Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools | Hacker News Reader

Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

washingtonpost.com

81 pointsantigizmo136 comments

No shit. Public school is all about teaching to the tests. There's no time to actually learn anything useful, because everything is focused on bringing up the state test scores, which influence funding. Not only are you spending all this time teaching what is going to be on the standardized test, and how to structure essays and do your work according to what the test graders expect, but there's the two weeks taken out of instructional time just to take the damned tests.

So you see everything that doesn't support that goal get stripped back. Home economics? Shop? History? Real literature? Gym? Programming/technology/spelling/philosophy? Nope, we're going to spend 80% of your time honing your five-paragraph essay skills and pushing everybody kicking and screaming through pre-calc.

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 do, and to the extent that you're finding it hard to do, then you were failing all along, and removing the tests would just hide that. [1] (Plus, it's not like a student that can't meet this minimum is going to somehow do just fine in "real literature".)

However, to conclude a "no" answer to that question, you would need to cite specific questions from the tests, and go on record saying "nope, no reason a graduate of our system needs to know that, so why are we making sure they can answer it?"

So I'm confused as to why such testing critics never discuss this crucial piece of evidence, instead relying entirely on innuendo about suppose dangers of "teaching to the test".

[1] Which, of course, doesn't means the teachers specifically were the cause; in the extreme case, if students are literally starving, then you need to fix that. But regardless, any root-cause analysis must start from the detection of a failure, irrespective of where it ends.

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 curricular material and forces students to focus on something they, their parents and their teachers all find silly and boring, reducing respect for the education system.

-- The material that's on the test is often the lowest common denominator for what students should know, calculated over a US state or group of states. This means there will be material that's not on the test but that everyone thinks in a particular community thinks kids should learn (history, art, music, etc.) or even that most people in a state think should be taught but a vocal minority oppose (comparative religion, black history, evolution, etc.). That material will be left off the test, and a teacher won't have time to cover it because he or she has to spend all the class's time on stuff on the test. If a science test will never mention Neil Armstrong or Neil deGrasse Tyson, a teacher has no incentive to mention either of them, and may even be penalize for doing so at the expense of more practice with the density formula.

-- Teachers are evaluated based on test scores, often to the exclusion of other factors. This stresses teachers out at test time, which causes them to stress students out. Students come to dislike school and learn less.

-- The tests are sometimes flawed, but by the time people realize the results are wrong, their results have already factored into policy, personnel decisions and student placement.

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.

The problem is that the test doesn't just offer a pass-fail threshold, but is graded on a sliding scale, which means that so long as there is a chance of increasing the class average, kids will continue to be drilled on the test topics, over and over again.

My kids were sent home with worksheet after worksheet of basic arithmetic problems, long after they had completely mastered those skills.

> tl;dr; Teachers are unprofessional and just generally horrible people who inflict their problems onto innocent third parties.

… and you have the peer-reviewed studies to prove that an entire field is full of unqualified bad-actors? Or is this just the casual, unthinking racism implied by your decision to use “black history” as your example rather than, say, music or science and the corresponding assumption that it's some how distinct from and less important than “history” rather than being an essential component?

Scroll up - it was smelendez who made the claim that teachers take their stress out on students, not me. I just phrased it in a manner that gives teachers agency.

Black history was also an example taken from smelendez. History of any sort is far less important than literacy and numeracy, as is comparative religion, evolution, art and music (his other examples).

But I guess calling me racist is easier than actually addressing my arguments.

> Scroll up - it was smelendez who made the claim that teachers take their stress out on students, not me. I just phrased it in a manner that gives teachers agency.

No, you were making a blanket statement about an entire profession. Saying that people react poorly under prolonged stress is a simple statement of fact, with decades of concurring evidence from fields ranging from business and education to neuroscience, and it doesn't imply that those people chose to do anything wrong other than being an average human in a bad situation.

In contrast, your statement shifted all of the blame to one of the parties with the least agency and used loaded terms like “unprofessional” or “horrible” without any supporting justification.

> Black history was also an example taken from smelendez. History of any sort is far less important than literacy and numeracy, as is comparative religion, evolution, art and music (his other examples).

There were quite a few other things which he included which are not 3Rs and I find it interesting that you picked the only one which is the hobby-horse of right-wing discussion about schools.

> But I guess calling me racist is easier than actually addressing my arguments.

That's why I said “casual, unthinking racism” because there are so many tropes common to popular U.S. discussion which are rooted in racism but often propagated by people who haven't thought deeply about the origin or implications.

No, you were making a blanket statement about an entire profession.

I didn't claim that teachers take their stress out on students. I simply claimed that if they did, they are horrible and unprofessional. My claim is conditional on smelendez being right. Again, scroll up.

If you want to dispute that characterization, and argue that it's professional behavior to let your emotions get in the way of work have at it.

I don't know how you think teachers have the least agency. Their choice sets include a) doing their job, b) not doing their job and c) quitting and finding a job they don't suck at. (I did the last one, although emotional leakage was not what made me a bad teacher.) In contrast, the students usually don't have the choice of finding a teacher who does their job.

> I didn't claim that teachers take their stress out on students. I simply claimed that if they did, they are horrible and unprofessional.

That's the linkage I'm talking about: that ignores the possibility that the job has unreasonable expectations. One person, sure, maybe they have problems but when a high percentage of the field reports low job satisfaction and cites things like long hours and poor support as reasons for leaving, it's irresponsible not to ask whether the system is setup correctly.

Here in DC, hitting the right numbers gets a bonus which is close to 50% of your salary – or nothing if you're slightly low, and the school administrators both track things closely and are prone to saying the only reason for not hitting your numbers is that you don't care enough, weren't willing to put in the effort, don't believe disadvantaged kids deserve quality education, etc. That produces a cycle where you get very enthusiastic, motivated teachers fresh out of college who are basically in crunch mode for the entire school year before eventually realizing that random chance makes it very hard to hit the targets consistently and their efforts won't be appreciated otherwise.

> I don't know how you think teachers have the least agency. Their choice sets include a) doing their job, b) not doing their job and c) quitting and finding a job they don't suck at. (I did the last one, although emotional leakage was not what made me a bad teacher.) In contrast, the students usually don't have the choice of finding a teacher who does their job.

I said one of the parties with the least agency because they don't have control over the students coming in, the curriculum or the expectations (e.g. one school near here puts second-year ESL students in AP English based on age, even if the teacher knows they would learn more with more basic coverage first), and don't have the ability to get the school or parents to provide support. The students were the reason I said “one of” since they do have even less control.

I'm glad that you were able to take the option of going somewhere else but that's hard for many people to do unless they happen to have skills which are in demand in industry. Unlike many other jobs, there are only a few employers in most areas and they hire at set times of year. If you're the CS teacher and have picked up some PHP, that's probably manageable but if you're an English teacher you're probably looking at a career reset or either taking a much longer commute or moving.

If teachers cite long hours, they are lying.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Kind of makes you wonder how truthful their harder to verify claims are.

Here in DC, hitting the right numbers gets a bonus which is close to 50% of your salary – or nothing if you're slightly low...

