Testing Our Patience

The great thing about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is that it has finally brought attention to the vast numbers of children --our children, our nation's future-- for whom our education system is failing. But that may be the only good thing about it.

No Child Left Behind has accomplished the same thing as many of our public policies do: it is creating a massive industry with benefits for many, except those the policy was intended to help. American students took 45 million tests in 2006, a number that certainly has risen as NCLB requirements have kicked in. The Government Accounting Office estimated that, between 2002 and 2008, states would spend between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion to implement tests mandated under No Child Left Behind. These are just the direct costs; if the time spent on prepping students and coordinating and administering the tests are included, the costs could be 10 to 15 times higher.




If this type of expenditure were producing real progress among students, I'd say, "Hallelujah!" Instead it's producing some really perverse incentives:

• A recent report in the New York Times stated, "As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma. "
• It gets worse: in a second story, we find that, "Cheating on tests used to be thought of as primarily the domain of students, but as standardized test results have taken on an increasing importance as a way to measure schools, the culprits have increasingly turned out to be educators." The schools are changing the students' test scores so the schools look better. Never mind how the students are faring.
• If you do not have a teenager in a Minnesota high school, you might not be aware that in 2009, 43% of 11th graders failed to pass a math test needed to graduate. The legislature, horrified at denying diplomas to so many children, came up with an Einsteinian idea: let's tell them that if they take the test three times and still don't pass, we'll give them a diploma anyway.
• Because tests are costly, states are turning to multiple choice "bubble" tests because they are cheaper to administer, yet they are notoriously inadequate as a measure of students' knowledge as skills. How would you feel if your annual performance review consisted solely of a standardized multiple choice test, and it alone determined whether you'd keep your job? Other economically advanced nations use performance-based assessment where students are evaluated on the basis of real work such as essays, projects and activities. And by the way, they do just fine (or better!) on standardized multiple choice tests.
• Remedies must be taken at schools that fail to show annual yearly progress (another odd measure), one of which is "turnaround." Those teachers in Rhode Island? They've been turned-around. Here in Minnesota, where we're "nice", turnaround is a fancy word for reshuffling the deck chairs. One teacher described to me that when a school is reconstituted, the poor performing teachers are let go-- to another school.

In fairness, NCLB is creating pressure to help students who struggle the most. I recently completed a number of interviews with teachers and principals, and was struck by the variety and intensity of efforts they were making to help students pass standardized tests. People will argue whether this is a good thing or not. But the biggest takeaway was this-- how does standardized testing help the student, teacher or school when a student enters 9th or 10th grade with a 5th grade math level and must pass an Algebra II (i.e. quadratic equations and trigonometry) test by the end of 11th grade? As one teacher put it, "“How do I help? I’ve hit every tool in the toolbox. I don’t know what to do. They (the students) don’t know what to do. It’s very sad. They work so hard.”

more to come on this subject...

Our Little Genious Cheats and other Saturday tidbits

On Saturday mornings I read the New York Times, and I'm always struck by the arcane, the absurd and the avoidable. Here are a few from this morning.

Our Little Genius cheats... Remember seeing the ads for this game show in which super smart kids are quizzed? Fox has scrapped the show over allegations that they coached the kids on answers. Far less scandalous than real life--see the story in which schools actually changed students' standardized test score answers so the school would fare better under No Child Left Behind.

Tim Pawlenty, speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference last week was quoted in two different articles, in the first saying: "God's in charge" and in the second "We should take a page out of her (Tiger Wood's wife) playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country." How someone could hold (or not) both of these beliefs is truly remarkable, and says everything we need to know about him as presidential material.

Sarah Palin started a row with an actress with Down syndrome who did a voice over on Family Guy. Palin's disingenuous blather was ignited over an episode in which Chris begins to date a girl with Down syndrome, and asks about her family. The girl replies "My dad's an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska." Palin claims it was a swipe at her son Trig. The actress, Andrea Fay Friedman, replied, "My mother did not carry me around like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes."

The latest threat in Haiti is the accumulation of human excrement. Haiti had no sewage treatment plants even before the earthquake; the lowliest workers cleaned latrines and the waste was transported to disposal sites. Now it just piles up. And worse, starving families rummage in it looking for food. Public health officials fear outbreaks of cholera, malaria and dengue. Cases of typhoid and shigellosis are already on the rise. "Haiti's pigs live better lives than we do," says a displaced mother of four.

