I pity the students who take standardized tests in Texas · 4:26am Jan 10th, 2017
Texas's propensity for doing stupid shit with its educational system is well-known at this point.
But this may be perhaps my favorite one so far:
Teachers are also trying to survive as they are tasked with teaching kids how to take these tests, which they do by digging through past tests, posted online. Forget joy of language and the fun of discovery in poetry, this is line-by-line dissection, painful and delivered without anesthetic. One teacher wrote to me last month, working after 10 p.m., trying to figure out the test maker’s interpretation of my poem “Midnight.” This poem isn’t quite as jarring as “A Real Case,” simply symptomatic of aforementioned neuroses: It’s about insomnia.
“Hello Mrs. Holbrook. My name is Sean, and I’m an 8th grade English teacher in Texas. I’m attempting to decipher the number of stanzas in your poem, ‘Midnight’. This isn’t clear from the formatting in our most recent benchmark. The assessment asks the following question:
“Dividing the poem into two stanzas allows the poet to―
A) compare the speaker’s schedule with the train’s schedule.
B ) ask questions to keep the reader guessing about what will happen
C) contrast the speaker’s feelings about weekends and Mondays
D) incorporate reminders for the reader about where the action takes place.
The answer is C) to contrast the speaker’s feelings about weekends and Mondays.
How many stanzas are in this poem? Where are they located? I would appreciate your help. Thank you so much!”
Oh, goody. I’m a benchmark. Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.
Even better?
The same year that “Midnight” appeared on the STAAR test (2013), Texas paid Pearson some $500 million to administer the tests, reportedly without proper training to monitor the contract. Test scorers, who are routinely hired from ads on (where else?), Craiglist, also receive scant training, as reported by this seasoned test scorer. I’m not sure what the qualifications are for the people who make up the questions, but the ability to ride unicorns comes to mind.
Now comes research that reveals that a simple demographic study of the wealth of the parents could have accurately predicted the outcomes, no desks or test packets needed. Educator and author Peter Greene reports,
“Put another way, Tienken et. al. have demonstrated that we do not need to actually give the Common Core-linked Big Standardized Test in order to generate the “student achievement” data, because we can generate the same data by looking at demographic information all by itself.
Tienken and his team used just three pieces of demographic data—
1. percentage of families in the community with income over $200K
2. percentage of people in the community in poverty
3. percentage of people in community with bachelor’s degrees
Using that data alone, Tienken was able to predict school district test results accurately in most cases.”
Thanks, Texas!
Yep.
Just imagine how fucked up the healthcare system will be when it's run by the same people.
And people wonder why I'm against nationalized healthcare.
Ah, standardised literary analysis. Don't remind me.
4376638
Pearson, the people who made the test, are a private company. So if you're going to actually make this argument, wouldn't that be for the government to do it themselves, instead of subcontracting it out to random
campaign contributorsunqualified schmucks?4376631
Well-constructed standardized tests are actually quite useful. The bigger ones (like the SATs) have had their validity empirically tested - people's ability on those tests correlates well with success in life and academia, g (the general intelligence factor), past grades, ect.
While it isn't terribly surprising that this test correlates with such demographic factors as well (in fact, if your test doesn't, it is probably a bad test), the fact that it is no more predictive than said demographic factors is problematic, as it means that spending your money on the test in order to grade schools is basically worthless (though it may still be useful for grading individual student performance).
That said, questions which are badly constructed are problematic because it means that the test is really about guessing what the person who wrote the test wanted the answer to be. While this is actually a skill (and actually probably tests your intelligence), it is undesirable, and it also adds a lot of randomness to the test.
Also, if your goal is to test people's ability to understand poetry, this question doesn't do a very good job of it.