You've found a bad bonus structure. Making the bonus linear in value-add would solve this problem. Again - not a problem with testing at all.

Or maybe it's not such a bad bonus structure - I'm told that cliffs are a great way to motivate salespeople. I guess salespeople are better at managing their emotions than teachers?

> I didn't claim that teachers take their stress out on students. I simply claimed that if they did, they are horrible and unprofessional.

Maybe there is misunderstanding around the phrase "take out on" (it doesn't imply intentionality to me), but how could stress not affect a teacher's performance in the class room? It doesn't mean they're horrible and unprofessional, it means they're human!

Don't you think there's a qualitative difference involved in teaching for the purpose of instilling enough knowledge to pass an exam, versus teaching to instill a passion for the material? Making dioramas, drawing political cartoons, and wearing togas while reciting Mark Antony's speech from Julius Caesar were the kinds of things that kept me motivated to read and understand material in which I held no innate interest, and all of that seems superfluous to a test-driven approach.

It's far more important that students can add than that they got to goof around in togas. Ideal world? They can do both. But if they can't do the math, then the togas just have to wait.

Sounds like you have a lot of experience teaching.

> You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?"

Uhm, I don't feel like I do? Or at least insofar as I do, that set feels like it should be really small, because: Which graduate?

There are many things that we'd like a graduate to do, but we don't need for every graduate to be able to do. I would quite like my CS grads to understand big O notation - I would not attempt to teach it to everyone. I would quite like my history grads to be able to perform independent research - I don't really care if my receptionist can.

There are basic low level things that everyone should be able to do. Addition, multiplication, subtraction, division. But that set is quite small, and it beggars belief that one needs a hundred plus tests to figure out where someone is with respect to those things.

Structured within that context, the idea that it's a good model to teach the tests; to have a list of things that you'd like graduates to be able to do and if they don't do that they're failing and the school's failing (and so on); seems supremely wasteful. If the students do some maths in the mean time and discover a passion for some particular element of it, great, but it's not useful to attempt to make them meet some idealised standard that doesn't reflect reality, rather than focusing on teaching people where their inclinations and skills lie.

Here are some real standardized tests. Which students don't need to be able to answer "Roberto paid $43.08 for 3 CDs. All 3 CDs were the same price. How much did each CD cost?" Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)?

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf

http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1...

http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261...

Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed?

> Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed?

I think you've somewhat missed the point, though I'm happy enough to play that game.

My question would be which adults need to know those things? You ask me, "Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)?" And I would be inclined to answer anyone who doesn't want to go into some field that uses a lot of mathematics; accountancy, physics, computer science, biology, et cetera et cetera. Outside of the education system, for a lot of people, that knowledge has no value. And it's the same with the questions upon angles, the questions about area... people who aren't going to be working in particularly quantitative professions do not need to know these things.

Your secretary does not need to know (taken from the sheets you posted) what an angle given by a line bisecting two parallel lines is. They don't need to know what 833,000 is written in scientific notation. They don't need to know what 2 over 3 to the power of four is, or which of the following: the square root of 144, the square root of 16, the square root of four, the square root of three - is an irrational number. They don't need to know what a 20% discount on a price of $37.50 is, it will be marked on what they want to buy. They do not need to know what has the same value as 5 to the power of 6 multiplied by 5 to the power of -2. Or what (jk)^-5(jk)^3 is. They do not need to know what the value of 4 to the square root of X is when X is 100. Or which graph shows that Y is equal to minus X squared.

These things all have a use, but they don't have a use to everyone. They don't have a use to nearly everyone. Most people do not work in a profession where that sort of maths is useful.

Your taxidriver does not need to be able to understand algebra, your secretary does not need to be able to understand geometry, your customer service representative does not need to be able to do calculus. And it is a waste of time, effort, money, and passion to try to teach them to do so if they are not interested.

I would suggest, in the place of general standardised tests, a system more similar to the badges given out for scouting: pass fail assessment of a particular skill, voluntary participation, fine-grained certification. You have kids in a school, and if they want to go for their level 1 geometry badge, or whatever, then you help them do so. You retain the absolute basics that everyone has to have in order to get by in society, like addition, multiplication, division. And everything else you take out into a much finer-grained system that vouches for specific skills.

That would allow both a better analysis of the sort of skills that are being promoted in particular areas by particular schools and it will allow children to pursue their aspirations rather than being shoehorned into a process that is not suitable for everybody and manages to say very little with respect to specific careers. People shouldn't end up shit-listed for life because they ended up studying a bunch of stuff they had no interest or passion for but which unfortunately, because of the way the system was set up, is the only way that their employer had to assess anything about their education.

For the people who don't need to realize that a 20% discount on $37.50 is $30, why bother sending them to school past 6th grade at all?

Now that I see your argument more fully, it seems less like an argument against testing and more like an argument against wasting resources on unneeded education. Do you believe the people who don't need the specific topics you mention actually do need education beyond grade 6? If so, why?

What is this hypothetical 12-year-old going to do for the next six years until they are old enough to get the kind of minimum-wage job that accepts people without a diploma? Child-labor laws are still a thing...

We're running into the other problem with public schooling: it's not so much about education as warehousing children while their parents work during the day, until like a tree, they grow the requisite number of rings that magically grants them status as an (more-or-less - see alcohol, car rentals, etc.) independent being. You can see this with the expansion of organized after-school sports and activities - school usually runs from 7:30-8:00AM to 2:30-3:00PM, except parents are still working until 5:00PM, so you've either got to trust your kids to get off the school bus and not burn the house down in two hours, send them to grandma, pay for ruinously expensive child-care, or hope little Johnny or Sally is into soccer/football/baseball/band/art, etc.

On the first point, I would argue that understanding how money works is a pretty fundamental mathematical competency - percentages like that come up all the time with sales taxes, meal taxes, etc, and they are usually not built into the prices on the sticker/menu.

> For the people who don't need to realize that a 20% discount on $37.50 is $30, why bother sending them to school past 6th grade at all? Now that I see your argument more fully, it seems less like an argument against testing and more like an argument against wasting resources on unneeded education. Do you believe the people who don't need the specific topics you mention actually do need education beyond grade 6? If so, why?

It's an argument against a specific form of testing. Frequent standardised tests; testing the same things across all the schools and all the students; using that as your measuring stick, shapes the fact that you're going to get a lot of unneeded, even harmful, education. And the more frequently you run those tests, the better your 'data' is (data which is not politically neutral, as some might think) the more pronounced the effect. Test scores are the incentive.

There's two answers I can give to your question. One is the practical answer, as things stand at the moment. The other is the idealistic answer, as things could stand.

For the practical answer, the most that I can say about someone who matches that pattern persisting in education, in the current system, after grade 6 is that they may be getting something else out of some of the other subjects that they study there. If you were a parent, and you couldn't afford to educate your child yourself, then it would probably still make sense to send your child to school beyond grade 6. If you don't do so, they won't have the qualifications to get by particularly well in life, and they may learn something useful in the process (though I wouldn't bet too much on it.)

Besides, you still need some where to stick your children while you're at work. If nothing else, education is free child-care for poor people.

