folks realize the complexity (what works in situation A, with student X might fail the next time around, but knowing it worked in the former will be nevertheless useful info).
The info about this project came out a while ago, though. Has something been released from the study? There’s some comment about a release of preliminary results.
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