Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools • Hacker News Board

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#51

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

smelendez wrote: post #34

SilasX wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 curr…

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.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#52

Post by jonlucc » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:05 PM UTC

Kequc wrote: post #46

tsotha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh huh. How many of those kids are there, you figure, on a percentage basis?

I just did some wikipedia sleuthing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#P... > The US Census declared that in 2010 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty: 22% of all people under age 18 13.7% of all people 19–21 and 9% of all people ages 65 and older.

So if we take 2/10 children and subtract 2 kids from the denominator because their parents could afford to send them to private school, you get 1/4 of students in an average school. I imagine the ratio is even worse in most inner cities and certain rural areas.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#53

Post by jonlucc » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:14 PM UTC

saganus wrote: post #23

forrestthewoods wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me pause and think for a moment. What do rich kid schools do? I have no idea. I went to a dumb kid rural high school. But for some reason through the endless education discussion I've never heard brought up what rich kid schools do differently. Even if the answer is "but we can't do that because we're poor". Man. Now you've got me all curious...

From my limited experience with friends from private schools, I've seen that they usually have better infrastructure, lab equipment, etc. Also from what I was told, teachers usually are payed better so a lot of them come from better universities and also it seems that they are better updated on current technologies. Of course this will depend on school and I also think even private schools get some crappy teachers/ba…

That's fascinating to me, because when I was in high school, it was opposite. I visited a few private school science class labs because I was in a sort of city-wide science club, and the ones in private schools generally had worse infrastructure and supplies. Also, one of my teachers mentioned that she considered herself payed-up for tithing to the church for the rest of her life because she worked for less pay at a Catholic school for 4 years before moving to the public school. Maybe that is unique to St. Louis, where the private schools are almost all religiously affiliated.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#54

Post by mhuffman » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:23 PM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #20

littletimmy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no. There's also the small matter that private school teachers tend to be amazingly more qualified. I've heard of PhDs teaching at some of the very top private schools. By contrast, state school teachers are poorly trained and poorly paid.

Maybe in later grades it's helpful, I don't think it requires a phd to teach 8 year olds multiplication tables. Private school, as far as i can tell, have 18 kids with an aide per classroom. Public school will have 30-40 kids per class. I dunno. if it was easy it wouldn't be a problem. There are lots of dials to turn. As you say, qualification levels of teachers is is one, frequency of testing is another. I think the…

The very highest pupil to teacher ratio seems to be California with under 25. The average seems to be 16. [1]

From personal experience, my child goes to a public school and his classroom is about 25 students with a teacher and 2 assistant teachers, around 8 kids per. instructor.

There seems to be differing research on class size anyway, with even the most liberal interpretation of results pointing to smaller class sizes only helping "troubled" children. Also, most of the countries that have larger average class sizes than the US do better than us in rankings.[2] The definition of "troubled" seems to range from poor to lower IQ.

The US seems to do about as well as Latvia and Russia in education, and not much higher than Mexico, Turkey, and Thailand, despite spending more on education per student than nearly anyone else in the world. I wonder if we might just study (with an open mind) what other countries are doing and incorporate those findings, rather than guessing and just blowing cash hand-over-fist.

[1] http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.htm... [2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-arou...

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#55

Post by jqm » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:32 PM UTC

finance-geek wrote: post #33

tsotha wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "difficult to teach" you mean kids who cause problems for the other kids, then yeah. I went to a Catholic high school, and they did not tolerate disruptions. That allowed them to have classes with almost 50 kids and still have better than 95% of the graduating class going on to a four year college.

No, "difficult to teach" often just means kids who have not had a proper meal the previous night because their family cannot afford it. Try paying attention when you are chronically hungry and you understand one of many problems very easily.

I don't disagree food is a problem. On the other hand there are plenty of "difficult to teach kids" doing very little but causing problems who eat just fine.

Source: I was a public school student once.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#56

Post by jqm » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #22

logicchains wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a nation, we've decided that every child should be educated. The key point is that the current approach is failing at this. It's possible that by giving up on the really hard cases and focusing more on the average cases, it would be possible to educate more children than the current approach achieves. Better to reach for a good outcome and succeed than to reach for a perfect outcome and fail, so to speak. >I thin…

No one is very well served by the current system, I would agree. But if you start thrusting out the bottom end of students without even the increasingly value-less credential of a high school diploma, you're effectively consigning them to the prison system for life. With so many under-employed liberal arts college grads and aged-out boomers sucking up the low-end jobs, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find job…

Every kid needs to study and learn. But not every kid needs to study and learn the same things the same way. I believe until we figure that out we are going to have the same problems.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#57

Post by waterlesscloud » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:44 PM UTC

lm______ wrote: post #13

I worked for a year as a tutor in an elementary school. Even the first graders are doing six or seven standardized tests every year, plus random additional tests (including those given by me and my fellow reading tutors, testing every student in the school three times yearly to see if they qualified to be tutored). The kids would even get their scores back too, so would be distraught when they didn't match up to othe…

" Even the first graders are doing six or seven standardized tests every year, plus random additional tests"

Name them. They're standardized, so this shouldn't be a problem for you.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#58

Post by waterlesscloud » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:52 PM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #41

japhyr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing "rich kid schools" do is filter out many students who are difficult to teach. Teaching and running a school is a lot easier if your goal does not involve teaching everyone who walks through your doors.

