Everyone's Not Proficient. Accept it and Move On.

"All students will be proficient in every public school by 2014."

Really? Proficient in math and science? or math and English? or basketball and poetry? In all subjects? In just two? How about Chinese and marketing?

Can all students understand every subject? Is full math knowledge possible - if so, to what level? I think not. This fantasy of Full Proficiency at all things is an educational holy grail, a pipe dream. It's certainly not going to block success in life. Every person learns to work around his limitations and succeed despite them. For some, those limitations have guided them into fulfilling their talents in spectacular fashion.

Certainly, I know hundreds of people who marvel at my math knowledge, marvel that THEY could never understand all that stuff, not realizing how limited my knowledge really is. I can't tell you how poor the writing and grammatical skills are for the population as a whole - even my principal has a degree in English yet is constantly writing things such as "All students THAT are in the building ..." rather than "All students WHO ..." and using "there," "they're" and "their" pretty much randomly. His math abilities rival a 6th grader's, yet he's pulling down a 6-figure income.

Is it possible to be successful in life if you aren't proficient in English and math? It certainly seems to be so.

Could most teachers pass the NY Regents test in math and English? I doubt it. Even some of the high school teachers OF those courses will have difficulties. I know many successful tradesman and managers and businessmen who couldn't come close to passing. Certainly there are vast reaches of this country where English is a foreign language and rarely heard.

Why should anyone care if the SAT scores aren't rising? Why should anyone reform their schools if AYP isn't met? I'm not entirely sure that they CAN consistently rise nor should we expect them to. It isn't possible to be all things. Over the last few years, I have seen story after story of successful schools whose gains have been the result of cheating, playing games, or practice overkill to the exclusion of all else. I don't want to have schools succeed if that's the method they use. Some of the "miracles" are the result of success by elimination - toss the low-scoring students to the curb and the average rises, which works for the remaining ones, I suppose. Private schools do this quite well. Also, those private schools are never tested in the same ways. Force them to "reform" and to submit to testing before you claim that the public schools are inferior.

Shouldn't we be looking to place students appropriately? Shouldn't we question whether ALL students should be taking the test - shouldn't many of them be looking at vo-tech or alternative placements, avoiding the test entirely? Is having 100% of the students proficient at ANYTHING by 2014 even a worthwhile goal or is it not even close to achievable because students are human, and humans are different?

I know that some will start the chorus of "We need twenty-first century teaching for twenty-first century students." This attempt at reform assumes that changing the teaching method will magically make everyone perfect. Like a million other reforms, this one won't work either because you are still dealing with people. You can reform all you like and you'll scratch the surface and ease the itch. You won't cure the patient and you won't make much difference.

Testing is interesting. It's not very useful, though.

A Response to the Income Gap Question and Comments.

Let's recap the last few posts, shall we? I've come to the conclusion that the income-scores correlation that shows up in every testing situation is actually rooted in the parents and their attitudes about school and education.

The smarter, motivated, dedicated parent who is demanding of a good education is also likely to have passed similar traits to his child which, while not being a guarantee certainly shows a strong correlation to that child's success. Show me a bored, unmotivated, or stupid child and I'll bet that you've got a bored, unmotivated or stupid parent. We just had open house and all that I saw reinforced my feelings on that - all of the visitors but one was the parent of a hard-working kid.

Yeah, yeah, I know. There are exceptions and everyone can point to the kid who breaks the mold. But averages don't care about your exceptions.

How else to explain that persistent gap between the rich and the poor? There's the racial gap, but that disappears when you control for income. Likewise for the gender gap, or the city-size gap. Examine the increases for repeat test-takers and you can see that even here, the differences aren't as great as that for income.

It's not a simple A-B correlation: More money does not make a kid smarter. The cause-effect isn't there. We need the confounding factor that causes both effects, sort of like the correlation between the amount of "Bling" and the low death rate in cars. Does "Bling" prevent deaths? No, but the ability to afford it means that you can also afford a safer car.

Jonathan asks "If I can paraphrase: Smart adults --> high income, Smart adults --> smart kids. If I have this right (and please correct me if I do not) I think it is bunk."

He then goes on to describe the exact things that do allow a wealthier parent to raise better students (and those traits invariably show up as "being smarter"):

"intellectually enriched environment, ... more expensive towns ... schools maybe not better, but at least better-funded. ... stimulating things around ... babysat by a reader ...more likely to be exposed to culturally enriching stuff. Plays ... the library ...travel ... fewer stresses from neighborhood, hunger, family ... depends on the parents' wealth, not on the parents' smarts."