Headline: "Fewer People Late Paying Mortgage." Details: The improvement was in the group that has only missed one payment. The percentage of homeowners missing two payments increased, from 6.25% in the 3rd quarter of 2009 to 6.89% in the fourth quarter , as did the percentage of those missing at least three payments, from 8.85% to 9.67%. And the number of loans in foreclosure rose from 4.47% to 4.58% --from 3.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

My weekend gift to you: No item on Tiger Woods.

The rine in spine sties minely in the pline, or, language is power

Yikes! It's funny how fast you can fall behind when you're traveling and swamped with work. While I'm sure no one put their life on hold while waiting for my post, I promise to be more consistent in the future.

I was in Albuquerque having great fun with my brother Kelly and his wife Debra. See pics below. We went to the zoo, and while I'm not normally a zoo fan, the cats were prowling, the gorillas fighting and the the birds were beautiful. Did you know a black leopard has spots? We waiting for him to walk into the sun so we could see his spots. Stunning!

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I met with my friend Mahmoud a few weeks ago. He is Iranian born, and is now a U.S. citizen, having been here since he was sixteen. He’s a linguist, and has fascinating ideas about language.

As a learner of English, he was determined to match his language to that of native speakers. He studied every type of English language pattern possible, from children’s nursery rhymes to Olde English to southern dialects to Boston dialects. And he still couldn’t figure out what made his speech different. So he went to the head of ESL at the University of Minnesota and asked her, “What is it that makes my English different from native speakers?” She told him, “When you find out, please let us know.”

Many years later, Mahmoud has yet to discover those intricacies of language that identify a person as a non-native speaker. But he has discovered how powerful those differences are. As a younger man he took a job in the restaurant industry. He was promoted five times in six years, moving from wait staff to the head of a multi-million dollar business. He says he did it by adjusting his language with each promotion, tailoring it always to the people around him.

Mahmoud believes two things. First, language has always been used, and still is, to separate people by status. Think "My Fair Lady" (see Eliza and henry below). Think the movie "Fargo". Second, language, thoughts and behavior are a package deal.

We judge people by their language. After the movie “Fargo” was released, there was a strong backlash from Minnesotans over the way their speech was portrayed. Check out this hilarious clip and you’ll see what I mean. An editorial in the Brainerd Dispatch ("Fargo was filmed in Brainerd) read, “ But the film's depiction of a typical Brainerd resident is particularly illuminating - a vapid moron presumably the product of inbreeding by a 100 percent Scandinavian population.” Much of the depiction was a product of language, which the Brainerd Dispatch shows great sensitivity to in a side bar reading, “Dey didn't show ya dis here really big watertower dat we're so attached ta in dat der movie, did dey?”

For Mahmoud, it’s not about sacrificing your native language. Instead it’s about gaining power through learning new dialects. Just as I am more effective if I know Chinese in China, I’ll be more effective in landing a job if I speak the dialect of a potential employer simply because I am communicating better.

Some of the work I do is in the field of education. The twist in thinking from, “this is the right and only way to communicate” (which rejects the students’ heritage, and hence their personal identities) to “people use many forms of language and the more you know the more powerful you’ll be” has profound implications. It’s interesting that young ESL students are often grouped with special education students. We treat them as needing remedial work. But in fact, they’re doing double the learning as native speakers, because they have to learn both the material and English at the same time. Instead of celebrating their dual language abilities, we punish them with inferior test and classroom grades. In fact, research is beginning to show that dual language speakers develop superior intellectual capacities as they mature.

I’ve noticed in my work with alternative school students that their writing is pretty dreadful by traditional standards—specifically, their grammar and spelling sucks. But their stories will tear your heart apart.

why is every little girls dream to become princess? No matter what color no matter rich or poor that seems to be every little girls dream. I used to always imagine I was the princess of the Ida B. Wells (that’s the name of the projects in Chicago that I grew up in) I use to stand between the orange poles (that’s where my throne was at) and imagine my prince charming was coming to take me away from my hell hole of a house. See my father was a well known drug dealer when I was born and by the time I was 5 we had lost everything dew to his full blow crack addiction...my mama spent her nights looking 4 him in the crack houses he use to own right on the rock block. When he wasn’t on the rock block he was stealing our TVs , vcr’s and ect. To provide for his problems.

If language is about communicating, surely this student has mastered a form of language, whether or not we approve of it. We often dump students with poor writing skills into the discard pile. They are made to feel “stupid” (their words, not mine). We fail with our own communication in helping them understand that language and writing are about power— it’s about developing the skills to thrive in a world of multiple dialects. Ultimately, they fail to master the language skills they need to prosper after high school.

Thanks Mahmoud! Hope I didn’t bastardize your elegant thinking too much.