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January 12, 2009 09:32 PM UTC
27 Comments
because of test prep, and the importance of ACT and CSAP scores. Teachers are forced to prepare the kids for a test, and not college.
If you want kids ready for college, stop using high risk tests to determine funding. It’s that simple.
Even if I’m wrong, and the test prep isn’t what is doing it, then at the very least these test scores show that CSAP is a miserable failure. Do away with it, and I guarantee the curriculum will be better for it.
We need data and facts, obviously the HighEd crowd has these … 50%+ of DPS grads need remedial college work.
Of note, I believe the SAT and ACT are required for college entrance.
So the kids who are going to college are going to take them anyway. They are not a determination of performance in college.
The skills that these kids need do not come from CSAP–the test on which the curriculum is currently based. Obviously you can test these kids, but don’t tie funding into it, because the teachers are then pressed to make sure the kids do well on the test.
These kids are trying to go to college, not pass the damn test so the administration will have enough money to make sure the school stays open.
The entire culture of our public school system in this state is not about preparing kids for college. The entire culture, from when the kids are in 1st grade, all the way until they graduate, is based on doing well on that test.
If you want kids to be prepared for college, then make them learn things because it will prepare them to succeed when they go on to college. We have had 10+ years of this crap, and it’s obviously not working. Our schools are getting worse, and the kids are the ones suffering.
For all the hype that testing gets as a culprit in taking time away from “real” education, there is little to suggest that this is really true.
Extremely unsafe chaotic school situations are bad for kids. School situations that require involved parents and demand far more in time and personal engagement in personal change from kids than the traditional curriculum with a specially hypes and focused set of teachers (a la the KIPP program) can make a positive difference if it is sustained.
Absent the extremes at this top and bottom 2-3% or so of cases, academic outcomes are stunningly indifferent to process inputs like testing, teacher experience and education, teacher pay, student-teacher ratio, principal experience and curriculum and the like. In contrast, outcomes are extremely sensitive to student demographics and factors like absenteeism rates, frequency of school changes, and English as a Second Language rates. Also, deviations from what socio-economic factors would predict are often quite stable for individual students.
If public schools are to have a leveling impact, we need to recognize that it takes far more intense intervention (at great expense) to bring students in poor communities up to the level that we achieve in middle class communities with far more modest, less intrusive instructional programs.
Well they are teaching them to the SAT and ACT from day one. Their whole goal is to get as many kids into top colleges as possible and that is test scores, test scores, & test scores.
THe trick is not to stop teaching to the test. The trick is to design the test so teaching to the test gives a kid the education they need. For example, testing that they can do basic math – that is a skill that is needed and so teaching to the test is spot on.
Of course college entrance test scores are important. My previous comment sort of came off like I was saying SAT and ACT scores don’t matter–they do.
What I am struggling to understand is how CSAP is preparing these kids for college. It’s the current system of school accountability, and it’s obviously failing. Your solution is to teach more to the test, which I disagree with, but can we both agree that the current system is a failure? Colorado, like many other states, has been a victim of No Child Left Behind.
Let’s hope we can come up with a better system soon–because the pass-through system of sending kids off to college who are ill-prepared for it is only going to make college more like high school.
Wonder why that is?
It’s not because teachers are experts on education. And it’s not because they care about kids.
It’s all about teachers.
I really really hate to do so, even a little bit.
But I think NCLB and CSAP have been successful. They aren’t perfect, but they’re a big improvement. And if you talk to educators who are focused on helping the kids and they trust you to keep it off the record – they will tell you that CSAP has been the biggest help in the last 40 years for poor kids.
We need to improve the system. We need to improve the tests. But the basic approach is good.
If 50% of kids are going back for remedial classes or summer school, or are grossly unprepared for college–it’s anything but a success.
It is very very slow and difficult, but we are seeing some improvement. And even more important, the CSAPs have school districts focused on trying to figure out how to improve. They aren’t very good at it – yet, but this will force them to find approaches that do raise the results.
About 1/3 of our marketing budget is measuring the effect of the other 2/3s. Now if I knew what worked, I could spend all of the budget on marketing. But it requires constant ongoing measurement to determine what is working and adjust. Schools need to do the same.
Private college prep K-12 works mostly by excluding kids who aren’t easy to teach. They’ve learned “standard English” by osmosis, and simply empirically will pick up a great deal so long as conditions don’t absolutely suck.
I mean that we need more non-college prep and that it would take ten hours a day, six days a week, plus home time, and a huge focus on habit issues like how to participate in class and a willingness to submit to becoming linguistically “upper middle class white” as a native language for years, at something like triple or more the cost of regular schooling, before ordinary academic instruction would produce the results that it does will middle class kids.
