From the editor

It has become an annual ritual. In late July or early August, the state releases results of the past school year's Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) tests, and the newspapers go hog wild. They produce special sections filled with bewildering charts, peppered with tiny numbers. Stories about schools that beat the odds and outperformed expectations. Stories focused on schools stuck in the mire. Obligatory, sheepish quotes from superintendents in districts where results were bad. Quotes about focus and high expectations from principals at schools that soared.

What's usually lacking is context. In this era of tooth-and-claw accountability, these scores matter, and not just for the schools. The focus on scores means families will increasingly choose schools for their kids based on test score results. While this may or may not be a good thing, we certainly want those choices to be based on accurate information, placed in the proper context.

But the average reader must be bewildered by typical newspaper coverage, which echoes itself several times through the course of a year.. CSAP results in August. Then, School Accountability Reports in the winter (based largely on the same data, just packaged differently). Then, third grade CSAPs from the following year. And each data release is treated by the media as a Big Event. It's never put in any kind of context, and so it's confusing and unhelpful.

So, we've decided to ask our readers to let the newspapers know what they would consider to be good, informative coverage of the upcoming CSAP release. Click here and take the EXTREMELY brief survey. We will compile the results and send them on to papers across the state, at least those large enough to assign their own reporters to the story. Your answers are completely anonymous, so please, speak freely.

Perhaps this will help the newspapers give us the kind of stories that will move the accountability debate forward in Colorado.

Brief hiatus

I'll be on vacation, so there will be no e-newsletter the next two weeks. The blog, however will soldier on in my absence. Visit early and often.

-- Alan Gottlieb

Blog highlights

Bloggers and pseudonyms

How do you feel about the fact that our Schools for Tomorrow bloggers use pseudonyms to mask their identities? One reader Phil Gonring, takes issue with it. Here's his comment, and a couple of responses, followed by a couple of other blog highlights from last week:

·  Phil Gonring Says:
July 18th, 2007 at 10:47 am e

While I could have written replies to any number of bloggers, Uncle Charley, the Blogfather, or Quique I have chosen Old School because his posting was at the bottom of the most recent Headfirst newsletter and because it offered a critique of other people and institutions. While initially I thought having code names for the blog was kind of cool, I guess I don't really understand the need for all this anonymity, the internet equivalent of ski masks that Headfirst's bloggers have been pulling over their faces to hide their identities. We're not robbing banks. We're not facing death squads or gulags operated by dictators and their thugs. No one involved in the school reform debate has disappeared in the middle of the night. Moreover, it's simply not fair to take shots at other people and insitutions unless we're willing to say who we are. In fact, it might even strengthen the debate. So I'd say to Old School and his blogger colleagues, still your tongue unless you're willing to take off the mask. Sign me, Phil Gonring

·  Blogfather Says:
July 18th, 2007 at 12:54 pm e

Phil,

Thanks for your thoughts on anonymity. This blog is carefully moderated to prohibit ad hominem attacks on individuals. I'm not quite sure what set you off about Old School's post. Of course we aren't facing death squads or disappearances (then again, no one has blogged about Cheney yet). But as you well now, edu-world can be vicious and high stakes, and some people, given their positions, are justifiably nervous about having their identities revealed. Also, people tend to get pigeonholed based on their professional affiliation or place of employment. People you or others might dismiss because they work at Organization X have a better chance of being listened to if preconceived notions are eliminated.

Alan (There. I've outed myself).

·  Uncle Charley Says:
July 18th, 2007 at 3:31 pm e

Phil,

I'll echo Blogfather's (Alan's) response. Approached with this opportunity, I initially felt uncomfortable blogging anonymously. It gives an added temptation to express criticism too harshly or too personally - I already stuck my foot in my mouth once, and had to apologize. Yet it has only served to increase my vigilance.

The added freedom to write thought-provoking pieces without easily being labeled or pigeonholed is the appeal of anonymity, but it should be balanced with a healthy respect.

Thanks for sharing your comment. If you have any serious concerns about my approach in writing on this site, please feel free to contact me through Blogfather (Alan).

·  Phil Gonring Says:
July 19th, 2007 at 11:29 am e

Thanks for your sweet, civil and thoughtful response, Uncle Charley. Phil Gonring.