And I agree. But what affects the wealth? I would maintain that any person can rise in this world, though for many it is harder than it is for others (racism, classism, sexism, and bigotry are alive and well -- the situation is improving but.) Being smart and motivated is a good start. Lazy and stupid are starting well behind the stagger.

To truly improve the students' performance, you can't just give them money. You can feed them and eliminate some stresses and move them into a wealthier town ... and get nowhere because that's not the cause in this relationship. You can't just move into a better neighborhood and suddenly improve your scores.

But the better neighborhood DOES have better schools and better students. What is cause and what the effect? We need to look at the acquisition of wealth. On average, which type of person will acquire wealth, a boorish lout or a diligent, studious worker?

Over the population, which group of people will stay in a company and rise in the corporate ladder, the smart and driven ones or the unmotivated slackers? Which type will job-hop (or be fired) and remain at the lowest levels of the many companies' pay-scales? Which type will recover from a major setback or rise from the slum and make something of himself? Which will read books, learn math, and practice speaking without an accent that labels him as uneducated? Which type of person will motivate his kids and provide a richer environment than that of his neighbors? Which single mothers will rise at 4:30am to tutor their children -- the alcoholic or the mother of a future President?

Pissed Off Teacher asks "How about all the money rich parents spend on SAT prep classes and private tutors? Lower income kids cannot get this extra help."

They don't get that help and that's a shame. I'd like to see ALL schools offer a half-credit SAT prep course, basically a review of math and English. Now that they've had a taste of what they'll need it for, they might be prepared to pay better attention and break out of the bad habits that they started school with.

I should also mention that the most-advertised grade bump that Kaplan Test Prep and others provide is simply the elimination of the common mistakes. Meeting once or twice a week for ten weeks is not enough time for more than test-taking strategies and gimmickry. Their "guarantee" of 100-point gains are backed by an offer to retake the course free. If the offer was for your original money back, then I'd listen.

Darren, who's obviously been hearing waaaaay tooo much tax-raising talk from his Governator said...

I know what let's do! Let's tax the rich, and if that doesn't work, let's tax them some more! Then, when there's no rich left, there will be none of this gap between rich and poor!

We'll have to cut him some slack. His "Republican" governor has been sounding like a tax-and-spend liberal Democrat lately.  That and those deficits would make anyone cranky.

So what do we do now?

I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. I'm not sure that the income-gap problem CAN be solved because it has already happened; what we are seeing in our classrooms is the fallout.

We already offer free-or-reduced lunch and breakfast. We already introduce them to the things that make intelligent, well-rounded, and educated people and try to help them break whatever mold they're in. We already offer extra help in the corridors because Packemin HS doesn't have any extra rooms.

What we really need to do is to stop agonizing over scores. We should look for improvement in each student and try not to worry so much about improvement from year to year and from cohort to cohort. We certainly should ignore the idea that 100% will achieve proficiency in four years.

Spending more money on the schools might or might not be the answer -- it really depends on whether you've been spending the right amount in the first place. If you've been undermining the system for years, cutting back further certainly won't help. If you're at the right level of funding, spending more won't help either.

Teach the ones in front of you. Do what you can. Don't try to save the world.

There, I said it.

Scores vs Income

From Schools Matter

The new Census Bureau report on income is out, and the New York Times has some interesting analyses. Here are a few of them summarized:

For the first time since the Census has been keeping records, median income is less than it was ten years ago. And even though the top quintile of workers' incomes increased, the decrease in the other four quintiles was significant enough to make the median income in 2008 less than it was in 1998. In short, the rich have gotten richer, and everyone else, poorer.
In terms of the relation between family income and SAT test scores, the Times analyis shows the statistical relation a monstrous direct correlation (.95). This same correlation, by the way, can be found in any set of state test scores for elementary school children, too. Poor kids do worse on high-stakes standardized tests, so let's keep them poor and contained by using these tests to determine who gets a chance for the best teaching, the best colleges, and the best jobs. Simple. The rest will get the corporate welfare apartheid charter schools with minimally-qualified missionaries from Teach for America, along with no libraries, no art, music, athletics, or even cafeterias. And thus, The New Eugenics in Action.
As family income and wealth goes, so go the test scores, so let's blame, once again, the schools and the teachers for the flat or diminishing test scores, rather than the corporate exporters of jobs over the past decade or the greed of CEOs or the enemies of workers' rights or the anti-educational curriculums of the testocrats.

Read the rest of it.