My trusty readers have been nudging me to write more education posts. I am trying to transition from other writing projects and home cleaning. My brain isn't quite there yet. So, let me give you the links with some hasty thoughts.
Wendy sends me a link to a USA Today article about testing scandals. They expose teachers that have been caught giving their students the answers for state standardized tests. In an impressive bit of investigative journalism, they also worked with statisticians who brought up other cases of suspicious scores. Wendy says that this article shows that high-stake testing is a bad idea. I'm just confused about how the teachers got their hands on the tests ahead of time.
Amy P urged me to check out a series of recent posts on Joanne Jacobs that have been quite excellent. Jacobs writes about which college majors are the most profitable. She also looks at the use of technology in education to stimulate kids and to get around traditional tracking of kids in honors and basic skills classes. I've grown more interested in online education in recent months, after I found that my youngest son, Ian, learns best that way.
Apt. 11d 
“Wendy says that this article shows that high-stake testing is a bad idea.”
It’s the worst idea when the people who really care don’t have good quality control and when there’s insufficient interest/money/willpower to do sufficient policing. Unless we’re ready to invest in an SEC of educational testing, there will be cheating.
The cheating problem is rampant in rural developing countries (and, potentially even in the non-rural ones. The SAT charges security adders for testing in India & China because of cheating issues).
I’m generally in agreement that *high-stakes* testing is a bad idea because I don’t think that the enforcement against cheating required is worthwhile. I’m in favor of testing, because I think it can expose issues. But, the exposing should be used to take corrective measures. If it’s used to determine outcomes (including for the teacher), cheating will be an issue, and then, we have to invest in enforcement. Enforcement is expensive, because any valid enforcement (making cheating illegal, for example), will interact with our legal system which (rightly) guarantees significant rights to the accused.
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PS: I would never have predicted that I would ever see “USA Today” and “impressive bit of investigative journalism” in the same sentence.
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PPS: I think my bottom line is that honor system/professional ethics rules break down when the stakes are sufficiently high enough. Then you need realistic odds of getting caught and punished. If the stakes are lower, honor system rules might suffice. The requirement for collusion can also be barrier against cheating (because then you’re relying on the honor of many rather than just one).
(So, I don’t consider this an issue for teachers only, but for all workers: police, air traffic controllers, scientists, . . . .).
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I think my bottom line is that honor system/professional ethics rules break down when the stakes are sufficiently high enough. Then you need realistic odds of getting caught and punished.
For example, Bank of America.
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The Boston Globe has a series of linked stories on school assignments: http://tinyurl.com/67f6knf.
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“Anything that’s worth winning is worth cheating for”
And a great Mark Kleiman post on the subject:
http://www.samefacts.com/2002/12/education-policy/high-stakes-school-testing/testing-fails/
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I just published a post about Khan Academy. Have you heard of it? I watched the TED talk over the weekend and am pretty darn impressed.
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My mil was a public school teacher for years and knew many teachers who fed answers to the kids.
Khan Academy is cool, but it’s missing the teacher. It’s still a very passive way of getting an education, unless you have someone–i.e. a parent–supplementing with specific activities to reinforce the lectures.
Re: majors: I was a liberal arts major, continued in a liberal arts field for a doctorate, but essentially minored in ed tech. I’ve been relatively successful as a result. Had I majored in CS and a liberal arts degree, I think I could have written my own ticket, and still could. Doing technology work requires a huge amount of communication skills, writing skills, people skills, creative thinking, and critical thinking–all of which I got from my liberal arts degree. Glad to see confirmed what I have sensed for years.
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I’m impressed by Khan Academy, too. But, as Laura says, it’s not online teaching. It’s more of an online video textbook (with the benefits that come from video).
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Can we do an experiment on Kahn Academy? We’re an interesting educated cross section here on this blog. Let’s all view a topic and see if we can understand the lecture. I suggest the Birthday Probability Problem (under probability & statistics).
http://www.khanacademy.org/video/birthday-probability-problem?playlist=Probability
I have a hypothesis. I think the videos are only useful for someone who has done the material already. I’m watching it now, and it’s way too slow for me (though I, unlike my husband, had forgotten to do the problem. But, the wikipedia-style entry works better for me than Kahn Academy).