A modest proposal: ax the SAT

Written by: Uncle Charley

Maybe I'll befriend a few 17-year-olds today by linking to this story: Abolish the SAT by the ever-controversial Charles Murray. The essay is a fairly thorough read, considerably longer than your typical cut-and-dry online news analysis"and you don't have to answer any multiple-choice comprehension questions at the end. So you can put your #2 pencils away.

Murray says we should eliminate the traditional SAT and put more emphasis on the SAT II subject exams for college admissions:

The substitution of achievement tests for the SAT will put a spotlight on the quality of the local high school's curriculum. If achievement test scores are getting all of the parents' attention in the college admissions process, the courses that prepare for those achievement tests will get more of their attention as well, and the pressure for those courses to improve will increase.

Not only does the test add nothing to the prediction other factors offer concerning a student's postsecondary academic success, the author also argues it would have a positive egalitarian effect:

Conversely, it seems to make no difference that high intellectual ability is a gift for which its recipients should be humbly grateful. Far too many students see a high score on the SAT as an expression of their own merit, not an achievement underwritten by the dumb luck of birth.

Hence the final reason for getting rid of the SAT: knowing those scores is too dispiriting for those who do poorly and too inspiriting for those who do well. In an age when intellectual talent is increasingly concentrated among young people who are also privileged economically and socially, the last thing we need are numbers that give these very, very lucky kids a sense of entitlement.

Ironically, as Murray points out, getting rid of the SAT would have the same effect as the assessment's original progressive advocates intended for it from its earliest days. Now, he says the test adds nothing and detracts plenty:

It could happen, and it should happen. There is poignancy in calling for an end to a test conceived for such a noble purpose. But the SAT score, intended as a signal flare for those on the bottom, has become a badge flaunted by those on top. We pay a steep educational and cultural price for a test that no one really needs.

Once I recovered from the knee-jerk flashbacks to the high drama of cramped hours in a strange classroom and untold weeks of agony before receiving the unforgotten score, Murray's thought-provoking essay has left me with a number of questions: If the SAT disappeared next year, who would be harmed (besides, of course, companies like Princeton Review)? Would the next generation of the intellectually gifted agree to relinquish their numerical badges?

If the SAT were to go, most Colorado students would not be affected. But what if the ACT were not far behind? Would abolishing the SAT (or even the ACT) really have the effect of improving curricula? Would something like the SAT II tests suffice for high schoolers on the path to higher education? Let's face it: could we live without these standardized college admission tests?

On the bubble: education triage?

Written by: Pol Econ Ed

Many observers are rightly concerned about various aspects of high stakes testing, and some of the perverse incentives it can raise.  While actual cheating, overly teaching to the test, and over-anxious kids are all possibilities, a more subtle one is the incentive for schools to focus more attention on the students who are close to proficient levels, to move them just over the bar.

University of Chicago economist Derek Neal has studied the impact of NCLB in Chicago, and found that achievement scores for students near the top and students near the bottom have not changed.  Here is one take on this research.

Test scores have gone up, somewhat, for students near proficiency, suggesting that schools and districts have followed the incentive that NCLB (perhaps unwittingly) provides " they target their resources to the students for whom it can make the most difference on the metric upon which they are measured.

In emergency medical care, this is called triage, but it is not consistent with a philosophy of No Child Left Behind. It is more akin to Let's Pull Up The Kids That Are Close So We Look Better (LPUKTACSWLB???).

Of course, in a world of little good news about the achievement gap, it is probably at least partially a good thing that schools seem to know enough that they can target a group of students near proficiency and get them over the bar.  Whether it is a good national policy incentive is another question.

One Response to On the bubble: education triage?�

1. Quique Says:
   July 18th, 2007 at 4:45 pm e

On the subject of the such things as cheating, there is a new book out called Collateral Damage " reviewed here: http://edrev.asu.edu./reviews/rev561.htm
It seems that cheating and the like is another of those perverse incentives. This is not meant in any way to take away from the point made in the main post about the so-called ‘bubble kids'.
From the review: The authors make compelling use of Campbell's law, a well-known social-science law named for social psychologist Donald Campbell. Campbell observed that the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more it will be subject to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Campbell's law, along with its application to test scores made by George Madaus and Marguerite Clarke, point to this inevitability: Uncertainty about the meaning of test scores increases as the stakes attached to them becomes more severe. With example piled on example, Nichols and Berliner document this inevitability of the distortion and outright corruption surrounding NCLB.�

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