When you make a test harder..

Back in 1973 there was an astronomical increase in beef prices. The farmers' joke was that an agricultural expert was trying to explain to a Congressman how long it would take to get more beef on the market. Congress then looked at the supply chain and then passed a law to shorten the bovine gestation period to six weeks.

Sadly enough, that's about as much intelligence as the "more accountability, less money" folks apply when they try to improve processes without understanding how education works.
 
I didn't mean to imply that "more accountability, less money" is an inherently stupid position -- just that it is often stupidly applied.

By the way, I worked in the LISD for a while and the district has administration with guts and weeds out bad teachers. Certainly the problem children know their rights and it's tough in some schools. That's why I love charter schools in urban areas. Teachers and administrators have great authority. "Your children were chosen because of their exceptional potential. However they are not applying themselves or are disrputive to other learners, were abusive of a teacher or fellow student -- so get the hell out and go back to public schools.
 
"In other words, they'll do better if they're held to the same standards as any normal employee. Furthermore, a kid is going to study harder if there's order around him, and he's going to behave better if there are real consequences to fear if he doesn't."

While it's impossible to deny the "theory" behind this, it just isn't true in practice. Especially in Texas.

Students: no longer believe in consequences. But it's not because of the schools... it starts much younger than that.

Teachers: we don't have unions here. As a teacher, I've seen plenty of crappy teachers get fired. Progress in education is stifled by the state and by parents, foremost. We need to alter/abandon the German style of grade school and start over, but it would be quite costly and require that parents not ship their kids off to be babysat every day.
 
Again, you are lumping the State of Texas together. As Crock pointed out, each school district is different. The bad school districts in the state just happen to be the biggest. Look at the best school districts in the state, they could compete nationally and I would even throw them into the international competitions.

When you have the new Dallas Superintendent hire his Communications directlor, 31, at $150,000/year after she was making $50,000/year and nobody else was interviewed, you know you have a major problem. It starts at the top and the DISD just does not get it. Why would any parent with children move into Dallas county and the DISD?
 
I can't get the link to open so i don't know if it is the STAAR tests referenced but I read a Dallas Morning news article Saturday with the headline " 9th graders beat lower STAAR expectations.Then it was reported they lowered the passing scores on the new tests for things like algebra and biology where they lowered passing to 37. 37 And world geography to 46
Gee call me shocked that more students passed those.
rolleyes.gif


The worst scores were in writing where 54 ( 54
was passing and reading where 65 was passing.

Until I read how low they made the passing grades in algebra biology and world geography I wonder how they could do so well if they couldn't read.
now i know

What a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
 
My biggest problem with standardized testing is the games that are played with the numbers and accountability ratings. They spend billions creating a new test that is harder. Then, they play around with what a passing score actually is. By rigging the numbers like this, they can say that 10% of the students passed or 90% of the students passed. It's all a matter of where they set the bar.

Then, in their infinite wisdom, they mandate that each sub population passes the test. So, 90% of a school could pass the test but if a lot of the kids that didn't pass fall into one group (black, white, Hispanic, low income, special ed) the entire school is deemed in unacceptable.

The problem isn't the testing as much as the level of importance placed on the test and the games that get played behind the scenes.
 
here is my thought on crappy teachers. Yes there are some. maybe more than we know and yes they should get fired.
BUT the same crappy teacher does not teach the same kids every year
and not every subject after 5th? grade
Attorneys help me with out with this concept.
In a personal injury lawsuit don't they assign a % of the blame to decide how much to award?

So if I were assigning blame the most I would assign to ' crappy teachers is10%
I'd assign 70% to parents and 20% to adminstrative bureacracy and newest techniqes and methods forced on teachers every year.
 
TAKS or STARR tests are not hard. It is reasonable to expect kids to pass the tests. Quit blaming anyone but the parents and make them responsible for the grades and the failure of thier kids.
Evaluate teachers and weed out the few incompetant ones.
This is fairly simple; If the parents dont care, the kids dont care. If the parents care, the kids care.
The one thing that would help in this matter is to have mandatory Saturday and Sunday parent/teacher conferences for students not making the grades. Could be done by an Counselors or Vice Principals by setting their workdays Sun- Thurs, and Tues - Sat. I promise counselors and Vice Principals will not be missed one day a week.
Would probably give the parents incentive to care.
 
MrD
Thank you.
So with the information you provided I stand by my Teachers 10% but maybe I should up the parents %.
It it doesn't change the outcome then in this situation the parents can and should have more accountability on the outcome than any other factor.

The issue of course is how do you involve paretns who had no involvement from their parents?

I don't give much to the argument that parents who are working long hours don't have time to influence their children to study. I see way too many single mothers who are making sure their children know what is expected of them in school. Not all single mothers but a surprising number.
 
I actually remember when the TAKS came out ( I think it was the TAKS) - I was a senior and our class was exempt, but the prep involved us, because the school would do practice questions over the intercom during the day to get everyone ready. I just remember our class rolling with laughter at the level of the questions - and this was not an advanced class, by any means. It was Texas Studies, i.e. Senior Goof-off 101.
 
o Assessments will increase in length at most grades and subjects.
o Overall test difficulty will be increased by including more rigorous items. o The rigor of items will be increased by assessing skills at a greater depth
and level of cognitive complexity. In this way, the tests will be better able to
measure the growth of higher-achieving students.
o In science and mathematics, the number of open-ended (griddable) items
on most tests will increase to allow students more opportunity to derive an
answer independently.
o Students will be required to respond to two writing tasks (including personal
narrative, literary, expository, persuasive, and analytic) rather than one
task.
o Performance standards will be set using empirical data gathered from
studies that link performance year to year from grades 3–8 to high school
and from specific courses to college and career readiness.


