A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About No Child Left Behind

That's actually, IMO, not even close to the biggest problem. The main problem with analyzing what is wrong with the schools is that no one can agree to shared definition of the mission of the schools that admits to an easy objective measurement, and, that this is complicated by lots of people selling proposed metricsbased on their beliefs about what those metrics will be which will justify the policy prescriptions they already prefer, which are often based on prefered outcomes that are different than what the outcomes are advertised as proxies for measuring (and often based on concealed ideological or financial interest of the people selling them.)

For my oldest we've moved through public, home school, private, and back to public over the years, trying various things. I have a criticism of each of them, and while we may have chosen the "wrong" private school, but it wasn't price that had us choose there.

But as you point out it's not uniform. It's reasonable that teachers make a big difference in some scenarios and not in others.

Is that a better use case for you?

Mercifully in Australia we don't have standardized testing every year (yet), but enough importance is tied to the tests that do take place that a disproportionate amount of time is spent preparing kids for the style of tests administered, regardless of any gaming of the system, reducing the time spent on the rest of the curriculum.

I know we've argued education before and so I'm not expecting a hallelujah moment, but I figured it was a point that should also be made.

Most of my math classes growing up ended with a week or two of "here's how what you just learned applies in the real world / future classes". It was one of the few redeeming aspects of my early math education, and is probably one of the first things to get cut when schools want to beef up test scores.

It's educating them in the wrong things. For example, goal of class: better thinker by learning to do multiplication. Because of test, they only learned memorizing multiplication tables.

"That's a useful skill" is not a useful educational criterion. Knowing how to change a tire on a car is a useful skill, but it's not appropriate for a math course.

"Educating students" is also a useless criterion. Education is a never-ending process. I'm still learning things now. Schools by necessity must restrict themselves to certain topics. A Spanish teacher cannot simply use "I'm educating students" as an excuse to spend four weeks on Canadian politics in the 1970s.

If test prep is so important, why isn't it its own course, where the teachers are trained for it, and where there are specific curriculum goals?

"This is why tests are standardized, not left up to the schools or teachers" - are you willfully ignoring the point? Someone defines the standards. The page I linked to suggests that the standards for this New York test were defined by people who want the public school systems to fail, as part of the general effort to privatize public school.

As http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/... points out:

> The bottom line is that there are tremendous financial interests driving the agenda about our schools — from test makers, to publishers, to data management corporations — all making tremendous profits from the chaotic change. When the scores drop, they prosper. When the tests change, they prosper. When schools scramble to buy materials to raise scores, they prosper. There are curriculum developers earning millions to created scripted lessons to turn teachers into deliverers of modules in alignment with the Common Core (or to replace teachers with computer software carefully designed for such alignment). This is all to be enforced by their principals, who must attend “calibration events” run by “network teams.”

You even used the passive "that's why tests are standardized" - who standardized the tests, what political and financial goals influence them, and how transparent is the standardization process?

When the schools and teachers define the tests, then these issues are much clearer, and any failures are limited to just the school or teacher, and not systemic to the entire state.

Hence why it's possible, and likely, that some test standardizers have gamed the test results, under my concrete definition of "gaming."

Hard question: are our schools meeting the educational needs of their pupils and society?

Easy question: did enough pupils fill in enough of the right circles on this test for us all to not get fired next year?

If you exchanged test scores for production figures and teachers for farmers, this article could be a story directly out of Soviet agriculture in the collectivisation era. I'm finding it highly entertaining to watch you, of all people, defending this system so vehemently.

OK, sure, it does sound like educating students, IF you accept that teaching people to spot inconsistencies and trap questions in a ritualized multiple choice test is a skill that transfers to other situations. Unfortunately this is really not the case at all. It's an education in how to navigate specific public-school bureaucracy. It doesn't even teach people to navigate other shitty bureaucracies.

Which is sometimes true sure. But it is frustrating working with academic "stars" who internalize this once they come to the "real world". They are focused so much on getting the "right answer" within some narrowly defined context of right, that they can't see the better solution by reinterpreting the problem or recasting the assumptions in a slightly different order. They are unable to combine bits of knowledge from different buckets, because the test questions are all neatly siloed.

For example, I've had this argument with fresh grads many, many times:

me: you need to limit your UDP packets to 512 bytes (or 8K depending on the situation).

them: but my teachers told me UDP packet size is a 16 bit integer.

me: yeah, but many stacks cut off shorter, because there is a different standard that says routers can drop packets bigger than their preferred size, the only minimum is 512 bytes.

them: my teacher told me that the packet size is a 16 bit field. Why are you talking about routers?

me: because you need to combine information to actually solve a problem?

them: whatever, I need to figure out what the bug in my code is causing these packets to be dropped.

Or -

me: hey $intern, let's figure out a few ways to solve approach this problem. expounds on the problem, lays out a few things that might work. The goal here is to try a few different techniques so we can work them into the bigger design. Any questions?

intern: no.

a few days later

intern: Hey I think i solved the problem, is this one solution right?

me: it's one way. It has some good stuff and bad stuff, but we want to try a few solutions to determine how to think about this.

intern: looks like a lost puppy but is it right?

Following conversation about multiple solutions and exploring solutions resembles "who's on first"

The biggest problem with standardized testing is there is no room for the idea that outside of school, it isn't always about doing the rote thing, the simple siloed task in front of you, but rather incorporating various bits of knowledge, about applying the bits of knowledge in ways that allow task completion for tasks that aren't extremely well defined with a pre-arranged solution.

In fact - the lack of a pre arranged solution is what defines most work outside of menial jobs. The idea that there is more than one approach or solution to something is antithetical to the core of standardized testing.

(keep in mind - that for the statistics to be meaningful, the tests can't allow for grading criterial other than "one strictly correct answer" or you end up with issues in the numbers as the result of graders being different.)

It's a probabilistic skill, and in so far as the test is designed to give a measure of what someone knows, and not how lucky they've been, it's gaming the system.

Is it a useful skill? Well, yes. To an extent. So is knowing your addition table, but we expect students to have moved somewhat beyond that by the time they're in secondary education. Just as we'd expect someone educated for five years, six or seven hours a week, 28-40 weeks a year, to have advanced somewhat beyond the need for discarding comedy answers as a viable test strategy.

By secondary level, we'd expect them to know, (or be capable of running the calculation,) to decide among those answers that are actually in the ball park. Approaches for which the cost is more or less constant regardless of how many answers are on the page: You trust your calculation or memory to have given you the answer and discard all others by default.

I learned a few things about standardized tests after working on them for so long: 1. almost none of the criticisms of standardized tests apply to a well-designed and maintained test, in particular "susceptible to gaming" or "culturally biased against minorities"; 2. many tests are badly designed; many tests function only as professional barriers to entry and governments/certification bodies don't care all that much how unfair the tests are as long as the final numbers come out right.

I worked on two tests for the federal government. They both were done with great care to be as fair as possible, although I learned how they manipulated the process to get the demographic mixture they desired.

Nobody is saying "don't test". The only place that I know of that doesn't test in the traditional sense are Waldorf schools, and even they still evaluate their students.

Concerns are being raised about standardized testing in a NCLB-influenced environment, both in how that limits test design, tests for the wrong things, and how this kind of testing creates the wrong incentives.

> the AP tests have a significant multiple-choice component that resists simple trickery.

It isn't just about trickery. I remember encountering a pumping lemma question during the GRE that was simply easier to answer in multiple choice form because I didn't have to prove the correctness of the right answer, but only the incorrectness of the wrong ones (and even there I didn't have to work out the fiddly details, I just needed a modest amount of confidence).