California Dumbs Down Tests

When it comes to education trends, as California goes, so goes the nation. Which is all the more reason to be concerned about the latest effort in California to dumb down standards. The University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has launched another salvo in its long-running war against the SAT, the test used by many colleges and universities to assess academic achievement among high school seniors. This is only the latest in a series of moves by BOARS against the SAT, but this one may be a stalking horse to eliminate standardized tests in general, especially if they conflict with the goal of promoting racial and ethnic diversity.

BOARS has already eliminated a requirement that University of California applicants take at least two subject-matter tests in addition to the SAT Reasoning Test. Now BOARS is taking aim at the SAT directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS' own report notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing principles it promulgated and that the new test "adds significant gains in predictive power of first year grades at UC." Nonetheless, BOARS is now recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT.

Both tests have been accepted for more than 30 years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report, it's hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized testing in general.

As numerous studies and the raw data on test scores have shown, performance on standardized tests varies not just between individuals but also between different racial and ethnic groups. In general, black and Latino students perform less well as a group than do white and Asian students. Since BOARS is committed to boosting the number of black and Latino students admitted to the UC system, standardized tests that do not produce politically correct results are a problem. It's not too far-fetched to wonder whether BOARS' effort to discourage students from taking the SAT may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.

But getting rid of standardized tests is not the way to solve the problem of underperforming black and Latino students. Standardized tests, whether they be the SAT or state tests taken to assess elementary and secondary school performance required by the No Child Left Behind Act, merely document the skills gap that exists between whites and Asians on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. The answer isn't fixing the tests to produce more even results between racial groups but improving the skills of those students who lag behind.

In 1996, voters in California did away with racial preferences in college admissions to state schools by enacting Proposition 209. Since then, many administrators in the UC system have tried to figure out a backdoor way to boost admissions of blacks and Latinos to the university's flagship schools, UC Berkley and UCLA. What they've failed to notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels when racial preferences were common. The students now enrolled under more race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses where they couldn't compete with their peers because their grades and test scores were substantially lower.

Eliminating standardized tests or dumbing down their contents doesn't help anyone. It simply sweeps evidence of academic disparities under the rug, where they can't be dealt with. If California really wants to improve education for all its students, it will work to keep high standards in place and encourage students to test what they have learned. California students prefer the SAT to other standardized tests, judging by the numbers who take this test now. BOARS' job should be to encourage students to make their own choices about which test they prefer, not to pick one test over another -- but most of all not to discourage the use of standardized tests altogether in the hopes of promoting greater diversity.

GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS THEN AND NOW

Dick Bachert

Note added 2-2010:
My point in this is to simply highlight the deterioration in the system since I went through it. The ONLY way to turn this around is to do the very thing upon which Ronald Reagan campaigned: ABOLISH THE “PROGRESSIVE” INFESTED DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION and eliminate its forced homogenization – and socialization — of curricula throughout the nation.

There is no way to get this nation back with the government schools cranking out thousands of new little progressives each year. That process made a Barack Obama INEVITABLE. Unless we make substantive changes, WORSE outcomes await our grandchildren.

The schools in America must be returned to the parents and the local communities who have always come together to instruct and nurture their youth without help from an all-powerful, “all-knowing” national government.

Comes now the spectacle of this effort by the educrats in NC to expunge American history before 1870 or so. While their stated goal is to streamline the subject, it’s more likely that they wish to keep their charges from understanding that this nation was born in armed revolution and we fought a nasty war between 1861 and 1865, ostensibly over slavery, but which actually had its roots in the abuse and hypocritical commercial exploitation by one area (the North, where much of the financing of slavery was based) of another (the South).
DB

“GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS THEN AND NOW” VIDEO AT:
(For those with poor eyesight or suffering TV induced “SASS” or Short Attention Span Syndrome)

(Time: 5 ½ minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Abraham Lincoln
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community’.”
Adolph Hitler Speech November 1933
Until the decent, traditional values folk rise up and clean up the freaking government schools, nothing else we do will make much difference.
I am a product of the government schools (GS). I graduated from high school in 1957 and was exposed to several hundred teachers. Most were dedicated professionals. And I can STILL name the EXCEPTIONAL ones.

