I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests
slate.com
slate.com
The dentist couldn't understand why I would do this. I told him it was my legal right, and a decision that my husband and I had thought through carefully...
Yeah, yeah. Silly comparison. However, I'm trying to make the point that testing, so long as it isn't the end-all motivation of all teaching efforts, serves a useful purpose and, while there are other possible methods of evaluation and feedback, testing is the backbone of most school systems at present. As such, teachers understandably fail to understand when parents opt their children out of tests. This might explain why those teachers and school officials had such difficulty making logical arguments in favor of it. To them, it was like opting those children out of flossing.
The author of this article does make the case that the school didn't argue very convincingly in favor of the tests, but neither did she make any form of convincing argument against the tests beyond stress. Arguably, learning that early and thorough preparation reduces stress is a tremendously important lesson for kids, even beyond what they're actually studying! Testing also teaches children to remain calm under pressure, and that random chance ("Oh, I won't study that. What are the odds it will be a question?") is a cruel mistress.
Yes, it is your legal right to opt your children out of both taking tests and flossing. Take a stand! Hooray for your legal rights!
Any school system for which a state standardized test is the “backbone” of student “evaluation and feedback” is completely and utterly broken.
There may be some schools like that, but I hope to never interact with them.
Every school I’ve ever interacted with had student assignments with careful grading, teacher-created tests relevant to the material being studied, report cards with grades or ideally written feedback from the teacher, etc. I would consider those the “backbone” of student assessment. State standardized tests are mostly a waste of time and pretty unrevealing about students, in comparison to actually looking at the students’ work.
Note: A key difference between these exams and SAT's is that curricula in the U.S. are often designed to help students pass SAT's, while the standardized tests here are designed to test the province's curriculum.
It is a very broken system
You also run into agency problems like teacher Y assigning everyone an A just to avoid whining students.
http://qz.com/157579/confession-of-an-ivy-league-teaching-as...
Yup, would have been better off without it.
> testing is the backbone of most school systems at present.
I think that's exactly where the problem is: kids are not supposed to help schools get funds, schools are supposed to train kids for real life.
The purpose of SATs is deeply questioned. They try to give a single number to evaluate someone.
There is a common fallacy on the matter. Say you want to evaluate programmers. You find out that your best programmers write code than the others, so you decide to track how much code each one has added to the source. You know what happens next: your code base just grew tenfold. That's because when you use a measurement, you are evaluating this measurement and nothing else.
Getting back to SATs, it means that you are evaluating the skills of kids at taking standardized tests, and I don't think this is a very useful skill as an adult.
> The author of this article does make the case that the school didn't argue very convincingly in favor of the tests, but neither did she make any form of convincing argument against the tests beyond stress.
Good, then it does not matter if they are taken or not; it is therefore very reasonable to avoid an unnecessary burden.
> Arguably, learning that early and thorough preparation reduces stress is a tremendously important lesson for kids, even beyond what they're actually studying! Testing also teaches children to remain calm under pressure, and that random chance ("Oh, I won't study that. What are the odds it will be a question?") is a cruel mistress.
I find it quite depressing to see that schools are now supposed to train you to take a test. How is that any relevant? What was the original purpose of school again? This is the same fallacy as I above: tests are made to check the training pupils where given, not the other way around.
> Yes, it is your legal right to opt your children out of both taking tests and flossing. Take a stand! Hooray for your legal rights!
How is that an argument?
I linked to real tests elsewhere in the thread.
You find that the best students can compute the area of a rectangle given a ruler and simplify (x^3y^2)(x^4y). You start testing that, and you know what happens next: all your students can compute area given a ruler and simplify algebraic equations.
Wait, isn't that a good thing?
A lot of teachers feel like they don't have time to teach concepts because they have to spend all of their time teaching the answers to specific questions on the test.
So far not a single person has actually told me how to "teach to the test" for the real NY or CA test. Strange how everyone knows it will happen, but no one actually knows how to do it.
The benefits of them (I guess), is that you can collect data on how kids are doing around various parts of the country, and maybe look at some areas where the kids are doing poorer than others to see if the education is lacking.
I don't see any downsides at all other than "my kids might get stressed" which is rather silly.
edit: just to clarify, I am all for the ability to opt-out if you want, but it seems these testings are generally disliked.
After all, would you get on an airliner where the pilot flunked the written pilot's exam? Would you see a doctor that flunked the medical board exam? Do you think people ought to get drivers' licenses even if they fail the written exam?
