Posted on 06/16/2005 8:59:45 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
New York moved to the forefront of the national standards movement in education during the 1990's when the State Board of Regents raised standards and required rigorous new tests for public school students. The policy is beginning to yield impressive results, especially in inner-city areas. But a bill in the State Legislature could strangle reforms by allowing some schools to evade rigorous state tests in favor of subjective evaluations that would make it impossible to judge student progress.
The bill, which has passed the Senate and is pending in the Assembly, would extend a temporary waiver that has allowed some schools to use so-called portfolio assessments - in which students are graded and evaluated based on papers, projects, book reports and other work performed over the course of the year. The bill would also require the State Department of Education to develop new portfolio systems that could be used by schools all over the state that wished to evade rigorous testing.
Before they jeopardize education reform, legislators should revisit a disturbing report issued a few years ago by a panel of education experts that evaluated the portfolio assessments used by the schools in the New York Performance Standard Consortium, a politically influential education group. The panel could find no evidence to support the claim that the consortium's schools were conforming to the state's learning standards or measuring student progress in any meaningful way.
Consortium supporters argue that the group's students are more likely to attend college, do better and so on. But the truth is that there are good alternative schools as well as dismal ones...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
New York Performance Standards Consortium
The Performance Standards Consortium is a network of 40 schools in New York that have agreed to use common performance assessment measures. Students at each of the schools complete four common tasks in order to graduate - a research paper, a science experiment, a mathematical analysis, and a literary analysis. Students must also present and defend their work before a graduation committee and successfully complete all coursework. (Each school has additional graduation requirements that are unique to the school.) Teachers at each school use the same rubrics to judge the quality of student work. Based on their common standards, these schools received a waiver from the New York state Regents' exams that are normally required for graduation. Although this waiver may be rescinded by a new state superintendent whose decision is currently being contested in court, this effort shows the potential for schools to work together to create authentic, standards-based assessment systems that are accepted by educational and political leaders.
I think the "portfolio assessment" schools are in the main trendy alternative schools that appeal to certain segments of the middle-class.
I wonder if "portfolio assessment" might mean more record keeping than teaching?
I'd suggest that the best reforms would happen by pushing it down to the grass roots level. Fer example, empower charter schools and vouchers. This would go a long way towards shaking and shaping up schools.
When kids grow up and out of highschool and go to work for somebody like me, they find that I don't use subjective standards to measure their work performance.
Some high school kids really do understand that...some never will.
I wonder if anyone has checked their results vs standardized tests to see if they reach the same conclusions. I'm guessing regular tests will yield the same results for the most part with a lot less trouble.
I wonder how many people read the paper on friday.
Here's a foolproof way to measure the relative quality of schools: privatize them all and see how much parents are willing to pay for each school.
It sounds like it. For sure it means more teachers. Maybe thats the point.
1994, RAND Corporation researcher Daniel Koretz, now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, released a report on portfolio assessment in Vermont that many experts say dampened enthusiasm for this method of grading. Koretz found that portfolio assessment was not all that useful in evaluating schools or students because one school might require one kind of project, another school quite a different one. It was difficult to compare their work and determine whether the standards were high enough. Teachers, Koretz found, also complained that portfolios were cutting into valuable teaching time. Math teachers, he wrote, “frequently noted that portfolio activities take time away from basic skills and computation, which still need attention.”
Koretz’s careful methodology and national reputation had an impact, but there were signs that portfolios were already losing ground. Around the same time as the report’s release, British prime minister John Major discarded the portfolio system that had been used for 20 years as the nation’s graduation exam in English. Dylan Wiliam, a British assessment expert who now works for ETS, said Major felt “that timed written examinations were the fairest way to assess achievement at the end of compulsory schooling.”
Most critics of portfolio assessment say they like the emphasis on demonstrated writing and oral skill, but have seen too many instances in which a refusal to give traditional tests of factual recall leads to charmingly written essays with little concrete information to support their arguments.
Great information!!! Thank you!!!
There are a lot of high schools in NYC where the kids study highly specialized skills, such as acting, graphic design, etc. as core disciplines. The portfolio testing might work in these instances.
Why didn't you post this as an editorial, which it happens to be? The usual meathead editorial is advocating standards in education. Maybe the end is near?
FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.
Everything I post there gets removed, so I do not bother. I leave it up to those reading to move articles if they so choose.
I know what you mean. It has to have the right topic and title. I asked the admin moderator to hang this editorial in the editorial sidebar, but no go. I placed Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out in the editorial sidebar. I was surprised to find out that it was reclassified as chat. Here's the concluding paragraphs which are the take home point.
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.
So I'm inclined to think the admin moderators do not read the entire article and make snap judgments, or they just don't like the source.
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