Public schools see paradox of lower funding, higher test scores

Sacramento Bee ^ | 7/2/11 | Diana Lambert and Phillip Reese

[Eva]

I’ll never forget my seventh grade science teacher, a young man not very long out of college. I was in a higher class, (we were all tracked), but no one did very well on the first test because we had never learned how to study for a test. So, this young man ran after school classes teaching us how to study and then ran a study class after school before every test, all on his own time.

When was the last time that you ever saw a teacher do something like that?

[Bob]

Teaching to the test is a perfectly legitimate method of covering the material.

I disagree - It's not a legitimate method when the teacher has prior knowledge as to what's going to be asked on the test. Tests can only be written to evaluate students on a portion of their coursework. Trying to do anything more would be unworkable; there's just too much material to test on all of it.

When a teacher knows beforehand which areas are going to be tested and which ones aren't (or worse, knows what the questions will be), everything that's not on the test will be given short shrift (or not taught at all) as the teacher prepares the students for taking that test. A different test on the same subject matter would be a disaster grade-wise since the students have only been taught what will be on the test rather than what's in the entire coursework.

[muawiyah]

We don't know that. This is just California ~

BTW, "teaching to the test" does cover all the material anyway. After all "the test" gets changed all the time, and that doesn't matter what test you are talking about.

Remedial courses are needed at the college level to make up for specific deficiencies ~ for instance there's the boy who played football ~ he wants to be an engineer. Now he needs to take those higher level math courses.

Girls are no problem. They got in all the AP courses anyway ~ they're better behaved eh.

[muawiyah]

Your typical Sigma 6 quality audit is actually an open book sort of thing where all the answers are known beforehand, and the audit is actually scheduled so nobody is surprised.

The idea is simple ~ if they can't pass that, what about when no one is looking!

Whether or not the answers are secret, or written on the blackboard, you can readily determine whether or not a "group' was prepared by taking a look at the results on the test ~ there should, of course, be NO wrong answers. One wrong answer proves the preparation was not suitible.

Teachers always imagine there's supposed to be some sort of continuum of abilities reflected in more or fewer right answers. The cold hard facts are that QUANTUM approaches to evaluating quality of teaching are more useful. If you let one kid post a wrong answer, you failed!

[Eva]

The teachers don’t know the specific questions, they just know the type of question and the previous questions.

Professional boards are done the same way. The prep courses give out old tests, the students answer all the questions on all the old tests and study them. Almost all the questions can be found on one of the old tests.

If they really wanted to test the students and not the teachers, they would be using something like the IOWA test that you can’t prepare for.

[Bob]

Remedial courses are needed at the college level to make up for specific deficiencies ~ for instance there's the boy who played football ~ he wants to be an engineer. Now he needs to take those higher level math courses.

You're kidding, right? If the need for remedial instruction were as limited as that, it could easily be taken care of with private tutoring. Instead, colleges have multiple class sections teaching their students what they should have learned in high school.

Cal State to Require Remedial Courses Before Freshman Year

March 18, 2010, 1:48 pm

California State University will require academically deficient students to take remedial mathematics and English classes before starting their freshman year, the San Jose Mercury News reported today. The policy, which will take effect in 2012, aims to reduce the amount of time students spend on noncredit remedial work once they arrive at college, a process that often lengthens their undergraduate years. Roughly 60 percent of Cal State’s new freshmen are judged deficient in English, math, or both.

Source: CSU and remedial instruction

[Gabz]

When was the last time that you ever saw a teacher do something like that?

My daughter's math teacher did that this past year, and my understanding is he has always done it. He does it because he is teaching 8th grade math to 7th graders, but they still have to know the 7th grade math because that is what the standardized test is about. He offers the extra classes to them as insurance, I guess. They all obviously did well enough with 6th grade math to just skip the 7th grade class.

[muawiyah]

Hmm ~ Cal State ~ deficiencies ~ that's a huge college system.

