LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

New Analysis of Dropouts

There were stories in newspapers across the country yesterday about an Associated Press/Johns Hopkins University analysis of Department of Education data about high school completion rates. The term the Johns Hopkins researcher uses for schools that graduate fewer than sixty percent of their freshman class is "dropout factory," which newspaper headline writers love. You can read the AP story here and see an interactive map that shows where the schools are located here.  (Wouldn't it be nice if the people who write such stories and do research like this actually visited the schools they're labeling?)

Why Current Assessment Practices Don't Promote Learning

Assessment expert Richard Stiggins writes about "Five Assessment Myths and Their Consequences" in Education Week.  Most of the readers of Language Arts-New Mexico already know these things, based on their experience in classrooms.  How do we get politicians and policy-makers to understand?

Five Assessment Myths and Their Consequences

By Rick Stiggins

America has spent 60 years building layer upon layer of district, state, national, and international assessments at immense cost—and with little evidence that our assessment practices have improved learning. True, testing data have revealed achievement problems. But revealing problems and helping fix them are two entirely different things.

As a member of the measurement community, I find this legacy very discouraging. It causes me to reflect deeply on my role and function. Are we helping students and teachers with our assessment practices, or contributing to their problems?

My reflections have brought me to the conclusion that assessment’s impact on the improvement of schools has been severely limited by several widespread but erroneous beliefs about what role it ought to play. Here are five of the most problematic of these assessment myths:

Myth 1: The path to school improvement is paved with standardized tests.

Evidence of the strength of this belief is seen in the evolution, intensity, and immense investment in our large-scale testing programs. We have been ranking states on the basis of average college-admission-test scores since the 1950s, comparing schools based on districtwide testing since the 1960s, comparing districts based on state assessments since the 1970s, comparing states based on national assessment since the 1980s, and comparing nations on the basis of international assessments since the 1990s. Have schools improved as a result?

The problem is that once-a-year assessments have never been able to meet the information needs of the decisionmakers who contribute the most to determining the effectiveness of schools: students and teachers, who make such decisions every three to four minutes. The brief history of our investment in testing outlined above includes no reference to day-to-day classroom assessment, which represents 99.9 percent of the assessments in a student’s school life. We have almost completely neglected classroom assessment in our obsession with standardized testing. Had we not, our path to school improvement would have been far more productive.

Read the rest here.

Testing for Dollars

They're paying students for getting high scores on the AP exams in New York City.  From the NY Times:

October 15, 2007

Making Cash a Prize for High Scores on Advanced Placement Tests

 

By Jennifer Medina

 

The city is expanding the use of cash rewards for students who take standardized tests with a $1 million effort financed by philanthropists who will pay students who do well on Advanced Placement exams.

High school students who get a top score, a five, on the exams will earn $1,000. A score of four will be worth $750, while a three will earn $500.

The program, which will be in 25 public schools and six private ones beginning this year, is enthusiastically supported by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who is expected at the announcement of the initiative today at Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem. In a statement, Mr. Klein said he was “grateful” that the private group was “stepping up to tackle the critical goal of increasing the number of students who succeed on Advanced Placement tests.”

Read the rest here. 

 

Is the Sun Setting on the SAT?

Just a few years ago it was hard to imagine the SAT ever disappearing, but lately it seems as though its days might be numbered.  From Education Week:

College-Admissions Group Weighs Calls to Dump SAT
By Scott J. Cech
Austin, Texas

A special commission of the National Association for College Admission Counseling studying the use of standardized admissions tests didn’t call for the expulsion of the SAT at the association’s annual meeting here last week, but it’s clear the 81-year-old exam would not be voted “most popular” either.

In a session billed as a “listening meeting” of the commission, which is chaired by Harvard University’s dean of admissions and financial aid, more than 100 high school counselors and college-admissions officers packed a standing-roomonly meeting room to listen and voice thoughts about the validity and usefulness of admissions tests.

On the subject of the SAT, though, most of the speakers differed mainly on whether they wanted to see the SAT made optional or replaced altogether.

Read the rest here. 

Letters About Literature

Once again this year The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and the Target Corporation are sponsoring the "Letters about Literature Contest."   To enter the competition, "readers [in grades 4 through 12] write a personal letter to an author, living or dead, from any genre-- fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or classic, explaining how that author's work changed the student's way of thinking about the world or themselves."  You can find more information about the contest, rules, and a teacher's guide here. Submission deadline is December 14, 2007.  (If you check the 2007 state winners you'll see that New Mexico was the ONLY STATE that had no winner for last year.  We think that means NO ONE ENTERED.  Looks like an opening for writers from our state.)