Edna Kleinmeyer who didn’t just teach English: She imbued us with a love of language I carry to this day. It was Ms. Kleinmeyer who told me I had a gift for writing;

Charlie Kluckholn, the tough old wrestling coach who taught chemistry and gave me some of the best advice I had received to that time;

Charles Huffman, the homeroom teacher who helped me over a very rough spot in my life;

Franklin Jefferis, a “lowly” shop teacher, whose love of a job well done was wordlessly communicated to his kids in thousands of subtle ways. Mr. Jefferis died soon after I graduated. One October night, I “visited” him – alone — at the funeral home and wept as I thanked him one last time.

But the current GS are radically different from the system through which I passed 50 years ago. Know that my concern and hostility are NOT directed at those who still TEACH — really teach, really want the best EDUCATION for the kids, want to prepare them academically for the future.

Those feelings are reserved for SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS who have socialist/collectivist agendas or quietly acquiesce to the agendas imposed on them from above. They know that what is going on is wrong, but say nothing lest they jeopardize their careers. Author Thomas Sowell calls these folks “the anointed.” And as the title of his book on the subject, “The Vision of The Anointed,” indicates, they HAVE a vision!

That it is NOT the PARENTS’ vision is of no concern to them.

When my kids were still in the GS, my wife and I were quite active. The Principal of their elementary school chose me to represent the school in something called the LSAC (Local School Advisory Committee) program. I attended several meetings held at the County Board of Education headquarters. I came away from the VERY FIRST of those meetings with these impressions:

1. Those folks DID NOT speak English. Through tight little smirks clearly indicative of the low esteem, indeed, contempt, they had for the uninformed and ignorant gaggle of parents arrayed before them, they spoke in buzz words and technobabble code only they comprehended. At one point — to the visible relief of the other parents — I stopped one woman’s presentation and asked for a translation of what she’d said. She was NOT pleased!

2. They DID NOT want parents involved! Cookie sales and PTA? OK. Serious criticism of a course or textbook? Verboten! Your option was private or parochial school. There very little home schooling then.

3. Most of these people MAY have once been educators. They were now bureaucrats guarding their turf.

4. Many of those administrative folks were making over $50K and, though I looked for signs of it, I saw little evidence of anything resembling “work.” And this was 20 years ago when the average classroom teacher earned less than $25K.

5. There were WAY too many administrators in the GS. It is a perfect opportunity to provide make-work sinecures for “anointed” members of the educational fraternity. Four years as an Air Force instructor taught me how to spot the signs.

Here’s the “bottom line:” Simply hurling more money into the black hole of the GS WILL NOT WORK. Most of that money will NEVER get to the classroom or into the pockets of DESERVING teachers who actually TEACH. And teach what any sensible human being – REGARDLESS of race, faith or ethnicity — instinctively understands to be correct, morally defensible material.

Bush is right about one thing: We need accountability! Perhaps you recall Clinton’s asinine plan to send 100,000 PAID Americorps “volunteers” into the grade schools to TEACH KIDS TO READ. Why hadn’t their PREVIOUS teachers – OR THEIR PARENTS! — taught them to perform that rather basic skill???

Think about what you just read as YOUR local government schools continue to raise YOUR property taxes.

Another encounter with “The System”
In 1978, my wife and I came to know a young woman named Patty. She
was a devoutly religious young mother who’d become more devout when her
husband and father of her two small sons aged 2 and 6 informed her that he
was leaving. In dire economic straits, I offered to let her stay in our
former home in Chamblee — which was not rented at the time – rent-free until she got back on her feet. She had been clandestinely home schooling the 6 year
old for about 2 years using very well done Christian course materials from
an organization in Texas the name of which escapes me. The lad had recently been tested and had placed at least a year ABOVE his chronological age. As required by the government school authorities at the time, she dutifully apprised the authorities of his scores.

