Giving New Meaning to Parenting

A few years ago, I was talking to a close friend who taught in a middle school in upstate New York. She told me that eight weeks before the State standardized No Child Left Behind [NCLB] testing, a group of kids were culled out from the rest, and offered extensive test preparation classes. These classes were given in hopes that they would take marginal students the extra mile and push them from “Below Basic” into the “Basic” classification, or from “Basic” into “Proficient”. Kids who were already testing at the proficient level or better were ignored, as were those seen as “having no chance” to pass the test. The “Marginals” are the focus, because these are the students who are going to make or break a school’s performance.

Why is this important? Schools have a lot riding on test scores. Funding issues, State takeover of under-performing schools, and the jobs of teachers and administrators all hang in the balance. If a school does not make adequate yearly progress, the dreaded AYP, they face a variety of penalties, that escalate in harshness over time. You can argue that spending all your time and effort at the margins makes good financial sense, since these are the kids that will have the biggest impact on the bottom line. But is education supposed to be about education or finance?

At the time, I thought this “teaching to the margins” policy was outrageous, in that it totally wrote off all the kids judged “unworthy” and only concentrated on helping a select few. It may be fiscally wise, but it seems morally bankrupt. Are we interested in educating students or in test prep? Are we interested in educating all kids, or only some of them? Do we even know what education is all about any more?

I thought maybe this particular school was an isolated case, but then the following
Article in the Washington Post came across my desk, courtesy of the Council for Exceptional Children email newsletter:

Test-prep triage raises ethical questions

Desperate to improve test scores, one Maryland school singled out students who had the best chance of improving their scores and offered them intensive preparation. Pulling those students from regular classes while ignoring those who may need the most help had some teachers questioning testing ethics.

You can read the whole article by clicking here.

Clearly, this is the same policy my friend saw in her school a few years ago, and the practice is catching on like a bad virus. The pressure on schools, teachers, and administrators has become so bad, incidents of adults manipulating test results have become more common. There’s a pretty famous scandal in New Jersey, not far from here, where:

“The Camden School District is the focus of a state criminal investigation into allegations of cheating on test scores and other fiscal irregularities. The Inquirer first uncovered unusually high 2005 test scores which were later confirmed by a state Department of Education investigation that found the scores were the result of “adult interference.” For the 2006 testing, the state beefed up security and the scores plunged.”

To read the whole series of articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, click here. The articles go on to say:

“For years, pockets of Camden teachers and administrators cultivated an informal culture of cheating to cope with growing pressure to boost test scores. The cheating was orchestrated by administrators, principals, guidance counselors, teachers, and anyone else willing to cooperate, according to a dozen teachers who took part in or witnessed it, and half a dozen more who were told of such occurrences….

During the 2004-05 school year, a teacher at Cooper’s Poynt Elementary – one of five schools identified by the state Department of Education as having suspiciously high scores – saw a guidance counselor changing students answers and asked why.

“If I don’t do it, I won’t have a job next year,” the counselor replied.“

Now I say this as someone who has been tutoring in a Middle School to help kids pass the PSSA’s (Pennsylvania’s No Child Left Behind test). I even handed out the classic, good test prep advice today, just like I received before the MCAT, LSAT and Bar Exam. My class is made up of kids from a wide variety of backgrounds, with a wide set of skills. Most said on the first day of class that they just didn’t like reading. Some are kids for whom English is a second language. Others simply don’t seem to care very much about school.

I often wonder whether anything we do in class has any effect at all. Do the twice-weekly sessions, divided between classroom workbook sessions and computer programs designed to fill in skill gaps, make any difference? When one child reported she went from a D in reading to a B+ on her last report card, I hoped that some of what we were discussing in class helped her. I encourage my students to read outside of the classroom and use audio books, mainly because both of those “methods” will do more to make them better readers and acquire a wider vocabulary than a month of test prep classes. But now, a week before the test, the best advice I can give them is :

- Lots of rest
- a good breakfast, including protein on the day of the test
- Ask them to try to stay loose and focused; and
- Give them strategies on what to do if they get stuck or start to run out of time.

The kids then informed me their teachers all told them the school was in danger of being taken over by the State if scores weren’t good enough.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m running the equivalent of Stanley Kaplan for the PSSA’s. I hope the kids have gotten the message I care about them. I make cookies or bring in candy, in the hopes to make this process less onerous for them. They don’t want to be there, and sometimes see it as more of a punishment than an extra bonus feature. I hope some of the critical thinking skills we’ve discussed have sunk in. i hope they have a better understanding of what the questions are asking- after all, if you don’t know what “figurative language” means, you have no hope of answering certain questions.

But I don’t fool myself into thinking this is education. This is gaming the system. And I don’t think the School and Administration have helped these kids out by adding the adult pressures of State-takeover on their shoulders. Kids should not be put into this sort of performance pressure situation, ever. It’s not conducive to learning, and it’s counter-productive. And as much as I got into this to help these kids succeed, I worry that I am doing nothing more than placing a band-aid over a hemorrhaging wound, if that much.

I am having a crisis of conscious here. Does extra instruction, in any form, benefit kids? Or is it merely upping the pressure and trying to mask more serious gaps in our education system? For example, it’s not a mystery that there are a lot of ESL kids in tutoring. The high percentage of English as Second Language kids in our schools definitely skews the scores- they may be passingly fluent in conversational English, but in terms of instructional language, they’re still not where they need to be. Many seem to wander from class to class, get in trouble, and end up in in-school suspension. They disrupt other kids, because they are bored. A lot of it seems to be caused by the fact that they can only really grasp a small percentage of the information that comes at that every day, in a language that they are just learning, one that may not even be spoken at home.

So this begs the question: Can you do an honest evaluation of the quality of the instruction given by dedicated teachers on a standardized test that more accurately measures demographics than intelligence?

Is the real purpose of NCLB to systematically dismantle public education? And what about all the reports that the new for-profit management companies have shown no better test scores than their public school brethren? (Article from the Philadelphia Daily News can be found here.)

Here’s a small piece of the article:

“The Philadelphia School District’s privately run schools – the largest experiment of its kind in the country – have failed to deliver higher test scores than the district despite costing an extra $90 million, a study released today says.

The analysis compared how district students performed on state and national tests during the last five years with students at the 41 schools run by the six private managers, including for-profit Edison Schools Inc.

‘There’s no evidence to proceed with the model of private management of schools, as is, that we have here in Philadelphia,’ said Jolley Bruce Christman of the Philadelphia-based Research for Action, one of two groups that wrote the study, the first substantial look at the district’s private-management model since it began in 2002.

‘There may be real advantages or benefits that parents can see that are not related to the standardized test scores that we looked at,’ Christman added. ‘But in terms of a blanket continuation of this model, I don’t see evidence that that should happen.’

Instead, 21 ‘restructured’ schools that got additional math and reading time, teacher coaches, and other special attention while remaining under district management emerged as the best performers, the study found.

The report, also written by the Rand Corp. and funded in part by the Annenberg and William Penn Foundations, has touched off yet another debate – locally and nationally – over the effectiveness of privatization in public schools.”

All I can say is that we have got to stop treating education like a quarterly profit report soon, and begin looking at it properly- as a long term, research, and development project to raise bright and intellectually curious citizens. But until that happens, sharpen your number 2 pencils, sleep tight, and have a good breakfast.

Photo courtesy of -Merce-, used under a Creative Commons License.

[tags]testing, no child left behind, education, test prep, state funded education, parenting, school aged children, nclb, public school[/tags]