Test Rejections

A week or two ago, I noticed Radio Free Hamilton's Even More HCS Students Opt Out of Math Tests

Fewer HCS elementary and middle school students took this week's state-mandated math tests than took last week's English language arts (ELA) exams.

An actual majority refused to take the tests here. In the state as a whole, it was only about a sixth, but Tens of Thousands of New York Students Refuse Tests

Pressed for a reaction to the boycott, which is fueled by allegations that Common Core is rigid and age-inappropriate, and that the tests are excessive, Governor Andrew Cuomo chose to split the difference in characteristic style, by minimizing both the importance of the schooling standards to which his state government (like most) has committed, as well as belittling objections to the same.

"My position was, the department of education had not done a good job in introducing the Common Core, and they had rushed it, so we said, for a period of five years, the test scores won’t count," Cuomo told reporters. "So they can opt out if they want to, but on the other hand, if the child takes the test as practice, then the score doesn't count anyway."

"The grades are meaningless to the student," he added, not exactly shoring up the argument for committing time and effort to filling in ovals on a sheet of paper.

Former U.S. senator from New York, and current presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton went a step further last week, referring to education as a "non-family enterprise."

So... Maybe parents and students have no business raising a fuss, in her view.

Ouch. Well, What If They Threw Common Core Tests and Nobody Came?

Maybe Common Core would have received a better reception if it had been imposed on the country in 1946, after years of regimentation and top-down decision-making from the New Deal bureacracy and the war effort. A gray standardized approach might have suited a collectivized era. But it was decades too late.

... as with so many things, one size doesn't fit all.

High-Tech Teaching: Japan

I'm a long-run techno-optimist about a lot of things, including education, but the crucial thing about any technology is how you use it... Lessons Learned from a Chalkboard: Slow and Steady Technology Integration (Bradley Emerling) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Every classroom I visited was equipped with a large green chalkboard. There were few computers, few projectors or smartboards, and no other visible forms of 21st century technology in most of the classrooms. Japanese colleagues and researchers confirmed this was representative of the average K-12 classroom in Japan. In January 2015, the Tokyo Broadcasting System reported approximately 75% of Japanese classrooms still use chalkboards as the primary medium for presentation of lesson content (Sankyuu, 2015).

My first reaction was one of astonishment. How could Japan, a society known for its creation of gadgets and highly specialized technological devices, be so far behind in their use of 21st century technology?

As I continued to record lessons, I began to note the masterful way Japanese teachers utilized this “primitive” instructional medium....

Since I spend a fair amount of time trying to keep up with Japanese robotics developments, I find this amusing...but it really depends on what lesson structure you want. If you can do it on a chalkboard, then computers provide only a very big waste of time and money. (And very much smaller screens.)

The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

Textbook Stories...

Environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes in the Washington Post about Environmental history errors in a high school textbook - The Washington Post

The other night I took a look at a few pages in my daughter’s U.S. History textbook (Pearson Prentice-Hall, U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present (Ohio Edition, 2008)) concerning the growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as I was curious what my daughter was learning about it. I expected to disagree with some of book’s choice of emphasis or the way certain events are portrayed. What I did not expect, however, was to find a series of plain factual errors....

I'm reminded of experiences 20 years ago with my children's textbooks. I still have a letter (well, I still have the TeX file from which the letter was printed) from March 4, 1995, noting that page 197 of my 10-year-old son's science book, by Mallinson et al., defined "resistance" as "a force applied by a machine". That's the meaning of "resistance"? I added that

The Mallinson usage seems clearly counter to the ordinary English use of the word, as well as to that of traditional physics. I suspect a typographical error here, but there's no diagram, example, or calculation given which might clarify their meaning. That, I think, is a more serious problem than an erroneous definition, and I'd noticed it before with this book....

It's not really fair to say that the book was wrong, because the book didn't really mean anything by its definition....it was just words. The book was not even wrong. It's a problem noted by Richard Feynman in his fairly famous encounter with the California school textbook system, some thirty years earlier, emotionally described at Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers'. This has been going on for a long time. Some people don't want to allow Wikipedia as a reference, because it does have errors. Many of them. Perhaps we shouldn't allow K-12 textbooks as references either.

Testing Teacher Effectiveness

Grant Wiggins, the "Understanding By Design" guy, agrees with Cuomo that the current local system of teacher ratings in NY is a "sham", but writes (from New Jersey) in An Open Letter to Governor Cuomo: Re-think the Regs of APPR | Granted, and...

Here is a simple analogy to make the point. You were a ballplayer and are a Yankees fan. But suppose only once per year, we “tested” the Yankees on their skills, on tests developed by experts. Now, imagine, the players do not know how they did, either during or after the test. Now imagine, the NYSED gives them a value-added score – with test security, so they cannot double-check or question the test results (or test validity). Worse, imagine in addition that the impartial evaluators and internal supervisors (coaches) went to one game where the Yankees were terrible – like the game last week in which they made 4 errors, left runners stranded, and pitched poorly. By the logic of your plan, we would be obligated to find Manager Girardi “ineffective.” But that’s both bad measurement and not common sense. Two weeks later it looks different, doesn’t it? Indeed, the charm of baseball is that a long season of 162 “tests” enables the truth of quality to out. If this is true for highly-skilled and trained professional athletes, what about novice young students?

In short, I fear you are making matters worse, not better, by this new round of reductionist rules. And by insisting that they be put into operation next year, with no time to really think them through, test them, and refine them ensures that this effort will backfire.

Smaller Schools, Bigger Achievements?

They're talking about urban schools, but I choose to focus on Small Is Good, in Small high school reform boosts districtwide outcomes -- ScienceDaily

"Small school reform lifted all boats."

Small school reform, in which new, small high schools replace large, comprehensive high schools, has been adopted by major U.S. cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Boston. Studies in New York and Boston have found that small high schools deliver better outcomes -- including higher graduation rates -- than large high schools for urban students.

I'm convinced. :-)

Stand up to pay attention

One of many possible small improvements (or maybe it won't be confirmed; let's say one of many items worthy of exploration).. We think better on our feet, literally -- ScienceDaily

A study from the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health finds students with standing desks are more attentive than their seated counterparts. In fact, preliminary results show 12 percent greater on-task engagement in classrooms with standing desks, which equates to an extra seven minutes per hour of engaged instruction time.

I'm not sure how far to go with that "seven minutes per hour", simply adding on 12%, but if you can then it's a substantial increase to the school year....certainly my school years could have been stretched quite a bit with extra attentiveness, and maybe a standing desk -- like the one I'm typing this on -- would have helped with attentiveness as well as health. It's hard to say.