That's not a good argument, nor is it an argument for the current system over the potential alternatives, mind. It's just saying that sometimes crap's the best thing on the menu.

For the idealistic answer: What I'm advocating for is a different model of testing, in which the statement that someone would need an education 'beyond' grade 6 is not as meaningful. There are different skills, different areas of expertise that they could go into, but it would be very difficult to rank those skills: Is someone who we've certified can refit a central heating system more or less skilled than someone who we've certified can rewire a house? Someone with both is more skilled than someone who only has one, but at the same time are they a better electrician than someone who only has one? Is someone who understands the mathematics underlying musical theory more or less skilled than someone who understands the mathematics underlying computational complexity? If you can apply Bayes Theorem, are you more or less skilled than a frequentist statistician? It's a lot harder to rank people when you throw out the idea of 'this year,' or grades, and just have specific skills and people who can or can't do the job.

Ideally I'd be able to answer your question by saying that children are given the chance to immerse themselves in a wide range of different subjects and projects - to follow those that appeal to them as far as they can go so that when they leave they have a wealth of ability that carries them through their lives. That if you're interested in mechanics, for example, you should be able to study mechanics all the time you're at school. Wouldn't we have some fantastic mechanics if they'd been learning on cars and lorries and boats and so on every week day for five or ten years under coaching appropriate to their skill level? Wouldn't we have some fantastic builders if they'd been learning building under that setup? Fantastic artists, fantastic musicians. Especially when we could focus on those who were interested. And who knows, they might - as they get further in that area - discover that maths is useful, and then they could go and get some maths badges when they've got a passion and a reason to drive their learning, (rather than it being something forced down their throats with no real promise of a relationship to their actual interests materialising.)

But I can't - and so the former answer is what we're saddled with. Do you need it? Sure. Unless you've got reasonably well-off parents, you've got to go through the paces. Should you need it, in that form? No.

I'm sure the shop-owners will be champing at the bit to have customers that can't check discounts in their heads, or employees that can't manage a till...

> Frequent standardised tests; testing the same things across all the schools and all the students; using that as your measuring stick, shapes the fact that you're going to get a lot of unneeded, even harmful, education.

Harmful? Really? Please tell what harmful education is coming out of standardized tests. Even the standard test taking strategy itself is useful in a general sense. You don't know the solution so narrow down to ones that seem reasonable, pick one and move on.

> Harmful? Really?

In my charity work I regularly interact with people whose education has been harmful to them. They failed, and from that failure gained the impression that they were stupid, and/or unable to learn specific subjects. Even putting aside the harm of taking up someone's time to no profit for themselves, you learn more than the information in the curriculum. You learn an attitude towards education, an assessment of how you relate to it. What many people learn is that it's not for them.

That's the fault of a poor education process and not that of education or even testing for that matter. This was posted on HN the other day and it is certainly something I had to overcome as I transitioned from being told I was smart to almost failing out of college.

http://akaptur.com/blog/2015/10/10/effective-learning-strate...

I think we need more methods for teaching (I wish I had Kahn Academy when growing up!). Everyone gets to where they understand basic math and reading comprehension in their own way, and that's fine. But if we are not checking up on students progress and making sure they have some basic level of general education, we are failing the students.

If you were a parent, and you couldn't afford to educate your child yourself, then it would probably still make sense to send your child to school beyond grade 6. If you don't do so, they won't have the qualifications to get by particularly well in life...

My rebuttal: Your secretary does not need to know (taken from the sheets you posted) what an angle given by a line bisecting two parallel lines is...These things all have a use, but they don't have a use to everyone...

Your idealistic answer seems to argue for changing the relevant topics. That's fine. That's an argument against the curriculum, not testing. All testing does is measure whether the curriculum is actually being taught.

All testing does is measure whether a very narrow curriculum taught in a very specific way with a very specific text and test prep guide as guidance is being taught. Since so much is put on not only passing these tests but improving every year (a near mathematical impossibility) schools define their curriculum by what is being tested, not what constitutes a well-rounded education (backed by scientific studies into the importance of topics and areas of study not tested).

You know what generally gets better test scores out of kids? More time spent studying how to answer questions and rote memorization of test topics. All done studying that stuff? If you study it more maybe one kid does better and we get more funding.

> Your idealistic answer seems to argue for changing the relevant topics. That's fine. That's an argument against the curriculum, not testing. All testing does is measure whether the curriculum is actually being taught.

A relevant curriculum is going to be different depending on what someone's interested in and what jobs are available - and what you measure and incentivise is what you get. Testing is not politically neutral.

There isn't anything wrong with testing, in principle, at some point you have to see whether someone can do the job. But the decision as to what to test, when, how... that influences what you're going to end up with. Just standardising the tests and running them often is a bad approach. That's what I'm saying.

Yes, testing does enforce the curriculum. If you don't like the curriculum, that might be bad.

I'm curious though: why do you think that, absent testing, teachers would be ignoring the prescribed curriculum and secretly implementing your preferred curriculum instead? If they are not secretly doing this, then without testing teachers wouldn't be doing what you want them to do anyway.

So you are arguing that we as a society need to lower our general education standards? Is this not the exact opposite of what we need to be doing? Math in particular is so important whether dealing with personal finances or simply thinking abstractly. What happens when the hypothetical taxi driver job goes away? If society didn't care enough to try and teach that person some general education when we had the chance, are we now going to do it in retraining?

> So you are arguing that we as a society need to lower our general education standards? Is this not the exact opposite of what we need to be doing? Math in particular is so important whether dealing with personal finances or simply thinking abstractly. What happens when the hypothetical taxi driver job goes away? If society didn't care enough to try and teach that person some general education when we had the chance, are we now going to do it in retraining?

I am arguing that as a society we need a different approach to assessing skills. That the incentive structure that the current model of teaching and assessment provides is not useful for providing the skills that our young and the labour market that they will hopefully become part of require in order to advance and profit. I am not necessarily saying that mathematics is not a valuable skill, but if it is valuable then it should show up in the course of teaching things that children are actually interested in - and if it is widely applicable then most of them should pick up a few mathematics badges here or there in the process of pursuing those interests. I do not believe that children will acquire and retain any great facility with a subject that they detest, or that bores them.

Is the taxi driver, with his five years experience of taxi driving and limited knowledge of mathematics, physics, law, medicine, et cetera; in other words the jobs that would be harder to automate entirely in the short and mid-term future (by which I mean the next 20 years or so); really going to compete with people who have been doing those jobs the last five years on the strength of half remembered mathematics, which he probably hated when he did them anyway? Especially since we don't have a system of retraining, at least not in any serious sense. There is no option to go to the local benefits centre, state that you are done with working in retail and want to retrain to be a programmer, and have funding and an education available to do so. I don't know of anyone, anywhere, that makes that sort of investment in people. If you want to retrain, you'd best have a bit of money.