I never had a deficiency in math or english so I can't quite relate to that, but it's probably the Oriental kids on the english part and the rest of them on the math.

Probably ought to start English Lit and Algebra by 8th grade you know. Get the deficiencies out of the way before they graduate.

[Carry_Okie]

Where is the other $100,000 per classroom being spent each year?

One third of the total never leaves Sacramento. The system is that top-heavy.

[hinckley buzzard]

So what makes you think teachers who would "teach to the test" now, weren't doing that all along? That is a fraudulent phoney baloney excuse and a red herring. We had tests in the fifties and sixties--every year, mandated by the State. Nobody talked about "teaching to the tests" then, but we did well enough that years later in the seventies they had to dumb down the SAT by ten or fifteen percent just so you slackers could keep up on paper.

Teachers are not the only problem, but the lethal failing of teachers as a group is that they waste their time in education colleges, the nearest thing real universities have to matchbook cover vocational schools, with an "education major," a pseudo field with no knowledge base, and no methodology:

In short, you can't teach what you don't know, and you can't do what you don't know how to do.

Fifty years ago teachers generally were serious adults, and had a foundation of professional attitude: not over-sexed twenty-something bimboes looking for a hot kid.

More money can only make these shortcomings worse as it attracts incompetents like flies to honey.

[Eva]

I missed seventh grade math, myself, never learned how to do square roots.

[Scotswife]

“You don’t need to be a teacher to devise a test that can determine if a subject has been learned.”

That’s true - however, if you do not have experience with certain age groups, the phrasing of the questions can create confusion for the kids.
If the test is a “good” test - there is no problem.

“They don’t need to be related. If the curriculum says that A, B, and C are to be taught, a test writer can create test questions that can determine if the students have learned A, B, and C.”

It is beneficial to have consistency, and consistency will improve if the curriculum supports the test - and the test reflects the curriculum.
When you see a high percentage of kids missing the same question, and you hear the teachers say, “that wasn’t even in the curriculum,” then you probably have a questionable test.
It doesn’t happen all the time - but it does happen.

“The questions should vary sufficiently from one year to the next so that teachers can only get a general idea as to the areas to be tested, not the specific questions to be asked.”

Well sure - that is what is happening. I haven’t heard of teachers being given questions beforehand.

[boop]

When I was in med school, we had old tests to use as a learning tool. They mixed up and wrote entirely new questions for the current class. It was very helpful to learn what they were looking for, and not waste our precious time on subjects that weren’t going to be asked anyway. We did have a lazy pathology prof who wouldn’t let us have old tests, because he used the exact same questions every year. He let us look at the test after it was over, so we’d know what questions we missed and could bone up on weak areas. But it was posted on a bulletin board, behind locked glass, lest anyone make a copy.

[newzjunkey]

We have English emersion in CA thanks to a voter initiative in 1998.

At this point nearly every student graduating, having attended CA schools, will have been taught under those rules. That has to help.

[newzjunkey]

Test scores are going up because the teachers are teaching to the tests, thanks to No Child Left Behind.

Is the problem with the state-created tests? Are they able to "game the system" in a way the test questions fail to be randomized, comprehensive and secret until taken?

There must be some objective metric. Even before NCLB, many schools, including private schools I'm familiar with, have used standardized exams to track progress and measure excellence.

Among the most widely used was the Stanford Achievement Test Series first published in 1926 and still available today in its 10th revision.

State-created tests may be supplanting SAT-10 in light of NCLB, but the principle of standardized testing is sound and time tested.

---

SAT, in this case, is different from the Scholastic Achievement Test often used for college admissions.

[BobL]

Good to hear (I remember that vote), but I thought the Dems running education would have ignored that law - certainly by now.

[Tax-chick]

You mean "English immersion," based on the verb "to immerse," which means to cover something with a liquid. "Submerge" is a synonym.

"Emersion" is a variant of "emergence": to appear after being concealed.

(This has been a public service announcement from the Free Republic Homophone Society.)