Though I suppose we can tell that the person who wrote the question doesn't understand poetry very well either. :V
This doesn't apply to just Texas but many states have went to standardized tests. In Ohio they introduced them like 20yrs ago. There is 2 of them the idea is to make sure students are meeting the minim standards for thier grade level which brought up the same concerns about rather teaching students the basics but teaching the tests to make sure they pass it
That isn't just a problem in Texas. That is a problem with standardized tests. Because of these tests, schools teach to the test and nothing else. If it isn't on the test, then it will be skipped to cover what is on the test. I remember classes where two weeks before the test, all we did was do previous tests to prepare for the actual test. One of the reasons these standardized tests are important to schools is that they determine how much funding the school gets. And the worst part is that schools use your test scores to determine your placement in next year classes and not your grades. So one test determines your future and not the grade you work all year to achieve.
ITT: America's public education system is just completely FUBAR. Sadly.. none of this surprises me.
To be fair, we have known that this was happening for at least a decade. Pearson is the major problem. We try and fix things with legislation and the company complains and nothing changes. It isn't a government standardized test, it is Pearson's test. I took a mock up of the Starr test recently, and I couldn't pass the English or history portions. Both of those are my minors.
4376665
Standardized tests aren't bad. The problem is that you have to actually think about what you want to include on them and make sure that the test is an actual test of the material in question.
There are good and bad standardized tests. I've taken lots of good standardized tests, and they're quite well-constructed and really do test the material in question.
But writing a test is itself a skill, and writing a good, high-quality standardized test requires real effort and empirical testing (you need to make sure that your test can be answered by other people - so ideally, you'd have other people take your test to make sure that the test can be done correctly and that there is no ambiguity or other such things).
Outsourcing your standardized test writing to a company like Pearson seems like a good idea if you are one of the people who thinks that the government can't do anything right. But if you think that the government can't do anything right, and you are part of the government, you are the thing which is dysfunctional. This is why states run by people who don't think that the government can accomplish any task tend to be badly run.
Of course, the people who think that the government can do no wrong are no better, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Making a high-quality standardized test requires a lot of effort and thinking. It also probably requires that you hire very smart, empirically-minded people to create the test.
This sort of loosey-goosey poetry analysis, where the answer they came up with was something they pulled out of their ass, is pretty clearly problematic and shows a low level of empiricism when constructing the questions.
The idea of teaching to the test being a bad thing is a flawed notion - you should be teaching to the test. The problem is that the test should be testing the actual knowledge you're supposed to learn. If it isn't, the problem isn't teaching to the test, it is that the test itself is poorly constructed.
I know a few people who keep threatening to take their kids out of grade school and home school them because they're afraid that common-core is going to brain wash the kids, and the (now healthier than before) school lunches are being controlled personally by Mrs. Obama.
/yeah, I wish this was a joke
4376647
I think you could do it well. It just requires that you actually be doing something sensible.
If you had students analyzing, say, Ozymandias, that's a poem whose meaning is reasonably clear. You could totally have a standardized test that used it as a question. I can think of other poems which are relatively straightforward and could be used in this way.
That being said, you'd want to make sure that whatever you're doing is something that is well-validated.
I personally would lean against using poems on a standardized exam simply because poetry is less important than other forms of reading comprehension and a lot of poetry uses sort of obfuscated or flowery language.
Then again, given how many people play "Every Breath You Take" at their weddings, maybe we should focus on people understanding songs instead. :V
4376649
Contracting unqualified schmucks is one of the very few ways the government can get anything of substance accomplished. That doesn't mean it'll be done anywhere close to right, of course…
I work part-time as a tutor, helping high schoolers prepare for the math, English (grammar), and reading portions of the ACT test. I like the English and math portions, but the reading part is totally ridiculous because of the amount of time given. For that section, I don't teach students why so-and-so detail reveals so-and-so about a character. I teach them how to allocate their time effectively. How to identify which questions can probably be answered quickly, and which ones should be skipped. How to absorb as much as possible from a single read-through of a text, since no one has time to read it twice. In short, I don't teach them reading comprehension, as it isn't the most critical skill for the reading comprehension section. I teach them how to beat the clock.
I'll admit that time trials can be fun, if you're into that, but it shouldn't be the point of a test. -_-;
Since those socioeconomic factors tend to correlate with better educational standards, isn't this evidence that the tests are actually measuring academic prowess?
...Using that data alone, Tienken was able to predict school district test results accurately in most cases.”