The taxi-driver is probably better off not having taken a mathematics course (under the current curriculum) at school, if that subject did not appeal to him, and not thinking of learning the subject as an act of suffering, or operating under the impression that he cannot learn it based on failing a number of tests on the subject some time ago. I regularly work with people with a background in in low income industries, as part of my charity work, and a great many of them have the assumption that they are simply incapable of learning and trace the roots of this assumption back to their failures in the education system. They don't have a faith that they can learn, or an understanding that anything good for them will come from investing in subjects that they have previously hated. It won't have made him competitive with people who were actually interested in the subject in any case - and there's no clear route of retraining that would let him become so.

As for the importance of mathematics to "thinking abstractly", I will observe that it is an old chestnut trotted out whenever one wants to justify a subject, and that as such I've ceased to take it seriously. That you claim it to be a particular virtue of mathematics, and others will claim it to be a virtue of English literature, philosophy, history, and so on and so forth. Indeed, it is hard to think of any subject that has not claimed it is a virtue of its own. At some point we simply have to stop taking the excuse seriously or accept that it is a general enough skill that you can pick it up in a wide range of subjects, and that as such it is not a great argument for retaining any specific subject.

If it is important to "think abstractly", and if we eventually come up with a way of understanding quite what people mean when they say that, then we may well profit by separating that skill out from the particular application of it and teaching the skill specifically. I understand that there are people trying to make a study of how one learns rationality, and that if one wish to teach the skill one might perhaps consult them and see what their methods were.

I'm not sure I can relate at all to your argument when you are arguing against basic math education. Standardize testing is not testing physics or law or medicine. It is testing bog standard basics. If we cannot get our youth up to that standard then something is very wrong, and blaming it on a test is a huge mistake.

>The taxi-driver is probably better off not having taken a mathematics course (under the current curriculum) at school, if that subject did not appeal to him, and not thinking of learning the subject as an act of suffering, or operating under the impression that he cannot learn it based on failing a number of tests on the subject some time ago.

This is not maths fault or the curriculum. It is the fault of a very poor teacher who can probably never be fired. Even then, doing things that you don't want to do, but they are good for you is part of growing up and becoming an adult. Is your opinion really that we should keep churning out young adults who have no concept of the basics. I have a few more title/payday loan shops I need to go open up.

The bog standard basics presumably relate to more advanced areas, for the purposes of your argument. Otherwise the taxi driver would be unemployed, and out of luck, regardless.

Nonetheless, I've yet to be convinced of the necessity of meeting that standard, basic or not. If one is to look at the UK education system, which doesn't seem to produce measurably worse employment or lives for its participants than the US, then one will note that the maths being taught in the papers given by the person I was responding to in the US is not dissimilar to the lower stream maths GCSE - taken at around 16 - in which a C is a quite acceptable grade for most purposes. Even then, there are things there that would not show up in a GCSE paper - a kid wouldn't need to know scientific notation to pass that test with a C.

As for payday loans etc. The obvious answer is 'don't accept deals you don't understand' it's possible to sting people on a great number of things, based on your advantage in some area that they do not understand. If it's not maths it will be penalty fees hidden in the legalize. By the time you're up to needing scientific notation and square roots to understand your loan, it's a deal that someone ought not to have taken in the first place.

It does not seem unfair to me to ask: You describe it as basic, and threaten all these consequences if it's not taught... there are places where that level of performance is not expected, and these consequences do not seem any more in evidence. So, why should I buy into the idea that this knowledge is needed?

Standardized tests measure students' ability to take standardized tests. This loosely correlates with their knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, and correlates more tightly with knowledge of test-taking strategies specific to the test they are taking. So no, most of what students need to know to pass the tests is not useful real-world knowledge.

To put it another way, knowing the material is not the easiest way to pass the test, so even if the test nominally evaluates useful real-world knowledge, a high score won't guarantee that a student actually possesses that knowledge.

"Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions, studying previous years, knowing exactly what you can sacrifice coverage of, how to guess multiple choice questions when you don't know the answer etc. Basically over-optimizing to fit an imperfect model.

Now, I'm a good test taker generally, and it has always helped me in life, and I will ensure my children know the rules of the game. But from the perspective of the country or planet, that's not time and effort well spent, it's a zero-sum arms-race that could have been better spent.

There's more to this, e.g. the fact that the tests are really testing the teachers (again very imperfectly), that some people want to privatize education and so on, but "teaching to the test" is a well known anti-pattern for good reasons, even though the individual incentives push us in that direction.

>"Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions...

Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all.

Or you're a good teacher with students learning what they should, but the other classes got higher numbers despite not knowing the topic as well, so now you're under pressure to copy them.

> Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all.

But the teacher that does this will have students with higher scores, so by all metrics they are not the incompetent ones.

Like in software engineering, metrics lose meaning once they are used to justify rewards and punishments.

Says someone with I'm guessing no teaching experience, and no background in education.

Teach the test, get better scores... Better teacher? Not likely.

You're making a number of bad assumptions:

1. The test actually covers what's important

2. The teacher has the time, resources and support needed to fully convey the material to every student

3. The teacher and the school are receiving students who are realistically capable of reaching the expected level

4. The test results will be interpreted in good faith and used only to help students and teachers perform better

In the U.S. public education system, years of simplistic fixes have largely ensured that none of those are true. Instead there are vicious feedback loops: unprepared students will do worse on tests, which is held against the teachers and school no matter how hard they were trying, which leads the most motivated parents to take their kids elsewhere and the best teachers to leave teaching or find another school or district where their efforts are appreciated. After a few iterations, the district may close the “failing” school and make life even harder for kids who now have the same problems plus a more of their day commuting to a school where they'll probably bear the stigma of having come from a bad school/neighborhood.

I don't think that disagrees with me: yes, schools should teach a general understanding, rather than drilling a narrow toolbox that works on one specific test. But then:

- As I said above, you would need to cite which test question are game-able, and which encourage this narrow teaching, which critics never do.

- If the problem is that teachers try to satisfy this goal by trying to game the tests, then the problem is with this way of teaching, not the tests per se.

"From September until Christmas vacation, [Brookside] was like any school you would imagine. Then, once they got back from Christmas break, for the next nine weeks until testing began, it was a different animal. What they did was drop their curriculum, drop their texts, and instead study exclusively from a standardized-test prep book. Kids weren't getting a liberal arts education, but prepping to a very narrowly drawn standardized test in primarily language arts and math. Because they were interested in passing the test more than anything else, for that 22 percent of the school year, they taught primarily to the broad middle section of kids that were going to pass. Plus, the school went and reached out to those kids who they thought were on the cusp of possibly passing. So who gets left out? The kids at the bottom and the kids at the top." [0]

It's not the tests per se, but it's what is put on the line. Raises, funding, evaluations, keeping your job - these are all disincentives to well-rounded education. Please don't make me quote the plethora of studies that show how important arts, literature, and the sciences are to primary education. Completely stopping studying these things for half the school year is bad.

So it doesn't matter if the tests are filled with good-to-know knowledge - they're positioned to dis-incentivize and devalue anything that isn't math, language arts, and a narrow reading of how to structure an essay.

[0] http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/04/11/why-excess...

Do you (A) oppose standardised testing in general, or (B) just object to (i) the way the test results are used as incentives/whatever, and (ii) think they test too narrow a set of subjects, or (C) something else?