Other objections are that the tests are biased towards or against certain segments of the population and that they don't accurately assess the quality of education.
The response to poor test results is not more funding for underprivileged schools or real reform, it's to fire teachers and close "under-performing" schools.
Standardized testing isn't used as a feedback mechanism to learn what works and what doesn't, what can be improved and what's doing fine. It's used as a weapon against public education.
http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1... http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261... http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf
Please explain with specifics how to "teach to the test" in a manner that doesn't increase student knowledge.(If "teaching to the test" increases student knowledge then it's a good thing.)
I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education". Are clinical trials a "weapon against pharmacy"? Is a sales board a "weapon against salesmen"?
Your critique that "there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids" is simply ignorant. If anything, modern testing systems are more difficult for teachers of top students (who have nowhere to go but down). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
If burning someone alive cures them of AIDS, then it's a good thing.
Rote memorization might (temporarily) increase the number of facts in your head. It will not make you an intelligent and productive individual. Instead, it will train you to be dependent on other people to give you information, rather than finding or inferring it for yourself.
> I have no idea why you believe measuring outputs is a "weapon against public education".
I explained that already, but you chose to ignore it as inconvenient to your radical ideology.
> * And your critique that "there's no allowance for poor areas, non-English-speaking areas, or special-needs kids" is simply ignorant.*
Since I've seen the devastating effects of NCLB and similar initiatives, I'm quite confident in my critique. Since I've seen many of your posts on HN, I'm equally confident that your extreme ideology will not change, so this will be my one and only reply to you.
Ignoring your completely dissimilar analogy, from what I saw from the tests that yummyfajitas linked, these are not matters of simple memorization, but actually knowing how to apply knowledge to an area. If the student passes that test, then one can assume they have learned what the test presumed to have been taught beforehand.
It's not a simple matter of listing things, but about applying methods to cases.
For seven hours each day, children in need of everything from individualized, therapist-aided teaching methods to nothing more than "here's a library, go nuts" are packed into overcrowded classrooms and drilled on the same crap.
Look at that Grade 8 New York test. Realize that is being given to 12-13 year olds. Realize I could have gotten 80% of it right in 4th grade at a school where a few slower kids didn't risk the career of their teacher.
This is what standardized testing does.
Because the specific legal programs making state testing regimes a condition of federal funding were overtly -- by their sponsors -- heralded as tools to provide information to parents that would lead them to opt into private schools (which, those same sponsors proposed, should be subsidized by public vouchers that redirect funds from the public schools), which private schools would not be subject to the same testing requirements.
Um, doesn't that make the formerly private schools part of the public education system? The government is still funding schools, after all. It sounds like their sponsors just want to rearrange the public education system a bit.
I do agree with you that private schools receiving taxpayer funds should be subject to the same testing requirements.
The California tests have expanded from something required every 3 or 4 years (I think I took them twice, but I opted out in high school) to something required every year starting in second grade. They also expanded in terms of the length of the tests. California does have specific programs for children from homes in which English is not spoken or is a second language.
I spent 10 years in Virginia and sent my daughter to public school for ~2 years there. During that time, I noticed a trend in the way that state used the standardized testing and recommendations of "No child left behind". They closed schools that either did not meet the average on the tests (umm... what's an average again?) or could not increase their scores year after year. After a few years of this, two themes started recurring: - close an under-performing school, bus the kids further to other schools which are now more crowded and trying to improve the performance of the students that were not doing well enough to keep their previous school open - good schools started having trouble increasing their scores in subsequent years
When it was an under-performing school that closed, very few people other than the parents of children at those schools (and maybe the surrounding schools) had a problem with it. When the best schools in the state (at least according to the test scores) started to fail the requirements (how do you improve test scores every year?), it still took a while for people to realize that the law (whether accidentally or otherwise) was going to close the doors of every public school in the state.
If the students already know everything on the test, then there isn't much need for prep. Take maybe 1 day to explain the test mechanics, another 1-2 days to administer, and you've spent maybe 3 days/year on testing.
You still haven't answered the question. How do you "teach to the test" (real tests, not tests written by straw men) without increasing student knowledge?
Think about it this way: all humans are different. We have short ones, tall ones, fat ones thin ones. Some can run a marathon almost without trying while for others it would nearly kill them. So everyone is different, and for kids especially they are different not just because their final state will be different but because they follow dramatically different paths developmentally. Teaching is an art form, a fine skill or understanding and nurturing each student along their unique path to realize the best outcome for each child.