The qualifiers speak for themselves. The accuracy of the prediction is not specified, and any that he fails to predict are covered by the weasel word 'most.'
I've been taking standardized tests longer than most bronies have been alive, because the school was perplexed that somebody with a low B/C average could smoke standardized tests like I did. The logical knots that test makers used to tie in the 80's and 90's were stunning. I particularly like "Find the 'best' answer" types, because they worked out to "This one sucks, this one is flat wrong.." Reading comprehension? Read the questions first, then blaze through the text. My weakness? Spelling and geometry. Skip and go on.
When my kids started doing standardized tests in school and we got to sample questions like the above, I told them "scan through the text and underline names and places." Seemed to work well.
4376684
But the main problem with standardized tests is how everything in the education system revolves around it. Like I said earlier, your grade doesn't matter as the school looks at your test score to determine what classes you take. For example, you could have a B or an A in your English class. But then you get a low score on the English section of the standardized test for some reason. Next year, you find yourself in a remedial English class because the school saw your low score on the test and figured you needed the help. The problem is that the education system puts so much weight on the tests. And the tests don't matter. Parents have the option to opt out their kids from standardized tests. What this means is that when the test comes, these kids don't take it.
4376710 My problems tend to be less "this test sucks" and more "I suck at this test and why the
can't I be doing maths or computers instead". Nonetheless, I agree with everything you're saying.
("Every Breath You Take"? At weddings? I don't know how to react to that.)
4376733
Yes. But the problem is that if you are spending $500 million/year on grading your schools with tests when you could just use demographic factors, you're wasting $500 million/year.
4376735
IQ correlates very heavily with test scores on a proper standardized test. It isn't terribly surprising.
Sometimes, the cynic in me suggests we should just replace them with IQ tests and stop pretending.
The AP tests do genuinely test your knowledge, but they're constructed a bit differently (and have open answer portions). They are also a lot more work to grade.
Oregon had a better system for scholastic achievement - CIM/CAM - but sadly, it never got really fully implemented. In CIM and CAM, you had to complete projects that required you to exhibit knowledge/ability - one of them was public speaking, for instance, which is hard to do a standardized test on, but which is nevertheless important. They had to train all the teachers in the standards and how to mark students, ect. It was a good program.
The problem was that:
1) Higher education didn't really end up buying into it.
2) It was not properly funded.
3) A lot of students didn't meet the standards.
Sounds about normal.
4376749
It's amazing how many people don't realise it's a song about a crazy stalker and not a romance ballad. But hey, people hear what they want to hear.
4376764 Not really. If you are actually adjusting for these factors, then you can easily find outliers which should be actionable by state policy. Also, I'd expect such a test to be used to evaluate something about the students – otherwise, it will likely be useless, since you shouldn't really expect students to do well in a test that only benefits their teachers.
I'd also like to see a study that compares the performance of classrooms whose teachers try to game the system, with the ones that focus on the education of the students.
4376782 To be honest, I have met enough people that can't really differentiate between being a stalker, and being in love.
Oh God, that question.
It's certainly possible to do literary analysis in a standardized multiple-choice test, but that is not the way to do it.
I think the bigger problem is Texas rewriting textbooks to change history. <.< Y'know, like calling traded slaves "workers".
4376792
This is only true if your test is actually measuring what you want it to measure, which is why it having high-quality questions is important - if the variation is due to factors other than educational quality, that's a problem.
This is true. I think they'll hold you back in some states if you don't pass the tests.
4376649 Who is paying them?
Then that's who's in charge of it. Pearson is only doing what it was paid to do. The government came up with the ridiculous standards, the insane methodology that is in direct opposition to their claimed end goals. Pearson was merely the lowest bidder.
You're complaining about the brand of mayonnaise on a shit sandwich.
Maybe I can speak to some of this, since I am a product of the Texas school system and have had to endure their standardized tests ranging from the TAAS (2002), TAKS (2003-2011), and most recently the STAAR (2012) before I graduated. Primarily being an AP student, these exams were only given the most cursory of glances and maybe a week or so of preparation. Largely considered by myself and other students as "a gigantic waste of time", or an excuse to nap uncomfortably at a desk for three hours after blowing through the exam in about an hour, many of these tests offered mind-numbingly simple questions or tricky ones with two, technically correct answers, with one being slightly more right than to other. Of them all however, the ones I found most annoying were the English exams.