You raise an objection to raises and funding being tied to test outcomes. Why would this be bad? Sure, if the tests are testing the wrong things, then we should fix the tests. But, it's not impossible to measure educational outcomes. Why should teachers continued employment, and pay, not reflect how well they are measured to be doing, at the thing they are paid to do?

The most profitable companies on earth got their by having a time horizon of longer than 8 months . there are critically important things that you can't measure on a multiple choice test

Came here to say "no shit," beaten to it, because it's the most obvious conclusion.

Five paragraph essays are way more important than home ec or shop or literature.

Reading (good) literature does more for your writing abilities than learning about five paragraph essays. That is not to say that you do not need to practice writing, just that five paragraph essays are not a good way to practice.

No way. Most literature is terribly structured for the workaday communications people actually need to do in real life.

Spot on. Since we've been homeschooling, education has become an enjoyable experience once more with the exception of mandated standardized testing. I'm glad that California put a pause on the CAHSEEs because from personal experience, it just doesn't serve a real world practical need. Too many questions are just worded so poorly and often designed to trick students. I've been through the public school system and did quite well. I'm glad not to be forcing someone's antiquated testing and grading philosophies in our home now.

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.

23 hours a year is "overwhelming"? That's 40 minutes/week, assuming a 36 week school year.

In other news, I'm overwhelmed by brushing my teeth.

Incidentally, since I'm sure a bunch of people will spout the "teaching to the test" slogan, I'd love it if someone could look at these real tests and explain how to teach to them without improving student learning. Somehow I suspect not, because real tests are actually reasonably well designed and "teaching to the test" is actually just "teaching".

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1... http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261...

And most of this anti-testing stuff ignores the reason the whole regieme was established in the first place: too many schools weren't even pretending to teach their students the most basic of things, including the 3Rs (heck, phonics vs. "Dick and Jane and Their Running dog Spot" is still being fought 60 years after Why Johnny Can't Read was published).

I'm certain it's being taken too far without caring about the consequences (which we could point out as another example of how dysfunctional our public schools have become, see above, in the latter half of the 20th Century they simply didn't care if their graduates could read), but graduating from high school in 1979 I was at the edge of the beginning of this in Missouri. And the test was simple (well, after the SATs and College Board achievement tests :-) and covered entirely relevant stuff, things you really should be able to do to earn a high school diploma.

This in fact has a lot to do with out current insane college finance regime; the high school diploma became an entirely worthless signal, so when combined with Griggs v. Duke Power, the non-free for the student college degree has become the new signal of minimum competence.

Another negative side effect is it discourages good teachers. A neighbor told me how he wanted to be a science teacher in highschool. He shadowed one of the older science teachers and was basically discouraged by what he found out from them -- the advice was "you don't get to actaully teach much fun or interesting stuff, just teach to the test"

Or put it another way, think about the people who would choose to teach knowing that they'll just be drilling tests all day every day. Think about personalities that process will select for. And those will be people teaching your kids.

Yup, I am close friends/family with 4 teachers. One is pretty much done after this year. Another has been seriously considering leaving for the last couple. Both basically for the same reasons.

One summed up the problem as all the time and effort spent on standardized testing actually means that the system focuses almost exclusively on evaluating teachers (and whether they are following the prescribed teaching materials close enough) and could really care less about the individual students and the quality of the education.

I think it is important to remember why testing came about. Bad schools were doing so bad that kids were graduating HS without the ability to read or do basic math. In order to fix a problem this bad, first measurements have to be taken.

My biggest problem with testing is that it can hold back gifted students.

But why are most schools spending almost all their time teaching to the test so to speak. Were all of them miserable failures before?

Why couldn't they just focus on underperforming school and investigagte what is happening there (probably poverty, crime, bad home environments if I had to guess...).

I also don't understand the idea of relating budgets to test scores. It is like they want schools to fail on purpose -- "Looks like you are struggling here with teaching these kids, ok, well we'll cut your budget, that should help..."

> But why are most schools spending almost all their time teaching to the test so to speak.

Is this really problem if when taught the test someone can do general math and reading comprehension? At that point, teaching the test is teaching the basic skills we expect a member of society to have. The only problem I have with teaching the test is it gives a disincentive to push gifted students beyond the test material.

> "Looks like you are struggling here with teaching these kids, ok, well we'll cut your budget, that should help..."

Welcome to the perverse federal government. States handle education so they could simply tell the feds no, but the feds use tax dollars to twist the states arms. This is also how highway speeds get set. The federal government takes a bunch of tax money from the states and then holds it hostage unless the states implement what the federal government wants. This is one of the big reasons for people wanting smaller/less federal government.

Is that really true? My recollection is that standardized testing came about because of a fad to improve education by making it more "accountable" and "managed like a business." It was the educational version of stack ranking.

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 other classmates who would brag about doing better. I tutored kids who were behind a bit in reading, so of course my students were consistently stressed out before the tests and afterwards, they would tell me how this bullshit test meant that they're "stupid". I had many kids use that exact word.

The teachers universally hated it too, since they constantly had administrators breathing down their necks and it severely restricted their freedom to teach creative, engaging material.

" 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.

DIBELS, MAPS, Common Core, etc. Some of these happen multiple times a year.

I honestly can't remember all of the names, but I can assure you there were more. I was a tutor -- I never administered any of these tests -- and it was three years ago. Just Google "first grade standardized tests" and you'll find some more, though I can't remember which of those in particular the kids at my school took. Each state has its own standardized tests too...

To be honest, I enjoyed taking standardized tests when I was a student, but it became clear to me that for most kids (most of whom didn't have the stress-free, charmed existence that I had growing up) it's just demoralizing and useless.

Googled "first grade standardized tests" and not seeing anywhere near 6 or 7 plus more.

Sure you can't remember them all?

Yes, I'm sure. Why are you so hellbent on doubting me?

I tutor my little brother-in-law sometimes (he's 9), and I like to deprogram him from public school testing culture as much as possible. I tell him that when he's with me and he doesn't know the answer, don't guess. Just say, "I don't know." And I test him, too. I ask him questions he can't possibly know the answer to, or questions that have no right answer, just to hear him say, "I don't know." And then I congratulate him for being honest. I do this because I know that public school encourages him to do the exact opposite. At least when I was in school, they never want you to leave a question blank. They always tell you to guess. If you guess, and get the answer wrong, you get partial credit (IIRC, 25%), but if you leave it blank, you get no credit. Why they do this, I have no idea. Maybe they feel like if the child guesses, they have a 25% chance of getting the right answer, so that means the school has a 25% chance of getting the federal money, so therefore the child should get 25% credit for at least filling in the bubble. Makes sense in kind of a bizarre way. But in the real world, there is no 25% credit for guessing.

I've never heard of a guessing reward before. I've heard of guessing penalties, though. Back when I took the AP exams, there was a penalty (negative points awarded) for guessing, whereas leaving a multiple-choice question blank was worth 0 points. (This stopped being the case in 2011.)

