By Tom
I was sitting at home the other day, perusing the Spokesman-Review, and I came across an interesting editorial, criticizing Randy Dorn's recent proposal to make the state math test more reasonable. You can read it yourself, but here's the money quote:
"The state will only institute math and science requirements after it’s been demonstrated that a higher percentage can pass. This is like watching high jump practice and then deciding where to place the bar so that most competitors will clear it. When the consistent message is that the state will call off accountability, then it’s impossible to gauge students’ best efforts."
When I read this, I thought to myself, "Isn't that exactly how a high jump competition is supposed to run?" I mean, like most Americans, I only catch snippets of high jumping every four years, so I'm no expert, but that seems like the way I remember it. So I looked it up, and found that:
"In a competition, the bar is initially set at a relatively low height, and is moved upward in set increments ... The competitor who clears the highest jump is declared the winner."
That sounds right. You set the bar low and then raise it until only one jumper is left. But unlike a high jump event, our goal in education is not to designate a single winner. Despite the fact that you hear it all the time, high jump competitions are a really bad metaphor for educational standards and assessments. So I decided to find a better one.
I turned first to the medical community. We've all taken eye exams, and we're familiar with the fact that if
you can read the fourth line from the bottom, your eyes are fine. If you can't, then you should consider corrective lenses. So if we wanted to improve Vision In America, could we simply raise the standard by lowering the line? Require people to read the third line from the bottom? No, because first of all, it's unnecessary. People who can read the fourth line up can also see and respond to street signs, they can recognize faces from across a room and they can watch a ballgame in a bar and know what the score is. They don't really need better vision. And besides, eye exams measure something intrinsic. The only way to achieve better vision is to get glasses. Or squint. Educational assessments, on the other hand, measure something that we can actually change with more or better education. Raising the standards works, as long as you also do something to raise the capacity of the students who need to meet those standards. So the eye-exam metaphor doesn't work, either.
So it was on to the DMV. That's where you go to take your driver's test. Surely I could learn something about raising educational standards from these people. So what would we do if we wanted to improve Driving In America? Couldn't we just create a tougher drivers' test? But when I thought about it, I realized that the problem with most drivers isn't that they lack the capacity to drive well, it's their lack of attention to the task of driving. Making the test harder would do nothing to address that. In fact, when I remember my own driver's test, it seemed like the actual driving was the easy part. It was the extra, silly stuff that made it hard. Things like backing around a corner. The only way to make a drivers' test harder would be to add on seldom-used tasks like that. Like maybe launching a boat down a ramp. That's the last thing we need in education. Another bad metaphor.
Then it hit me. Swimming! Every spring we take our students down to the local pool to go swimming. Not because it targets any of the state standards, but because it's fun to go swimming in the spring with
your friends. And the first thing the lifeguards do, after they explain all the rules, is give the kids a swimming test. They have a rope that separates the shallow end from the deep end. If you want to swim in the deep end, you have to swim across the deep end, under the observation of a lifeguard. That's the test. If you can do it, they'll let you swim there. If you can't, they fish you out with a long pole and make you stay in the shallow end. It's that simple. It's an assessment that no one can argue with. And it's in the best interest of everyone involved to uphold the standard and score the assessment accurately. The perfect metaphor.
That's the way our state math assessments should be. They should figure out exactly what mathematical concepts and knowledge a person living in this country, right now, should possess. And after they teach those things they should test the students on them. No more talk about raising or lowering the bar. That doesn't help. We have a state math test which only 45% of our high school kids can pass. And the test has math material that people can function just fine without knowing. What we need to do is get a bunch of math teachers and a bunch of people who use math outside of high school all together in a room and let them figure out what the test should look like. And then tell the kids what's on the test. And then teach them.
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Coupla Things:
-Kristin, you're absolutely right. When they first rolled out the WASL, it was supposed to have been regularly reviewed and recalibrated. That doesn't seem to be happening.
-No, Bob; I have no intention of convening the meeting that I so rightously declared needs to be convened. I'll designate Brian as my proxy. He's everything I'm not; he teaches high school, he's worked outside of school and he pays attention during meetings.
This is an awesome post, Tom. This perspective makes so much sense...and at times there is so little out there that makes sense, it seems.
Are you announcing, Tom, that you will be calling a meeting of your proposed math standards group and submitting the results for public policy consideration? You never know who might read it and find it useful for adjusting ed policy.
Great job on the high jump theory. High jumping rules are meant to thin the field, but in education we can't continue to thin the field by telling kids they didn't meet standards so they're done and telling schools they didn't meet standards so they're going to lose out on much-needed resources.
In the early days, when our state assessment was in its piloting years, they analyzed the test, student scores, and got teacher feedback about what was realistic and what wasn't. That seems to have fallen away and now the test has been stagnant for awhile and, after years of kids failing to meet standards, they're trying to start over.
I agree that we need to keep an assessment, and that it's okay to teach to the assessment if it's assessing necessary skills. The reading and writing WASLs (Washington's NCLB swim test) are actually pretty good, except that they're useless for a teacher who wants the opportunity to use the information to improve a child's skills because we never see their test, and by the time the test is scored the child has moved on. The reading and writing WASLs work hard to prevent a gap in one skill from affecting a child's communication of another skill. A child's writing is not assessed on the reading test, and the writing test doesn't depend on the ability to read.
What I've seen from proctering the math and science test is that they are assessing more than math and science, and I'm sure our state test isn't the only one with that problem. There is clear disconnect, in Washington State, between what a child needs to learn to be a functioning member of society, what is taught in the district-mandated curriculum and what is assessed as the state standard. And we shouldn't be testing "College Readiness" in tenth grade. For reasons I am not going to go into, because they're pretty obvious, that swim test should be determined by the Universities in a child's senior year.
I liked this! Can I use it in this week's EduCarnival?