With literature being as vast and broad as the countries and artist that produced them, and the lens of personal experience through which works are read, I found it complete bullshit that someone's interpretation was somehow more correct than mine, over something as subjective as "Why are the drapes blue at the party and what did the author mean to imply?" (Please note that I'm using this as an example, and not a verbatim question pulled from the test. My memory is only so good, and I vaguely recall questions of this nature.) Many times, I found myself at odds with the test creators, who I felt were reading too far between the lines for meanings and interpretations that only someone well-versed in mental gymnastics could arrive at. I mean, saying that the blue coloration of the drapes signifies the characters reserved sadness being subtly displayed to the world outside makes no realistic sense to me. I've had the same color drapes for the past ten years and sure as hell don't change them every time I go through a change of emotion. (If I did, they'd almost be permanently red due to how pissed off I'd be at wasting so much money on different shades of the same item and having to change them so damn often.)
All considered, these exams played little bearing on my future and aren't something I consider worth taxpayer money. Frankly, I wish "No Child Left Behind" would disappear. I understand the good intentions behind it, but I can't think of a single thing the government has made faster, better, or cost-effective. My advice to young students I've mentored was to take control of their own education and to seek out knowledge for themselves. To go to the library, and start on one side and read everything until you hit the other. (Most of my young years were spent with a nose in a book, but damn it. I read most every book in the public library and it's been well worth it.) To never stop being curious and to run as far as you can with it. Horizons exist to be explored, not just stared at. These standardized tests don't facilitate free or independent thinking or the chance for students to draw their own conclusions. Only ones that are "correct". Ultimately this has ended up with the regurgitation of base information in the hopes you could get the golden star sticker of mediocrity and continue on.
I write this, not as a condemnation of all Texas schools, but of the scale but which students are measured. I've had many great teachers who went about and beyond to introduce assignments that made me think, learn, draw my own conclusions, and argue them. I've also had bad ones. In the end, take control and responsibility for yourself, because the most important person you will know your entire life, is you.
TL;DR: Standardizing testing is shit; go read a damn book and think for yourself.
4377093
The people paying Pearson are people who people are incompetent at running the government; ergo, they assume that governments are incompetent. The actual problem, however, is not that governments are incompetent, but that they are incompetent. As they are unwilling or unable to recognize themselves as incompetent, they instead place the blame on "government" itself, not realizing that is nonsensical - a government, like a corporation, is nothing more than the people who make it up.
Their attempts at outsourcing things that governments should be doing to incompetent private contractors is just one example of their incompetence.
Moreover, lest we forget, this is Texas, a state which has not accepted the Common Core curriculum; you seem to be blaming it on externally imposed standards, when the standards in Texas are, in fact, those of the state of Texas. The only people to blame are the people in charge of these standards, who are part of the same government who hired Pearson to make the tests for them.
4377534 Texas is, in fact, a government.
If the government wants to provide a service for a fee, I don't have a problem with it. As long as everyone has the option to purchase the service elsewhere. The possibility of competition would force the government administrators (or their contractors) to be competent or be unemployed.
People joke about the USPS, but they are in competition with UPS and other companies. They provide a service somewhat competently, at reasonable prices. If they got worse at delivering letters, someone would start a company to do it cheaper and more reliably.
Public schools? You're paying for them, whether you choose to send your kids there or not. Both in the form of taxes on your home (which you pay whether you own or rent - your landlord has to pay it, so has to charge more rent), and in increased cost of goods and services from businesses who have to pay those same property taxes. Everyone - even the poor - pay these taxes. That makes it near-impossible for anyone besides the upper classes to send their kids to private school. There is essentially no competition in the education industry. The result of a government near-monopoly on the education industry is the same as if there was a monopoly in any other industry. Astronomical cost and incompetence.
I don't believe in monopolies, no matter who is running them. That's all.