Test motivation differs from person to person, so if you don't encourage everyone to at least try every question and guess, you'll get differences in scores which don't reflect the child's difference in knowledge (which is what the test is trying to measure) so much as willingness to try or guess. This willingness can differ systematically so you might get drastically lower scores for poorer children than they should. (This is one of the reasons schools like psychologists to do IQ tests, because they can spot when a child isn't trying or is deliberately underperforming.) So that's one reason. Another reason is that it's rare to have no idea whatsoever; even if you feel entirely uncertain, you can still often guess at above chance rates, showing that you did know more than nothing. Forced-choice methodologies expose that knowledge and again make the tests more accurate, because more items means more effective at distinguishing between students.

(Imagine a test of 10 questions, each substantially harder; one student manages to answer correctly up to question 5 before starting to feel uncertain and refusing to answer any more, and a second gets up to question 6. How sure are you that #1 knows less than #2? Now imagine that they instead 'guessed' on the remaining 5 questions, and #1 got 3/5 right and #2 got 1/4. Now how sure are you? Haven't you learned something from this apparently 'useless' guessing?)

> But in the real world, there is no 25% credit for guessing.

You can no more refuse to guess in the real world than you can refuse to make choices, take actions, or let time pass.

I'm not saying there aren't any valid reasons for doing it. I'm just saying the there's a "meta-lesson" there that has to be corrected. I want all my kids to grow up knowing that there's no shame in saying "I don't know," if you honestly don't know. Life is not a sounding smart contest.

>> Why they do this, I have no idea.

> I'm not saying there aren't any valid reasons for doing it.

> I'm just saying the there's a "meta-lesson" there that has to be corrected.

And I'm saying that your meta-lesson is not a good idea as it will tend to teach underconfidence. The real world does not always let you off with a "I don't know"; you may not know to some high degree of certainty whether a cancer treatment is a good idea, but nevertheless you must decide whether or not to do it.

You may want to teach your brother how to guess, because a solid educated guess is also an opportunity for you to assess his level of understanding.

A student guess is an opportunity for you to learn what they understand and what they still need help with. If a student makes an attempt on a well-written multiple choice test, the attempt can show the teacher exactly what the student does and doesn't understand.

The right approach to guessing can communicate a lot, and partial credit may be justified if, for example, the student correctly factors a quadratic equation but fails to remember how to compute the intercepts from the result. That would tell a teacher that the student remembers part of the lesson but needs help with the rest.

Indeed. When I'm doing a technical interview, and I ask a question, I want the person I'm asking to tell me if they don't know the answer. If they tell me that they don't know the answer, I'm more confident that when they are stuck on a problem in the real world, they will come and ask someone, or look it up, rather than just trying to bullshit their way through. In the real world, guessing can be considerably more dangerous than admitting that you don't know something and thus taking the effort to actually find it out.

Are you sure it's a guessing bonus? I teach the LSAT. On that test, there's no guessing penalty, and you get a point for a correct answer.

So, if you guess five questions, on average you'll get a point, making each guess statistically worth about .2

But guesses don't have actual value of course, it's only when you guess right that you get the points.

I can't speak for the grade school standardized tests since I don't teach those (nor do I want to).

You could be right. I'm not sure.

I think because on a test they can't win or benefit from leaving an answer blank, but they can "win" a bit by guessing.

Now if say they are penalized for guessing -- they they pick A and then later asked to explain but they fail and get points taken off for example. Then guessing might be discouraged.

Another reason could be that maybe teachers believe that a student somehow knows the answer subconsciously and just guessing will tease that out. Or not trying to guess, means they have given up and are not engaged. Like say they don't answer, and leave a space blank, maybe to a grader it looks like "this person is lazy and don't want to work".

Anyway, you can interpret that in many ways.

When teaching though, I agree, that should be discouraged, but in a crucial end of the year standardized test it makes sense. And I guess our whole education system has shifted to "teaching to the test" then it makes to just practice tests all the time and not even bother "teaching" for knowledge's sake.

In the broader context, when it comes to math, reading and science, teens in the U.S. rank 36th in the world. Students in Shanghai are rated the best. What are they doing right that we could be doing better here in the US?

http://cnycentral.com/news/local/new-survey-ranks-us-student...

Scores in the US are strong affected by outliers. We won't significantly improve our ranking without addressing those outliers.

the real question is does that ranking matter? chasing potentially useless numbers to feel better isn't an unvarnished good in my book

Those comparisons are misleading because they don't control for the demographics of students coming in. The United States does a decent job for affluent students but we have a relatively percentage of lower class students taking the same tests, which means that the effect is significantly smaller once you compare demographically matched students from different countries.

The elephant in the room is poverty: that's well known to have massive educational drawbacks and most of the countries which outperform the United States have much higher social safety nets. It's hard to study when you have untreated medical problems, are hungry or perhaps not sleeping in the same place every night or even having a safe place to sleep at all. That's a familiar litany to many U.S. public school teachers and it's something which, unlike standardized testing, has been the subject of ongoing cuts for decades.

I think that this is something we should address for many reasons but I do want to note that poverty doesn't directly explain the entire gap, although I suspect that the problem is exacerbated by the social instability caused by multi-generational poverty which is harder to directly account for:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/201...

    “Even the OECD authors of the PISA test acknowledge that PISA results are due to a combination of variables, including but not limited to schooling, life experiences/home environment, poverty, access to early childhood programs, and health. In 2013, the OECD wrote in one of their reports that poverty explains up to 46% of the PISA mathematics score in OECD countries. At no time did OECD claim, as Duncan stated, schools' performance on the test can be blamed on low expectations and complacency.”

http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin...

    “If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.”

They should take a hint from engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondestructive_testing

I don't see how dousing the kids in vast amounts of gamma radiation will do any good...

In Poland we have three levels of schools: 6 years elementary, 3 years middle and 3 years high school. There are three standard tests done at the end of each level, which are the basis for the admission to the next level school. I don't see the point of making more standard tests than that - it's just an unnecessary distraction.

And yes, with Polish system you also waste some time (usually last semester) for teachers to do test-specific teaching, but that still seems better than having 6-7 standard tests per year

You have this in English-based schools as well. 7 + 4 + 2 years. Primary, lower and upper sections of the last 6 years of high-school, respectively.

Even though the tests are only towards the ends of the level, most of the time prior to it is spent teaching for it as well. Except for primary, I think you get to pass that no matter what, unless there is something seriously deficient in your knowledge.

In addition to the in-school teach to the test problem the focus on SAT and ACT tests for college admissions is also a really big problem. For the kids lucky enough to consider college, the fact remains that parents can throw money at SAT test preparation and get test score improvements in the 100 point range and more. I know because I have done this.

When I took the SAT in 1970 no one got assistance via test preparation. Now it is, or so it seems mandatory to top the charts with test scores.

Colleges look to raise their selectiveness rating by admitting higher and higher SAT (and ACT) test scores. The net affect is that for those that don't know or can't afford test preparation classes, they have lower scores than they might otherwise and the assumption is they have less choice in college admission.

I work at a University that plays the selective SAT game but also is starting to talk about if there are other ways of serving those that can succeed in college but might not get the scores that we strive for in our admits.

I think after 9 years of working in higher education and being a parent of a college grad and high school senior I think it is fair to say that both K12 public schools and institutions of higher education need some radical reinvention. I just hope I live long enough to see it come to happen.

