I am trying to like this magazine:
It is a libertarian publication and seemed to me to be a different slant on the news than we see from day to day. I thought some of you might enjoy it as well.
I just finished this article:
Its a lovely discussion of how the Federal No Child Left Behind Act is turning school administrators all over into true Americans - and by that I mean people willing to pad, spin, and change the standards rather than actually try to fix something. Here's a short snippet:
They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal. Jacob and Levitt argue that with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the incentives for teachers and administrators to manipulate the results from high-stakes tests will increase as schools begin to feel the consequences of low scores.
When I lived in Las Vegas, they had just started doing Math competency exams - this is before NCLB. The first year, an overwhelming number of students failed to pass. What was the conclusion? Of course, the test was too hard. Not like the thing wasn't likely researched and vetted and beta'd up the gazoo before it ever went in front of students, but really - it has to be a problem with the test.
Doesn't look like data and testing are going to be a reliable index for testing the schools until someone decides to rigorously proctor the proctors.
I'm not a fan of No Child Left Behind. I think when you tie a school's success or failure to a test that you inevitably wind up tying curriculum to the test, and to test taking for that matter. But truth be told I never really thought that the educators would be trying to game the system in the ways they appear to be. Wouldn't it just be better for the country to see all the schools fail honestly by a single, reasonable rubric? Then it would be difficult to argue that there are things that really need to be solved. I know that some people will invariably look bad that way, but how will they ever get what they need to fix things if they are expelling all their bad students prior to the test and then readmitting them the day after?
Wasn't this presidency going to be about education? Not really in the news that much of late is it? Maybe articles like this will light some fires.
2 comments:
magazines are not like vegetables... you shouldn't make yourself like them if you just don't.
You know, I genuinely like most vegetables, and things like artichokes and asparagus make me very happy. But Katy's right - perhaps Reason is the magazine equivalent of beets. So try other mags out instead - there's lots of really good ones. You do NOT have to eat your beets.
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