Standardized testing is like a club to this: it smashes down on children and insists they and their teachers follow one defined path that is almost completely inappropriate for many children. It actively interferes with a teacher's ability to tailor an educational path for a child. For example, if a child is not ready to learn a particular level of math, force feeding them a higher level is almost certainly counter productive and will have highly negative consequences. Yet that is what the standardized test encourages (even demands, once things like salaries and funding get linked to the results).
Since you clearly won't read the tests I linked to, I'll copy&paste from it:
At night Belle [the authors nickname for the Brooklyn Bridge] was dressed in tiny lights that spanned her limbs. On a cloudless night like this one, she was a sight like no other sight in the whole city....
When does this passage take place?
Is it short or tall students who don't need to be able to read the above paragraph and determine when the passage takes place? Do fat students not need to know how to compute area or simplify (x^2 y^3)(x^4 y^2)?
They increase far out of proportion with their actual educational value, leaving behind everything else.
Of the topics on the 3 specific tests I linked to, what material is "far out of proportion with it's actual educational value"? I'm asking for problem #s with explanations.
Use your critical thinking skills and reference the source material, don't just repeat talking points that you learned via rote memorization.
I knew that the US was lagging 1-2 years behind the rest of the world in mathematics [1] (also, from personal experience). The above isn't a math test, it is a kiddie pool. Where elsewhere in the developed world students are expected to do proofs at this age (even if they are simple ones), this test checks memorized knowledge by multiple choice. (Seriously, none of my teachers in secondary school would have been caught dead doing a single multiple choice question.)
Please explain with specifics how to "teach to the test" in a manner that doesn't increase student knowledge.
There's a difference between rote knowledge and understanding. I mean, seriously: Asking what a trinomial is (multiple choice, too, so you can guess pretty well) or calculating the area of a rectangle in eighth grade???
[1] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-cor...
You didn't answer the question: how would you make scores on these tests go up without also making understanding go up (i.e. "teach to the test")? I'm now convinced that "teaching to the test" is likely a myth - not a single proponent of the idea has actually explained how to do it.
(Incidentally, I'm not sure why you think the test I linked to is based on memorization. What would you memorize to make your score go up?)
We might be giving a 6th grade test to the 8th grade - that's a flaw of the curriculum, not of the test.
As part of the 1998 TIMSS, a couple hundred videos were made of math teaching in the US, Germany, and Japan. James W. Stigler and James Hiebert then wrote a book, "The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom", on the content of these videos. They observed:
"When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something different. Now we were struck by the similarity among the U.S. lessons and by how different they were from the other country’s lesson. When we watched a Japanese lesson, for example, we noticed that the teacher presents a problem to the students without first demonstrating how to solve the problem. We realized that U.S. teachers almost never do this, and now we saw that a feature we hardly noticed before is perhaps one of the most important features of U.S. lessons - that the teacher almost always demonstrates a procedure for solving problems before assigning them to students. This is the value of cross-cultural comparisons."
"For example, presenting a problem in Germany sets stage for a rather long development of a solution procedure, a whole-class activity, guided by the teacher. In Japan, presenting a problem sets the stage for students to work, individually or in groups, on developing solution procedures. In the United States, presenting a problem is the context for demonstrating a procedure and sets the stage for students practicing the procedure."
Or, as a review of the book on Amazon summarizes:
"In Japan, mathematics teaching is a method that aims to develop students' understanding of mathematical relationships and properties. This system of mathematical knowledge is taught to children in lessons that are highly coherent, hierarchically linear, and based on teachers' own research of what lessons promote student learning. Further, these lessons typically involve "structured problem-solving," where math concepts are induced from challenging problems, where these concepts are concretized through well-considered examples, and where mathematical relationships are proven as following necessarily from given premises.
"In contrast, mathematics teaching in the U.S. seeks to train students in mathematical procedures. These procedures are taught to students by demonstrating one correct procedure for solving an easy problem, and then students are asked to imitate that procedure for many highly similar problems. More often than not, the lessons for imparting these skills are incoherent--with many non-mathematical discursions and interruptions. Further, lessons almost never involve math inductions and proofs; rather, teachers state math relationships explicitly and immediately tell students how the relationship should be used to solve simple problems. Last, lessons are developed by education researchers not only without the collaboration of teachers, but specifically so that the lessons are 'teacher-proof'."