In the early 70s, we had some level of SAT preparation including the pre-SATs (forget what they were called). However, my impression is that standardized testing prep has certainly increased--as has the level of competition to get into top schools.

One of the problems with de-emphasizing standard tests for college admissions is that they do a pretty good job at predicting college success (assuming that's your goal). Unfortunately the things you'd probably like to emphasize more (like interviews or other qualitative factors) seem to have pretty bad predictive value for just about anything.

(And this is hardly unique to college admissions; cue any of the discussions here about hiring processes.)

One of the problems with de-emphasizing standard tests for college admissions is that they do a pretty good job at predicting college success

Maybe. The SAT has become so watered down that the ACT, which MIT didn't accept back when I was playing this game in the late '70s, now has more predictive power for success at MIT.

Based on your experience working in higher education, would you say that the SAT in its current form is as effective a test as the version you took in the 1970's?

My perception is that scores have become more correlated with money spent on test preparation, and less correlated with actual aptitude.

So I don't work directly with the admissions process (I run the public web) but as a parent I see the correlation with money spent. Also I've had conversations with the SAT preparation consultant that we used for both girls and the degree to which preparation classes or one-on-one consultation helps is dramatic at least at her firm. I know this to be true because of the feedback from other parents that we recommended.

The funny thing is that one of the highest correlations with college retention, as compared to just getting admitted, is how the student feels when the visit the campus. If they feel like they will fit it they have a much higher retention rate.

Because of this colleges track visits to their campus for campus tours and some factor that in at least when courting the prospects.

I have never understood why we keep most kids grouped by age throughout their education.

In my opinion, standardized testing is most useful in a situation where a very limited number of tests are given as 'mile markers' in an educational path. A re-calibration of the scale.

No two students learn at the same pace, why force it?

The fallacy with using tests of the kids as a marker for the quality of the teachers is that you just can't do that and get reliable results.

A bunch of black kids from the ghettos, who have their parents in jail/dead, worrying about siblings etc. and no cash to spend on basic school equipment, much less a decent meal every day, will have vastly lower scores than a bunch of white kids with helicopter parents.

If schools were adequately financed e.g. to provide free, healthy meals, proper study rooms and free school supplies, that could at least reduce the gap.

Unfortunately, kids can't vote and a large number of poor black kids end up in jail or dead anyway so they can't vote even when they're old. And so, schools remain the first place to go when politicians need to cut expenses.

> The fallacy with using tests of the kids as a marker for the quality of the teachers is that you just can't do that and get reliable results.

Which is not what is being proposed by people arguing for teacher evaluations drawing on standardized testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling), as the very name 'value-added' implies.

VAM is a good idea but it's really hard to get right and the trend has been make it very high stakes for teachers. You didn't really address the examples which mschuster91 provided and that's important to understanding the problem:

1. Limited parental support (note: this does not imply bad parents – working 3 jobs to pay the bills leaves little time to help with homework)

2. Unstable living environment

3. Strong financial restrictions

4. Need to care for siblings[1]

5. Food insecurity

How do you construct a VAM model which recognizes that a teacher who got a class full of students suffering from one or more of those problems and managed to improve them by one grade level had a LOT more work, and more complicated work, than the teacher in a wealthy suburb who got a bunch of students with affluent, involved parents who are both pushing their kids hard to excel and providing tons of extra support outside of school?

This isn't just a philosophical debate, either, since school districts are tying large parts of compensation to test scores. Starting with a hard job which doesn't pay particularly well, how many years are you going to spend not getting bonuses for your hard work or even being arbitrarily punished before you give up and find an easier job?

One estimate has ~12% of NYC public school teachers being punished by the flawed VAM in use there:

http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-...

That's a high number to begin with and downright shameful when you consider that those schools are already facing a hard time getting qualified teachers. If hiring is hard, you really need to make an effort to retain the people you do manage to find.

1. My wife has had students who felt pressure to skip after-school extra-curricular activities or even go to an inferior college so they could care for younger siblings while their parents worked. That's not wrong in the sense of everyone involved having a sympathetic motive but it's a huge burden which more affluent kids never even have to think about, which is why simple-sounding ideas like making college admission or scholarships merit-based ends up reinforcing the existing socioeconomic status quo rather than changing it.

> You didn't really address the examples which mschuster91 provided and that's important to understanding the problem:

On the contrary, I addressed it entirely. mschuster91 seems to be under the impression that the teacher evaluation schemes boil down to nothing but the simplest possible before-after comparison of grades of students, ignoring all issues of demographics, differing student quality, differing school circumstances, etc. Such a scheme is indeed absurd, as his counterexample proves, but it is not what has been proposed by pretty much everyone! The actual proposals are well aware of what he thinks is the fatal problem, and go to often elaborate lengths to model and adjust for these sorts of heterogeneities in order to quantify the value-added of a particular teacher. The problem is recognized, included, and mostly dealt with. Whether the solution works entirely or is worthwhile is unclear, but he's arguing against a strawman.

> One estimate has ~12% of NYC public school teachers being punished by the flawed VAM in use there:

So I've looked at http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/02/the-arbitrary-punishment-of-n... and I have zero idea what she is trying to show. She assumes independence and treats it as a coin flip. Ummm.... what? With that sort of logic, you could show no one could expect to score a 1600 on the SAT. When criticized she links to a real analysis†, which shows considerable non-independence which means her numbers are wrong and will overstate how many will be denied tenure based on the VAMs. By the way, why are you phrasing it as 'punished'? That sounds like you're assuming your conclusion. If VAM doesn't affect hiring decisions, there's no point to bothering with it in the first place is there, but if it does affect hiring decisions, that means teachers are being 'punished'...?

† not that I think too much of it either, since it relies mostly on an argument from incredulity and pointing angrily at some scatterplots, and tries to ignore the r=.35 correlation of ratings from two subjects; to put an r=.35 in perspective, the correlation between years of education and intelligence is only ~r=.55! Even the best IQ tests won't correlate with Gf more than r=.7 or so. r=.35 is pretty good for a single pair. I don't know why he thinks a .24 is 'minuscule' when that means you're predicting half of variance... (I wonder if this is a graphing problem? He doesn't seem to jitter the datapoints, which for a large amount of discrete data will hide a lot of the density; a plot of r=.35 of n=6k should look much more striking, like this: http://imgur.com/KcwmJJH ) For implications, look at the first graph and think about classification rates. Look at the datapoints at 100 along one axis, then look across to see how many correspond to <10 on the other; hardly any do, and the 100s are almost all mapped onto 80+ on the other axis. Or look at the 0s. In terms of identifying the bottom decile, it's doing a good job.

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...

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.

This is by far the biggest difference between the two.

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 least effort improvement is just smaller classes.

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...

If that's the case, it seems like it would be a pretty easy problem to fix: allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class. From a utilitarian perspective this would probably be a net win, in that whatever the disruptive students lost from being expelled would be more than made up for by what the students who actually wanted to learn gained from not having the disruptive students interrupting the learning process.