This is the difference between TAKS and STAAR according to the TEA.
 
Cedar, LarryT, Coel, AB and all teachers
There are no words to convey my gratitude and admiration.

Yes every profession has its BS but Wow you endure crap of the highest level and lowest level while you are trying to teach our children.

Nobody wins
 
I thought my final test in a graduate level artificial intelligence class was pretty easy. Then again it was all base on statistics , matrices and n-dimensional calculus so I couldn't image it being to tough.
 
A few things. As a fourth-grade teacher, let me say:

1. I agree, there are more crappy teachers than you would think. Most of them weed themselves out of the process.

2. Nobody gets fired in the ISD system. (I call it ISD because the Charter Schools are public schools, and the ISDs look down their nose at them.)

3. I have seen a great teacher get non-renewed, which is the same thing as fired, almost exclusively for test scores. He taught a fifth grade bilingual class, with 29 students, of whom 4-5 were special ed. He also got in trouble for answering a student's question in Spanish. That really ticked off the principal, from what I hear. This happened at the Charter School where I teach, but luckily the man landed on his feet the next year, teaching Spanish at the Charter's Middle School.

4. If 37% is the passing standard for the fourth grade STAAR tests, then all of my students passed. The average for my class was about 70% of all questions asked.

5. The STAAR tests were more difficult than TAKS. I did not view the test, but a student called me over to ask about a math question for example, and I noticed the question asked the student to answer a geometry question without showing the student a picture. Normally at this grade level the question would provide a picture.

My results were kind of like a bell curve that was flattened at the top. Iow, there were very few students who scored above 90%, and nobody scored 100%. For TAKS, there would be several students scoring 100%.

The length of the tests were increased significantly as well. I think the longest test had something like 54 questions. The students had less time to complete the questions, they only had four hours, compared to unlimited time, which actually ended up being 7 hours for the TAKS.

5. If you're still reading, you'll love this. Administrators are still the most serious problem. In the ISD where my children attend, one of the bigshots is creating a new admin. position at two elementary schools. After I emailed the Human Resources director to ask what "Dean of Elementary Instruction" was, I then switched my attention to the administrator who is actually behind all of this and eventually received the following reply.

(Cut and pasted from my email, I kid you not)

"I wanted to first communicate that I apologize for not responding initially to your information request. I also wanted to qualify a few things for you.



The Dean of Instruction position itself is considered an administrative level position. ( 210 Contract)



Several administrators on the Title campuses have proposed the need for the position on their campuses and others have not. The two campuses that have Dean of Instruction positions are Vega and Malvern.



Malvern’s Principal will be Dr. Amber Epperson and Vega’s Principal is Mike Forsyth.



The two campuses who made the request are bilingual campuses. Vega’s is becoming a Title campus and bilingual campus.



I know you expressed concerns about comprising instruction and adding the IS position back at a later date. While most administrators don’t tutor directly they can have an a positive impact on instruction in other ways. I would be an expectation that the Dean support instructional capacity building with teachers to help prevent gaps in student learning deterring the need for gap closure measures like tutoring."



I dare anybody to 1. make sense of his last sentence, and 2. guess how much money he makes to come up with a sentence like that!
 
Here is the problem with accountability, as I see it. Or at least one of the problems.

First, the word accountability includes the word "count", and it carries with it the notion that some empirical—or countable—standard of performance will be demanded. In education, a test that aspires to measure "standard of performance" is known as a criterion-referenced assessment: in other words, the criteria that is to be tested is published in advance, and the individual test items are designed to systematically sample that criteria. This sort of test is oriented toward what we call "mastery", or the idea of progress toward mastery. And mastery—if we intend for all students to achieve it—is understood to be a fairly basic level of performance.

But there is an inherent conflict at the heart of the whole operation that soon presents itself: a conflict between the need to administer a test that is fair and which lends itself to efficient grading on one hand, and on the other hand the need to preserve the authenticity of the assessment by limiting the ability of teachers and schools to "game out" the test—research has shown that higher scores can be and often are produced without actually increasing student competency. Put simply, there is a conflict between specificity and authenticity.

Now, if this conflict between specificity and authenticity was merely a problem for assessment, then I doubt there would be too much cause for complaint. But given the importance that the system places on these tests—graduation for the student and careers of administrators are on the line—we see the conflict between specificity and authenticity extending into the classroom. It increasingly has come to dominate the day-to-day instructional decisions that teachers make, and the momentum is definitely with the forces of specificity. Increasingly, teachers are encouraged to present content that is specific to the TEKS, to the exclusion of material that seeks to contextualize or consider that content in meaningful ways.

For instance, consider the following U.S. history TEK (13.A):
In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
Deez, you're almost exactly spot on re: the salary. In addition to all that you've commented on, the thing that really got my attention was the fact that this hack, whose title is actually Director of Curriculum and Instruction, is trying to blame the principals for asking for the additional administrative person.

The actual salary for the hack is 118,532 according to The Texas Tribune as of 4/21/11.

(I didn't paste the email from the HR director, which is worded much better. The HR director explained to me that the two campuses are losing their Instructional Specialist, but the IS is becoming this "Dean".)

The HR director is too smart to send out something that poorly worded, imo.

I'm actually going to email one of the two principals, the man who I respect his credentials and experience, because he cut his teeth in admin. in the Richardson School District. One of my former principals knows this young man and really believes he has a good head on his shoulders.

Btw, what little I know about admins., RISD still has a fantastic reputation for putting out the best administrators in the metroplex. I could easily be wrong, but that's what I've heard.
 
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