That's the difference: other countries teach problem solving and (deep) understanding. The US teaches simple, repeatable procedures. That's what then becomes "teaching to the test".
Another requires calculating the area of a square by knowing to measure the lengths of the sides and multiplying them with each other. This is all about memorizing a set of procedures and applying them.
Contrast that with this German question for 7th/8th graders: http://www.joerg-rudolf.lehrer.belwue.de/j3/images/mathe_sek...
You're required to show that the quadrilateral IJKL is a square if the distances AE, BF, CG, and DH are of equal length, for which you have to show that all sides of IJKL are of equal length and that the angles of IJKL are all right angles. This requires a number of substeps, since you'll be reducing the problem to the question of congruences between triangles. More importantly, the point is not the difficulty of the question but that the question requires application of knowledge to a novel situation that the student hasn't encountered before (known as "transfer of learning" [1]), whereas US math problems tend to be carefully tailored to be straightforward applications for the memorized procedures. To the point that it is known that US math tests tend to eschew even word problems [2] to a great degree.
Nobody says that "teaching to the test" doesn't teach students anything. The problem is that it teaches them procedures that require a minimum of independent thinking and are more about following down an established path.
[1] http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Transfer_of_learning
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_(mathematics_educa...
The test had about 8 problems (out of 27) that are amenable to memorizing algebraic transformations or definitions. So "teaching to the test" as you describe it is a great way to make sure your students get a solid 30%.
To the point that it is known that US math tests tend to eschew even word problems [2] to a great degree.
There are about 8/27 word problems. The rest are geometric reasoning problems along the lines of the German test you link to (I don't read German so I can't compare except in general terms).
Incidentally, transfer of learning is pretty much nonexistent. Wish I had an online source, but all I have to link to is a dead tree: http://www.amazon.com/Transfer-Learning-Instruction-Educatio...
Incidentally, I'm really glad someone is actually engaging with the topic rather than just reciting memorized talking points. Reminds me of what hacker news used to be like.
I.E. the tests are not at fault, but it sounds like your education system is teaching things in a wrong and inefficient manner.
To provide some anecdotal comparison, here in Denmark, we also regularly test students. Nobody has any problems with this, the education doesn't lack because of it. So the problem does not lie in testing, but it might lie in what you test for, and how the teachers perceive what the most efficient way of teaching is.
If you test a child in the curriculum to check if they learned the curriculum, and they pass the test, is it not reasonable to conclude from that, that they have learned what they should?...
First of all, let's clarify: I'm not American, and it's not my education system (which doesn't mean that I don't have first-hand experiences with the consequences).
To provide some anecdotal comparison, here in Denmark, we also regularly test students. Nobody has any problems with this, the education doesn't lack because of it. So the problem does not lie in testing, but it might lie in what you test for, and how the teachers perceive what the most efficient way of teaching is.
I think you may not be able to fully relate to how different American-style standardized testing is from the tests you are used to and what they do the education system because of how incentives are structured. Compare, for example, questions on the French Bac [1] with SAT questions [2]. Even though both supposedly test preparedness for college, there is a world of a difference between the two.
Testing is generally a crucial part of any education system; it provides feedback, incentives, and a lot of other things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with testing as such. There is a lot wrong with US-style standardized testing.
First of all, much of US standardized testing is not about evaluating students, but about evaluating schools and teachers (this is alluded to in the article). Schools may lose funding and teachers may even lose their jobs because of poor performance on standardized tests. This is why the school in the article is in such a state of panic over even just one family avoiding the tests and which is also why students could opt out in the first place (because it isn't really about the students).
As a consequence, this creates strong incentives to make sure that test results are good, no matter how that is accomplished. (In some extreme – and rare – cases, there have been teachers and schools with knowledge of tests who prepared their students accordingly beforehand.)
Because of the nature and design of standardized tests in the US, teaching deep understanding is a poor use of school resources to accomplish this goal; it's generally more efficient to fake a sufficient amount of understanding and rely on rote stuff. This, of course, creates a negative feedback loop that affects how material is being taught and – eventually – even how curricula are designed.
On top of that, the effort of dealing with standardized testing – especially as pervasive and frequent as it currently is in America – eats up a great many teaching resources.