It's not just the disruptive students - you've got the special-ed students, and all the students that are what my mother (an elementary special-ed teacher) refers to as "dull-normals" - those who don't really have learning disabilities that would get them labeled, but are just not very smart (80-100 IQ). Then there are the ESL students, and all the other categories I can't think of at 3AM...

Public schools have to service all of these students, until they graduate, drop out, or age out.

Why don't private schools have to deal with these "dull-normals" too? Having rich parents doesn't disqualify one from having below-average IQ.

Private schools can choose who they want to admit

Well there must be private schools somewhere that admit children of below-average intelligence, due to the profit to be had from rich parents with said children, so perhaps it would be instructive to look at how those schools handle it.

In the UK, I've seen richer parents simply send their children who didn't not meet private school's admissions and performance requirements to state school (the one I attended!) whilst their siblings passed the requirements and remained at the private school.

I remember two kids from primary school seemed to have disappeared and then reappeared a few months down the line from school year start. They didn't make the cut like their siblings. I think one of those kids, thinking back, was the son of the managing director of the company that is now TalkTalk pre-acquisition.

That's somewhat disheartening: it suggests that it isn't a problem that can be solved by throwing more money at it.

It's not. Private schools I've heard of and experienced have strong academic selection criteria on top of being incredibly expensive.

My son had funding for a time for nursery and was moved into the prep school. It was like seeing a foreign school. Class sizes were naturally smaller and I noted things such as their morning 'prayer', which went along the lines of "I vow to work hard today in everything I do", where as my morning prayer in an RC school was the Our Father.

I also saw kids in my sons class who, at 3 years old, were able to compute divisions in their head and articulate in a way that I've never seen a child that age speak.

These places are optimised for kids who have a lot of money backing them up and the brain power to boot. In some respects, their parents ability to simply hire help to ensure their kids do well academically must be noted too.

Not exactly, you've not demonstrated that the private schools have any incentive to even try. They can cream off the healthy, docile and rich and make money from that, so why should they accept any more challenge than that? After all, once you've done the initial skim, you don't actually need to be good educationalists, the filter has done all the work for you, and every kid you reject makes your competition look worse.

Plus the research shows private schools don't actually help you educationally, so they (like charter schools) must actually be worse at their jobs once you factor in the head start that selection gives them.

As a nation, we've decided that every child should be educated. I think that's a good goal to have, although there may be a more efficient way to do it. We kind of have a system in place with magnet schools and selective enrollment, but that's for high school.

>allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class

I think education and patience are helpful in teaching kids to vent their frustrations in more productive ways, so depriving them of those things seems likely to make it a vicious cycle.

>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 think education and patience are helpful in teaching kids to vent their frustrations in more productive ways, so depriving them of those things seems likely to make it a vicious cycle.

The problem is that spending time in school doesn't necessarily equal education, especially for the most difficult students. As a hypothetical, if it could be known that a particular student is 99% likely not to gain anything from being forced to spend the next 3 years in a classroom, and it's also known that this student harasses other students, reducing their ability to benefit from learning, would the benefit of keeping this student in class on the 1% chance they'd gain something outweigh the downsides?

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 jobs for those who have only high school diploma, let alone those who don't have even that thin sheet of paper to their name.

>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.

This wouldn't be a case with something like a basic income system. Or, the alternative more politically palatable to conservatives: make-work programs. Where people are paid to do work that, while not necessarily economically productive, nevertheless gives them the psychological satisfaction of feeling like they're working and contributing to society, and possibly helps them develop the discipline required to pursue further education in future.

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.

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.

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.

Poverty statistics in the US don't include government programs. How many of those kids are hungry after welfare and food stamps?

Aren't government programs in the US globally famous for being woefully inadequate and embarrassing? Who brings up America's social safety net in defense of the upper class? It's clear you aren't letting this topic go but this isn't the place for it.

>Aren't government programs in the US globally famous for being woefully inadequate and embarrassing?

Only to people who haven't actually looked at them. US welfare programs are certainly adequate to ensure nobody goes hungry. If children are going hungry it means their parents are spending money earmarked for food on something else.

That's what foodstamps, child-aid, etc are all for. Every country has it under different names. There are even soup-kitchens all over the place for the needy.

That, and they get free meals at the schools themselves.

If you want to use such excuses for disruptive students, then you have to actually fix the real problem. Vote for it. Petition for it. Protest. Call for a referendum.

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.

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 spending on technology programs were enough to set this school apart. Sometimes the simple answer is the right one.

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.

I attended a private Catholic prep school. One thing we didn't waste much time on was standardized testing. In my five years at the school, I only recall taking one standardized test, aside from the sat/ act.

Well of course you didn't - the school's funding didn't depend on taking tests. That's the point of this whole discussion.

Less standardized testing. More socratic learning method in small-sized classes, taught by highly paid teachers. That results in better prepared less stressed students who get admissions to better universities. They then get better jobs, beget richer kids, who then get admissions into private schools, and so on it goes.

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/bad syllabus, but in general I think it boils down to having either better material stuff or better trained teachers or both.

Edit: Forgot to add that these two improved areas seem to combine to give much better learning experience which in the end seems to somewhat correlate to student success.

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.

Maybe it could be due to being different countries?

I was talking about Mexico in this case.

I'm not saying there aren't shitty private schools in Mexico. There are a lot of everything. You can find some of the best high schools and colleges from the public side, as well as from the private.

But in general I found that here most private schools had at least nicer infrastructure. Maybe teachers were a mixed bag since you can also have old school catholic/religious institutions that would have really retrograde teachers, but again, at least in the infrastructure side money did seem to buy much better things.

That might also have to do with the fact that taxes in Mexico are not prioritized for education and so most public schools are really lacking in pretty much everything. Students and teachers basically put a significant part of the expense in school materials as well as things like paint for the buildings, repairing broken bathrooms, etc. It's a really dire situation that gets worse every day.

Under this context then, a private institution that can raise a significant amount of money from parents, will usually manage to make a very big difference.

We are talking about the difference between having a public college where most bathrooms were non functional, had no toiler paper or soap (so pretty much only running water if that) vs a private college where there is a Starbucks inside campus and other such amenities (like fully functional bathrooms and plenty of them, etc). Same thing for labs and of course the students capacity to buy newer (or even any kind) of laptops, etc.

Same thing for high schools where there is no space to play sports vs having a fully stocked gymnasium with a soccer field, showers, etc.

I guess that was my view at least.

Private schools don't necessarily spend any more per student on teaching than public schools do. Mine spent less, though I got more out of it.

One of the differentiators, I think, is that only parents who actually care about education spend >$10k/year on something they could get for free. Most of the children attending have significant support from their parents and come from stable homes.

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.

My sister sends her son to a private school, academia type, very intense on read/write/arithmetic, especially in their daily homework (more than 12 pages/day), and that's for age 5!!! Not exaggerate about the home work because I helped it, practicing writing many words, read short and easy stories, some summation like 12+4. Pretty surprising to see an age 5 do that, though painful for him.

One test per major course per school year, how the hell could this be "overwhelming"?

That was the point of the of no child left behind. If a select few aren't getting rich off of a public service then it must be broken and privatized.

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