A 9 a.m. – 3 p.m., 180 day a year, fairly passive “here’s the information, take it if you feel like it” approach, which we use now, without more, is doomed with students who are already testing at the first grade level or below in third grade. A small percentage will still thrive with this option, but only a small percentage.
I’m not sure that it is workable and desirable to do this (which would amount to cultural extermination) but that is something close to work it would take to really secure the every kid is college ready result in real life.
Yes the school can just coast and only those who are very self-motivated will make it out. But the school can also work very hard, as some do, and they can get a lot more into college.
I would much prefer that teaching inputs made more of a difference than a mountain of educational testing has shown. It would make all sorts of common sense and validate the work being done.
Obviously, there are a certain amount of educational activities from teachers and principals that are necessary to achieve any results. But, there appears to be a big middle ground where empirically there appears to be only a very weak, second or third order relationship between results and teaching inputs.
The results, at least at the school site level (which causes the law of averages to wipe out some individual teacher excellence), does little to support that conclusion.
My teaching experience involves Master’s Degree students and working professionals.
I very much agree with this. What is said is that teachers ruin their arguments and reputations by denying the benefits of teaching to tests.
The problem is that it is politically incorrect to discuss the impact of demographics on a school’s performance. Politicians and administrators just won’t touch it.
The question is, how can policy makers and administrators be allowed to deal with the real issues of students’ raw skills, home lives, role models at home, parental guidance?
Why can’t they be allowed to point out that some people never will succeed in college but they can be great workers and citizens doing what their natural talents allow them to do?
I just think the debates about education are so intellectually vapid and dishonest, which is why they seldom produce positive results for students.
Test prep makes kids learn. Teachers don’t want to do the work and don’t want to be held accountable.
To adults, the teachers look and sound so k12.
You can blame the teachers all day, but the system around which school funding is based has consistently failed since it was implemented.
Come on. AS has presented the facts with logic, even David agrees.
Four years post Bennets arrival, a Dem legislature and Amendment 23 we have a district that can’t deliver. That is some record of reform!
Nor have I ever. I actually don’t get paid by anyone to write anything–which is more than I can say for you.
At any rate, the people who are trying to reform the system have their hands tied because the entire system is built around a test that has failed the students it was trying to help.
…oh I forgot the sole variable for the failure of P-12 is the CSAP.
I wish Ewegen was still here so he could bitch slap you.
Homeschoolers don’t take the CSAP, you have alternatives and choice!
However, not using public schools does fore go access to the education tax credit known as free public school.
Denying a diploma to every kid who wasn’t college ready would do more harm than good in this era of inflated diploma awarding. It would signal that those who didn’t get diplomas were less competent than they were. Basically, is you show up regularly and make a good faith effort, you get a diploma in almost any public HS in the U.S.
About half of those not college ready are simply a math class behind. They have finished Alg I and Alg II and geometry, but not Trig or Pre-Calculus because they started behind schedule. The rest are further behind.
The notion offered by Schoales that money spent educating kids who don’t graduate college ready is money wasted is sophistry. Most of the HS dropouts have been writing on the wall for many years before the dropouts enter HS and only happen then because that is when the truancy laws permit it. And, not every HS student is college bound (or should be).
Yes there is an intense socio-economic/ethnic achievement gap at DPS. But, that gap is more or less constant from the first time that it is measured in a way accessible to the general public, in 3rd grade CSAPs, to HS graduation, indeed, it declines slightly at some points. But, the theory that simply providing the same educational opportunities to everyone will lead to significant social mobility is empirically false.
Offering all true educational opportunity is a clear path to social mobility. To see it in a country-wide basis, look at Taiwan or South Korea. To see it in a school, look at the inner city schools that send most/all of their kids on to college.
Education is the only way to provide social mobility on a large basis.
That more intensive intervention is needed toward the bottom of the achievement curve?
are not graduating as many kids from high school, and send far fewer kids to college than the U.S.
Both societies also lack the depth of poverty that we do.
There are 2-3% of schools (D’Evelyn is one, and there are a handful of others) that are rpoducing college bound kids, but they are doing it by having students and parents and the schools put radically more in than public schools do or are permitted to do now, and there is some admission/expulsion weeding involved.
While it can be achieved, it means spending massively more on kids who are behind in resources and expecting much more time and attitude commitment, than we do now.
If we want to spend $18,000 per kid on innner city schools and revamp that curriculum radically, there can be that kind of result. But, the social mobility impact of mere “equal” educational opportunity is vastly overrated based on the empirical evidence.
If we want kids to have an equal chance of going to college, we have to devote much, much more efford at K-12 to developing the options of those who are behind and it will come with lots of disappointments.
… I laugh then throw-up.
A future Penny Parker column: Heard at the Obama inauguration. “Oh is that the famous Michael Bennet who ran the world beating public school district in Denver?” “No, he lead the “50%+ of graduates need remedial education district”, you know the one that graduates less then 50% of minorities.”