Teachers study shows their worth

Teachers study shows their worth | Chicago Tribune:

"In Illinois, that score was determined by five factors: the average college entrance exam score of all teachers in the school; results on the teacher licensing test of basic skills; a national ranking of college attended; years of experience; and number of teachers with provisional credentials. All of the state's 3,800 public schools were evaluated."

The study reported by the Tribune appears to make an assumption that teacher quality is related to:

• Teacher testing
• College attended
• Experience
• Schools where teachers are working with provisional certificates

It seems to me that none of these indicators actually relate to teacher quality directly. The assumption that teachers that do poorly on basic skills examinations are somehow deficient fails to account for the problem of bias in the test instruments. The college attended, based on national ranking, fails to account for the potential of teacher education responsibilities at the so-called "better" schools may be the responsibility of junior faculty or the responsibility of graduate students while the tenured professors are out "researching" better practice. Experience is a red herring. The fact that a teacher has many years of experience does not have anything to do with how well one teaches. Finally, teachers tend to work on provisional certificates in poorer urban schools during their early years in the classroom. Schools with higher poverty rates tend to have more teachers on provisional certificates.

Rather than looking at straw men and red herrings perhaps we should be looking at the underlying problems of school success--

• Poverty
• Cultural differences
• Resistance

Only when we stop blaming teachers, parents, and the students themselves will we ever get to the bottom of effective school change.

Zoundry

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The Good Book, or just a good book?

The Daily Herald reports the following:

The Grapes of Wrath offered his first clue.A second came with another John Steinbeck classic, East of Eden. By the time Alex Cyhaniuk got around to reading Fahrenheit 451, the South Elgin High School sophomore knew to scout for references to the ancient text that permeates many of its pages--the Bible. For him, it was not a quest for religion but for literary meaning.

Teaching the literary references found in literature that have biblical foundation is not the same thing as teaching The Bible! It is quite true that one must have a passing knowledge of biblical references in order to fully understand what novelists and poets allude to in their text but teaching those textual references is done in the context of the text being read and not by teaching The Bible as a work of literature.

Teaching The Bible as literature as a ploy for teaching The Bible is fraught with far too much baggage to be of much value to be of much value to anyone save the fundamentalist wearing blinders. For example:

• Which translation would one use? It does make a difference. In Genesis, for example, yom echad, is often translated as the first day when a far better translation would be one day without reference to temporal time.
• Whose version of the text would be used? Would one insist on a Christian version and, if so, would it be a Catholic or Protestant version? Or should the Old Testament be read as a Jewish text using a Jewish translation in order to capture the references in their original form?
• Are Bible stories taught in isolation setting a foundation for literary references?

These are important questions that are generally not part of the public discourse regarding the fundamentalist desire to teach The Bible in the public schools. Perhaps they should be!

Daily Herald | News:

Zoundry

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ETS Pays $11.1 Million to Settle Teacher Test Lawsuit

In yet another case of improper scoring ETS must pay $11.1 to teachers covering lost wages, mental anguish and the like. This is not the first instance of ETS (or for that matter, other testing publishers) incompetent handling of test scoring. Not long ago in a widely reported story, ETS was guilty of improperly scoring a large batch of SAT tests thereby denying many students admission to the college or university of their choice.

In Illinois the publisher of the ISAT failed to deliver the tests to many school districts in the state in a timely manner.

This series of errors raises an important question in my mind. If scoring and delivery are significant issues, if management is so incompetent as to allow these types of errors, then how can we be so sure that they exercise competence in the construction of their tests. Incompetence breeds incompetence, greed is never satisfied. Since the testing industry has grown in the past few years can we be sure that tests are being developed along accepted psychometric principles? Are corners being cut just to meet deadlines for No Child Left Behind commitments? Can we trust the testing industry that cannot deliver on time and cannot accurately score tests of their own making? I wish I had the answers!

Praxis Settlement:

Zoundry

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Justices restore exit exam

"California's Supreme Court reinstated the high school exit exam as a diploma requirement Wednesday, less than two weeks after a trial court handed the Class of 2006 a free pass."

What is the issue in California? The trial court ruled that the California testing system discriminates against low-income students and students of color. The California Supreme Court held that the temporary injunction issued by the trial court should be set aside as the case moves through the appellate process. The underlying issue is not, however, a legal one rather it is a societal issue deeply tied to the current wave of xenophobia running rampant across our nation.

It is well-known that standardized testing is biased in favor of middle and upper income students who tend to be predominantly white. That tests discriminate is not a matter of controversy. What is controversial, however, is the high-stakes impact that testing has on our country. Nicholas Lehman writes about the meritocracy created and sustained by the testing industry in the United States in The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Lehman's argument is critical of the testing industry and the political drive to attach high-stakes results to testing at all levels.

Creating high-stakes testing arises out of what Berliner and Biddle call The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools. Here the authors argue that much of what is made of the crisis in American schools is a figment of the radical right's imagination. The statistical analysis that Berliner and Biddle use is important as they unpack each of the myths regarding the failure of American schools and public education.

What is going on in California and elsewhere with regard to high-stakes testing is a blatant attempt to divide Americans one from another. In spite of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, we are regressing as a nation into one that mandates division along a standard bell curve approach. Using testing to divide is what the late Stephen J. Gould called The Mismeasure of Man.

If we are to be a free society then, it seems to me, we must look for ways to include rather than separate. Inclusiveness is not a matter of homogenizing differences into an assimilationist broth where all diversity is lost through melting everything into a single clear mix but, rather, one that embraces cultural and social differences into a stew where flavors meld into an exciting mix yet the ingredients are clearly recognizable. Acculturation recognizes the contributions of difference rather than trying to erase those differences from the face of the earth.

MercuryNews.com | 05/25/2006 | Justices restore exit exam:

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