4377669
You have fallen prey to the free market fallacy. Schools aren't free markets and don't resemble them in meaningful ways. Moreover, schools are extremely prone to market failures.
In the case of education, there is an enormous amount of capital overlay - teachers, schools, equipment, janitors, ect. Moreover, there's economy of scale to education - the larger your body of students, the more classes you can offer. The more exceptional students you have, the more high level courses you can offer.
This creates intrinsic monopolies in education in any area of ~30,000 people or fewer - arguably this could be upped to as high as 50,000 people, depending on demographics, among other things. If you have a large school in such an area, you create an inherent monopoly which is very hard for any newcomer to compete with due to capital costs, your ability to offer more things at a lower price, ect.
Moreover, because of transportation issues, there's a fairly limited geographic area that you can realistically send your child to school in. This limits choices even in larger metropolitan areas, both because you have to get your kid to and from school, and because a long trip to school (or a long trip out of your way on the drive to/from work) are major restrictions on where your child can realistically be sent to school. Again, this further limits the possibilities for free market competition.
In reality, schools are intrinsically monopolistic or oligopolistic entities in most cases - even if you have choices, in many cases your number of truly available choices is going to be pretty sharply limited. Thus, the idea of schools truly competiting is something of a farce.
However, there are additional problems laid over the top of this.
The first, and largest, problem is that education primarily exists for the benefit of children. But children cannot pay for their education, and young children cannot be expected to make educated choices about their education.
This creates an intrinsic problem - free markets assume that the people buying the good in question are the people who benefit from it. But in this case, that's not the case. If you have parents paying for this education, then it is going to be their interests, not the children's, who are served - and many parents do not have the best interests of their children in mind. You cannot actually expect to reap the benefits of a free market in this case.
Many parents care less about education and more about their tribe. They will send their child to some school affiliated with their social group - some sort of religious school, for instance - which may provide an inferior education but indoctrinate them in their belief system. This is especially true of people from failing cultures. In this case, the good of the child is subordinated to other goals that the parent has.
A major secondary problem is that even parents who care about their child's education are notoriously terrible at determining which schools are best. Even if they do have the best interests of their children in mind, they have no really reasonable way of acting on those. Indeed, measuring how good schools are is extraordinarily difficult - student quality has a much larger impact on outcomes than anything else. Schools only contribute about 20% of the variation in student test score variation. This makes it extremely difficult for parents - who are generally quite ignorant of such things - to make any sort of intelligent decision about where to send their child to school. In fact, many parents will send their children to inferior schools, believing they are superior, simply because they don't know any better. Indeed, studies on public and private school students have found that, given the same student quality, public schools on average have marginally better outcomes than private ones. This suggests that sending students to private schools is, by and large, illogical - you're actually paying money for an equal or inferior education.
This is not to say that all private schools are worse than public schools, but for this to be true, a substantial number of them must be. This is a huge market failure. And given that people already pay to send their children to these schools, we must assume that many parents cannot be treated as truly rational actors.
All of the above is why treating schools as if they were a free market is a mistake - they're not and they don't really act very much like one.
The state has a compelling interest in educating the youth - an educated youth makes for a more prosperous country - so it makes sense for it to pay for it instead of parents. And it is more likely that the government will have the interests of children in general in mind than the parents, especially in a free nation.
There are additional factors as well - the state has several other major additional compelling interests in education. First off, by having public schools, you mix everyone together, at least regionally. This is good for social cohesion - by making it so that locals are mixed with other locals, you both create additional social bonds between disparate social groups as their children befriend each other in school, but also help to create a more culturally integrated society. People think of segregation as a racial thing, but it isn't just about race - cultural, class, and religious segregation are also bad for a society. Having a more homogenized society makes for a more cohesive and stable society.
Secondly, it does a better job of allowing the cream to rise - you want to maximize the success level of people, and if someone is born to poor parents, they should not be consigned to having a poor education. If they are truly capable of rising, they should be given the ability to rise. And while many will not, some will, and the benefits of that are large.
Likewise, it is good to make it so that the children of better off people are not artificially elevated beyond the levels of their own personal ability. Noble classes are bad for societies.