His explanation also requires a higher level of straight mathematical knowledge & computational calculators that weren’t available when I was a kid (interesting how the digital revolution changes things. analytic calculus isn’t nearly so important for most problems, even in science as it used to be).
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I’m generally in agreement that *high-stakes* testing is a bad idea because I don’t think that the enforcement against cheating required is worthwhile. I’m in favor of testing, because I think it can expose issues. But, the exposing should be used to take corrective measures.
I’m not sure what, exactly, this means. Do you oppose merit pay for good teachers? If not, how do you determine merit? Do you support public funding for private schools through vouchers, even if the private school education is worse? What if, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported this morning, voucher students performed worse on standardized tests than public school students?
http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/118820339.html
The “corrective measure” may be to stop funding vouchers with public money, but for the schools in question that is certainly “high stakes.”
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That article was a bit strange. There was no effort to see if the voucher population was comparable on anything but income. And no way to compare change over time.
Anyway, I’m guessing that it is very high stakes for the lower performing private schools. The higher performing ones (and many very handily beat the public schools) can probably fill the classes without vouchers.
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“I’m not sure what, exactly, this means. Do you oppose merit pay for good teachers?”
Yes, I oppose merit pay, because I don’t think we’re willing to do the investment in evaluation that would be required to provide merit pay base don actual merit in doing the hard job of teaching all the kids (rather than rewarding surface/gameable/cheatable achievements like scoring well on a test).
I’m more interested in systems that more actively tries to weed out bad teachers, but I don’t think the money involved in merit pay justifies the kind of system that we’d need to measure merit.
So, no to the merit debate as it’s currently played out, which is merit pay based on some simple to measure variable of performance.
“Do you support public funding for private schools through vouchers, even if the private school education is worse?”
No, never. I don’t support it even if it’s better.
So, what did I mean by taking “corrective” measures? I think I mostly mean educational/social intervention in schools where the children are performing poorly. I think that one thing that NCLB forced us to do is to think about those schools and groups, rather than just pretend that everything was OK until they graduated and couldn’t find a job, ’cause they couldn’t read or do simple arithmetic and then found themselves in the illegal economy and then eventually bouncing in and out of jail. Uncovering the problems (and testing plays that role) doesn’t mean we know how to fix them, but it makes it harder for us to live in denial.
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See, where I’m coming from is that I don’t intuitively believe that — except for the top and bottom 1-2% — teacher quality matters a heck of a lot. For the vast majority of kids, teacher quality is swamped by peer/parent/socio-economic factors, so the best way to improve education is to make everyone richer.
This puts me at odds with the Conservatives who want to test, reward, and punish, but also with Liberals and Unions that push for higher salaries and greater protections for teachers to protect this cherished resource.
For my money, absent solid evidence on what makes a “good teacher”, I see no reason why we need to work hard to keep them.
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“For my money, absent solid evidence on what makes a “good teacher”, I see no reason why we need to work hard to keep them.”
I agree with you that teacher quality is trumped by other factors in outcomes. But, I disagree that that means that it doesn’t matter who is teaching. And, in particular, I disagree that it means that any random person is a sufficiently qualified teacher, especially if you pair that with high turn over.
I could compare it to physicians. I think that in general the quality of a physician isn’t all that well tied to outcomes. But, I think the qualifications required to have a sufficiently good physician that they don’t actually produce negative outcomes is pretty high. I think the same is true for teachers.
My issue with merit pay is that it tries to come up with comparative ranks of teachers, with the hope that you’ll pay the “best” (which is automatically a comparative rank) the most. I think what we need is high baseline standards so that teachers aren’t standing in the way of learning.
(I do believe that I don’t always agree with the status quo on what those standards should be).
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Again, I think I need it spelled out a little more. What is a “high baseline standard”? Does that mean a Masters in Education? Or does it mean some sort of test of student achievement? The former seems insufficient, and the latter begins to be “high stakes” again, from the teacher’s perspective.
Also, do I get to sue the teacher from educational malpractice if my kid turns out dumb?
http://moms.today.com/_news/2011/03/16/6278260-mom-sues-preschool-for-not-prepping-4-year-old-for-ivy-league
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