You are of course correct that standardized tests couldn't be a problem without other parts of the education system creating negative feedback loops. For example, in the US, teachers are underpaid relative to other professionals with graduate degrees [5], and given the degree of inequality in America and the cost of a college degree, this creates a strong incentive for the best and the brightest among a generation to do something other than teaching. This in turn means that schools are trying to weed out the poor teachers, and the methods for that tend to punish the good teachers and the students as well.
(I note that European systems have plenty of problems of their own, such as the myriad of issues with badly thought out approaches to tracking [3] that many European countries have [4]. But these are independent problems.)
[1] http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/a-look-at-one-...
[2] http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-practice-questions
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)
[4] It's not that tracking as such is harmful – not all students are alike, after all –, but many implementations of tracking are harmful in that they further social segregation or create incentives for good teachers to work at upper tier schools, leaving lower tier schools with poorer teachers.
[5] To be clear, US teachers are generally not poorly paid. But with a graduate degree, they can earn more – generally much more – elsewhere, which leads to a sort of brain drain out of the education system.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
No, standarized tests aren't ideal. But what do you propose instead. Let each of the millions of teachers create his/her own standard?
The thing is - this is easily achievable by sampling. You don't need to test every single kid to figure out broad trends. The tests reveal nothing at that level that couldn't be ascertained through other means.
> I don't see any downsides at all other than "my kids might get stressed" which is rather silly.
The biggest downside is that inevitably the minute such a system is introduced nearly the entire educational program becomes bent on preparing kids for the test. If it can't be tested, it just falls through the cracks and isn't taught. But we all know schooling, especially in younger years, is about so much more than being able to reproduce a small set of measurable skills.
I also think your "rather silly" comment is a bit flippant. For someone who is not bothered by tests this might seem reasonable. But for kids that are not ready, introducing them to high stress testing situations can scar them badly and impair their performance for life. For a child that does not react well (through lack of maturity) to a testing environment, it means inevitably they will do very poorly on the test, which will feed back into their self esteem and have a high risk of setting back their educational progress.
To determine the performance of an individual teacher, you pretty much do. You want to measure teacher performance from a sample of 5/30 students? Too noisy. Even 30 students is far from ideal.
Testing every child is also a great way to prevent schools from "randomly" cherrypicking which students take the test.
It's not like I love exams myself? This is simply something people should learn to deal with.
>But for kids that are not ready, introducing them to high stress testing situations can scar them badly and impair their performance for life.
If your kid gets scared for life by a test, then I'm afraid you simply haven't prepared them for life at all. Test might be frightening, I'll grant you that, but it's such a normal part of the education system and a lot of other things, that it simply is something one must learn to cope with in some way or another. There's often counseling or guidance you can get if you really have anxiety.
>it means inevitably they will do very poorly on the test, which will feed back into their self esteem and have a high risk of setting back their educational progress.
Then you deal with that by helping them as I mentioned in the last sentence in the paragraph before. It can also be an indicator that the child simply hasn't learned what it was expected to have learned, and therefore isn't ready to progress yet.
Kids aren't fragile little things that'll break so easily. I'll stand on my earlier claim and would say "sparing" them of such things will do more harm to them later on in their life than it will do them good. You can't always hold you child in the hand, and if they never learn to deal with stressful situations it will have a much larger impact later on in life.
(wings of fire series, spirit animals, that sort of things)
When we go to the bookstore the rule is: if you want it I buy it. I don't care if its about dragons or elephants. It's still cheaper than private school.
EDIT: Here's a link to some older costs: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_063.asp
A little hyperbole! I went to school, and also have a job.
Here in Germany we have some private schools that are almost free because they are run by the catholic church or protestants. Other non religious private schools are at about 5000€ per year.
While I was reading the first page, I was screaming, your kid is smart, thus "IT MATTERS TO YOUR KID'S TEACHERS".
By the second page the author somehow figures it out after posting on Facebook and getting tons of comments from friends that explain it to her in excruciating detail. I would not hire this person as a lawyer ever. I have no idea why she wrote this article.
Would not hire as a lawyer.
I, too, would not hire her as a lawyer, but that's because she isn't one anymore. She's been an instructor and professor for more than a decade, not a practicing attorney.
What's worth defending here?
Then the option isn't confusing at all, it's quite clear. What's confusing is this: Why was it there in the first place?
Once they have done this, and therefore are completely entitled, they take out their entitlement anxieties on everyone else who was smart enough to learn what they needed to and didnt give a shit about social conformity or status entitlement.
Their collective anger at themselves is what creates homelessness.
In fact, I think she demonstrates that pretty well.