For reasons which would become clear in a moment, Patty had been harassed by the DeKalb County school authorities for about 6 months and, by the time she moved into the Chamblee house, had been — unbeknownst to us — ORDERED to put the 6 year old into the nearest government elementary school or suffer the consequences. Because she wanted the boys to be educated Christians, there was no way she was going to do that and she told them so.

At approximately 2 am one morning, a loud knock on the door announced the
arrival of the aforementioned “consequences.”

Dressed only in a nightgown, she was confronted by several burly police officers who thrust an arrest warrant in her face. With the now awakened 6 year old watching and the 2 year old wailing in the other room, she was handcuffed and led out the door to jail. She was tossed into a large cell with a couple of hookers and a junkie who spent much of the rest of that morning vomiting in the corner. The two young boys for whom the educational authorities professed such great concern were just left AT THE HOUSE — ALONE! Patty was later told that the bureaucrats from Children Services who were SUPPOSED to accompany the cops were late and, in their haste to get this dangerous miscreant behind bars, the cops just missed the fact that the Children Services people were, well, missing. The CS folks showed up an hour later to find two terrified kids, one of whom had just seen his mother hauled off in cuffs.

Patty was ultimately brought to trial under the Georgia Truancy Statutes. Her pro-bono attorney tore the school authorities to shreds and hers has been called THE case that opened the floodgates to home schooling in Georgia. Once they had all the facts, the jury didn’t take long to acquit her. I’m proud to have played a small part in that.

At Patty’s trial, a previously overlooked aspect of the government schools was put into sharp focus for those paying attention: The Director of Instruction for DeKalb County testified that the then current 7 hour school day consisted of an average of approximately 3 hours or less of instruction. At that time, Patty was devoting 4 to 5 hours a day to direct instruction.

He also as much as admitted that the REAL reason they wanted ALL these kids in school was the $3,000.00 per kid per year (I’m sure that number is higher in 2001!) they then got from the state and federal government. Empty seats = lost funds. As in most things, follow the money.

Patty home schooled these two boys through high school.

And how did the boys turn out?

One is now a physician and the other a budding journalist.

But that now seems to be the norm for the growing legions of home schooled kids – which most likely explains why the NEA and the government school folks feel justifiably threatened. And home-schooled kids routinely win national academic competitions.

One of Reagan’s key platform planks was to dismantle the horribly misnamed Department of Education (the Department of Educational MEDIOCRITY would be more descriptive). When he got to Washington, his effort was defeated by the NEA and the federal educrats. Reagan’s 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” declared that if a foreign power had done to government schools what was been done to it by the establishment bureaucrats and teachers’ unions, we would have CONSIDERED IT AN ACT OF WAR!

Sadly, that war goes on – and our kids and the future of this nation are the casualties. Barack Obama is a direct manifestation of how badly America has lost that war and how effectively generations of kids have been indoctrinated.

Thomas Jefferson believed an EDUCATED PUBLIC to be the cornerstone of the system he and the other Founders TRIED to leave behind. He would NOT, I feel certain, be a big fan of the current government education system. If he returned today, he’d home school just as he did before.

And here’s something else to think about: Nothing else we do to try to turn this country away from the Marxist path Obama and his mendacious minions have set us upon will count for much until we clean the utopian leftist idiots out of the system and insist that our kids learn the natural laws and how the physical world works. And putting a condom over a cucumber or the PC definition of hate speech is NOT real learning. The kids in China, India and elsewhere are learning reading, math, physics, chemistry, etc. Until we do that, there’s no way the America envisioned by the Founders can be restored. We simply cannot compete with millions of new young socialists coming on the scene each year.

GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS THEN AND NOW VIDEO AT:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U

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