That doesn't account for all of the difference. I went to public HS in rural Sacramento county, while some friends of mine went to the public schools in nearby Folsom -- a very wealthy suburb. These were public, like I said, so they don't have that selectivity you mentioned: if you live in their district, you go there. "Just" the facts of very interested parents, investment from nearby Intel and HP, and massive spend…

I'm just amused that if you said "Folsom" to Americans, 99% would associate it with prison, or Johnny Cash for the same reason. But it's really a wealthy suburb.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#59

Post by jostylr » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #4

littletimmy wrote: post #3

The rich send their kids to private schools. Therefore, this problem does not apply to the rich. Therefore, this problem will not be solved.

This made me pause and think for a moment. What do rich kid schools do? I have no idea. I went to a dumb kid rural high school. But for some reason through the endless education discussion I've never heard brought up what rich kid schools do differently. Even if the answer is "but we can't do that because we're poor". Man. Now you've got me all curious...

I have tutored in private schools (rich, not religious) and have heard of how they structure their day. One prominent thing is that of more freedom. They have more time in between classes, more freedom to socialize, and more choice in their life. This is huge.

Additionally, they can get tutored as I just mentioned. Related to that are all the test preps and extra-curricular activities that can be supported with money, etc. These additional resources enrich what students can bring to the classroom.

It is hard, however, to ascertain whether their outcomes are better because of anything to do with the school. They have more resources, family connections, and connecting to each other who also have other resources.

Fundamentally, my belief is that one should focus on grooming intelligence, not knowledge. The question then becomes how does one help a person become more intelligent? Programming them with knowledge does not help; it just creates miserable robots.

Instead, allowing them to be free, moving, interacting, socializing, making a mess out of exploring reality, this is what grows the brain, IMO.

I work for a Sudbury school and this is what we focus on making happen. Demonstrative anecdote: we had a student who was with us from age 5 to age 12. He never had any formal instruction. He wanted to go to a different school to join their baseball team. It is a highly respected private school in the area. They interviewed him and were impressed and let him in. In his first weeks of school, he did not know about parts of speech or that a dot meant multiplication of numbers. He quickly learned all of that (pretty simple, after all) and got 90's on his first tests. Intelligence is hard to acquire and it requires freedom to explore, freedom to move, freedom to socialize. Knowledge is relatively straightforward to acquire when the brain is ready for it.

Re: Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

#60

Post by epalmer » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 12:55 PM UTC

I'm a parent of a recent college grad and high school senior. Both of my girls went to a “good” public school in an semi-affluent neighborhood. They take standardized tests for two weeks each year. Or at least the calendar is blocked from real work those two weeks. And once done the rest of the school year is time wasting. So lots of wasted time just for the administration and post test taking. Teachers routinely complain (in private) about teaching to the tests.

And yet there are glimmers of hope:

Project based learning in school and after school can make a difference. While not exactly the same thing, challenge based learning, is making a difference in a few school districts across the county as well https://www.challengebasedlearning.org/pages/welcome. My girls participated in FIRST Robotics http://www.usfirst.org/ starting with First Lego League (FLL) and advancing through First Tech Challenge (FTC) and then to First Robotics Competition (FRC). The best part of these programs is that it is so much more than STEM. They learn how to solve real world like problems, do marketing, run the business of the team, work in teams, learn about robot design, programming and more. As a volunteer in FIRST for now ten (10) plus years, I have witnessed it transform the lives of more than a hundred kids.

There are other similar programs like VEX, which I know little about, but support in concept. http://www.vexrobotics.com/

The biggest challenge with these programs is funding and penetrating the underserved schools. Of course in the underserved school if kids are hungry then not much else matters. The same could be said for kids that can’t get to after school programs for the many reasons that exist like both parents working, the need to take care of siblings and more.

In my state (Virginia), state legislators and the head of the department of education are starting to take notice of the impact of FIRST robotics on outcomes and are talking about funding underserved school programs. Many robotics team has been lobbying at the state and federal level for just this cause including my daughter’s team. So maybe next year some funding will be allocated. In my hometown, Richmond, VA. there seems to be enough passion among adults that volunteers can be found to staff more programs for project based learning.

We are also starting to see interest and some action for building and staffing makerspaces in schools and libraries. This is very exciting since small projects are also valuable for learning and more affordable. We need makerspaces across k12 and into colleges and universities.

While none of the above fixes the teach to the test problem, or the socioeconomic gradient issues, they at least help in some little ways.