Finally, the state, by having its finger in education, can help to build loyalty towards the state - a feeling of camaraderie and patriotism, as well as of promoting the nation's ideals. It means that everyone feels united as not just a community, but also as a country. This is important for stability of the state, and is a logical reason for the state to be interested in such. This is also why enemies of the state tend to dislike public education when they don't have control over it.
I'm surprised to see you surprised that regional economic status predicted test results. Obviously it didn't predict them exactly; all that statement can really mean is that it had a strong correlation at the level of the school district. But it always correlates with test results, all across America. It would be exceptional if that didn't happen. Don't you think you'd get the same results for the SAT?
4377869
It isn't surprising at all. In fact, if your test doesn't show that, it would mean something went wrong.
However, it doesn't really tell you anything about how well your schools are performing. If you spend lots of money on standardized tests and your data can be replicated with simple demographic data, it means that you're wasting a lot of money on testing and not really measuring what you really want to be measuring (school performance), and instead are simply measuring student quality, which can be estimated demographically and isn't something that you can really change.
That being said, there is at least some purpose to the tests (if you fail them, you won't be passed up from certain grade levels), which I was unaware of when I initially posted this. This is not true in every state (my own home state, after flirting with CIM and CAM, backed away from any system which held students back (both because of upset parents and because administrators didn't want to lower high school graduation rates further), thereby rendering their standardized exams entirely pointless), but it is apparently true in Texas.
4377920 You think that school performance can be measured by something other than the aggregate of student performance?
It would make sense to create a regression model of school performance with its economic baseline as an independent variable, and measure school performance as the deviation from the model's prediction of the average score. Or measure the change in school performance as the change in scores since last year. But in any case, you're going to take your measurements in the form of student test data, and those test scores will correlate with wealth.
That Tienken was able to predict district test scores from district wealth is not a valid complaint about the test. It isn't even a valid complaint about school performance, since even if schools work, school performances would probably be normally distributed, or distributed in a way dependent on district wealth. I can't think of any way not to get results that would be correlated with district wealth other than small sample size.
4377729
I'm no longer confident that's always true.
The takeover of literary theory by charismatic charlatans since 1960 has been nearly absolute. Without feedback mechanisms to select for any kind of quality in their work, they have been able to reform the field's culture so that it repels smart people or people with integrity, and promotes frauds, social schemers, and entertainers. Literary theory in the 19th and early 20th century, when it was dominated by people from "better classes," was much more intelligent. I don't think this was because the "better classes" were smarter on average, but it may have been because class-based selection of leaders chose leaders randomly with respect to their ability. Given how clever humans are at exploiting social systems, in a domain without selection for quality, a system that guarantees nearly-random selection of leaders may perform considerably above average.
4378180
The US has been extremely successful without a conventional noble class. And if we look at history, at many points in time when the noble classes were removed from power and replaced based on merit, things got better. The French military is but one example of such.
Indeed, basically every country got rid of the old practice of buying a military rank because they found it lead to inferior leadership.
This suggests that there's a rather large benefit to not having a noble class, or at least not putting them to such use.
While the idea that randomly selecting leaders amongst the leader class is appealing, it would seem that historically, this was often not the case - it seems that despite the fact that the noble class was supposed to produce leaders, many were not.
The ideal system is one based on merit at whatever task. The problem with the English literary establishment is that it is not based on merit. Some years ago you made a blog post about conductors, and I suspect the same is true of the English literary establishment - they're no longer connected to reality, so their merit is kind of irrelevant and they just engage in internal masturbatory processes. Indeed, the very rejection of empiricism supports their worthlessness - it is a convenient way of hiding their lack of worth.
Society still needs books and music, and we still get books and music. But it the people making popular music and writing popular books aren't English professors and music professors, by and large. Given how many English and music professors there are, this would suggest that writing popular books or making popular music and being a professor are not skill sets that overlap that much.
While it is certainly true that we shouldn't expect all of them to be master authors or musicians, going back, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were university professors. And those were the first two I thought to check (Hemingway, who was the third I thought to check, was not). What popular author today is a university professor in English? What popular musician teaches music? I can't think of one, though I'm sure at least one must exist.
Indeed, I have the suspicion that the best-selling academic at the moment is probably a physicist or biologist.
If you don't have any element of merit to your system, perhaps a noble class is better than nothing at all, doubly so if you educate your noble class in leadership. But If your system can have merit, that's a better solution.
4378152
Student performance from these sorts of standardized tests seems to have as variables:
1) Student quality (race, SES, parental education, ect. - a lot of this is probably a proxy for genetics, and all this accounts for ~60%).
2) School quality (20% or so of total performance).
3) Other factors influencing student performance (20% or so - so, already bad news given we don't know what these factors are). Test variability probably falls into this category.
You can do a regression to try and dampen out the effects of student quality, but I'm skeptical of how well this will work - even once we've done that, we're getting something which is at best 50/50 stuff we actually know is actually related to school quality. And the noisier the test is, the less data we're getting about schools from any given iteration.
Most likely you'd need to average the data out over a long period of time to get any sort of useful statistics about school performance, and given current educational trends, I'm not sure if schools are even stable in terms of teaching the same curriculum and using the same tests over the time scale of a decade or more. And all this assumes that the demographics of the district don't shift significantly over such long time spans in ways that would distort the data (say, an influx of silicon valley expats to Reno, or an influx of Mexican immigrants in some city in Texas, or an influx of Chinese students in Vancouver).
Oh, yeah, and teachers might move between schools during that time too. Or maybe principals have some sort of effect... there seem to be a lot of things that can change in ten years, which means that even gathering data over time won't be perfect (though it should at least work somewhat).
Obviously at larger schools you'll get better data faster than at smaller ones (larger sample sizes) but I'm not sure how useful this is all going to be in the long run and whether you can really draw useful conclusions above and beyond what you could get from principals evaluating teachers, which they already do anyway.
If you've got some other primary purpose in mind for the data, then also using it for teacher/school evaluations seems like a reasonable thing to do, but a lot of these standardized test programs seem to be implemented for the purpose of analyzing teacher/school performance over analyzing student performance (i.e. the reason the program exists is to try and find schools which are having problems, and individual student performance is a bonus). Given we already have at least some tests (like the SATs) for measuring general student performance, it makes me wonder if we're maybe wasting a lot of money for not-that-great data.
I mean, it isn't that I don't think that it would be totally awesome to be able to do this - it would be really great if it really worked. But I'm not sure that it really does, or that the added value is equal to the cost in both money and classroom time.
4378238
Certainly. But some of out most-important leadership positions are often filled by people of no special merit--notably Congress and the Presidency.
4378296
You're supposed to have to win an election to get there, though, which at least is a mark of merit - though unfortunately, not necessarily in the talents necessary for those roles.
4378297 If they held an election in Equestria, Flim and Flam would win.
4379088 No, no, you're being silly. It's only in real life shady business people with no morals and little empathy get elected to office. The main six could actually stop Flim and Flam from getting elected, or maybe even just AJ by herself.
Well, let's just look at this from the typical Breitbart comments section perspective.
1. Everyone who reads, writes, or understands poetry is a liberal.
2. All liberals are traitors.
3. All traitors must be executed as enemies of America.
4. KILL ALL LIBERALS. KILL ALL POETS. KILL ALL WHO WILL NOT DO THE KILLING. KILL. KILL. KILL.
Therefore, if you can answer a question on poetry, you will be executed as an enemy of America, which you totally deserve. The test only exists as yet another means of determining who needs to be culled, for only when 97% of all "citizens" are executed can the real America exist again.
Really, it's all so simple when you just let someone else think about it.
The students who take standardized tests in Texas are those students who do not have an advantage over others because of their own personal characteristics, such as intelligence or motivation. These students may come from low-income families that do not have enough money to provide them with an education that will give them an edge over other students. As you can see here these students do not even use modern educational tools. . The world has gotten too complicated for anyone not to know how to deal with it; if you don't know what to do in a particular situation, it's because nobody has taught you how yet -- or at least not well enough for your purposes. So we should make sure that everyone knows how to deal with their problems before they become serious problems.