Will Texas Lead the Nation Away from Child Abuse Through Testing?

When I was teaching in Louisiana in 2000, the state gained the dubious distinction as the first in the nation to use a single test to determine a child's future in the elementary grades. Since then, more than 10 states and New York City have joined the unethical and abusive practice.

Now it looks as if at least half of the "test and punish" national obsession may beginning to crack, and it is a beautiful irony that Texas, the inspiration for the educational genocide of the past nine years, may lead us back toward some semblance of humane education assessment. First, this from FairTest:

Issue: Mar 2009
The Texas Association of School Administrators has released a report offering a sweeping plan for reforming their state’s education system. “Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas” calls for fundamentally altering the way society thinks of public education’s purpose and changing priorities from preparing students for the workforce to preparing them for success in life. A key recommendation is to shift from high-stakes standardized testing to multiple measures of student learning.

“For assessment to be of any value, it must move from the present ‘autopsy’ model to one that more resembles a ‘daily check up,’ which continuously identifies student strengths, interests, motivations, accomplishments, and other information necessary so that teachers can design the learning experiences that will best meet each student’s needs.” The ideas in this report can inform the ongoing debate over high school exit exams, the No Child Left Behind law, which was largely modeled after Texas’s high-stakes testing program, and other state assessment practices.

The Texas superintendent’s report is available here.

Now it seems the Texas Legislature is getting into the act with matching bills that would alter rules on elementary student advancement. The new legislation would essentially repeal the child abuse through testing that has taught hundreds of thousands of children failure at an early age over the past eight years. Here is a crucial section from HB 3:

SECTION 7.
. . . .
(a) Not later than the first day of the school year, a school district shall determine the requirements for student advancement from one grade level to the next. In determining whether a student may be promoted to the next grade level, the district shall consider:
(1) the student's score on an assessment instrument administered under Section 39.023(a), (b), or (l);
(2) the recommendation of the student's teacher;
(3) the student's grade in each subject or course; and
(4) any other necessary information, as determined by the district.

And here is a nice op-ed on the subject from the Longview News-Journal:

LONGVIEW NEWS-JOURNAL
Tuesday, March 10, 2009

We don't imagine a long line of folks gathering at the state Capitol to defend the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS. Bills filed in both chambers in the past week (Senate Bill 3 and House Bill 3) would eliminate the test. Right now, the test is scheduled to be phased out for high school students in 2011-12, but would continue for children in lower grades. Eliminating the test at all levels would force classroom attention away from teaching to that test — required for graduation and even grade advancement — and toward better preparing students for either college or the workplace.

It should be clear what we're doing in Texas isn't working particularly well. The state ranks fourth from the bottom in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and dead last in the percentage of adults with a high school diploma. A recent study by education and counseling professors at Sam Houston State University found less than one third of all Texas high school graduates have adequate preparation for college courses, based on Texas Education Agency standards. Similar studies show workplace-bound high school graduates woefully unprepared.

The new legislation, according to the Houston Chronicle, would eliminate the requirement that students in grades three, five, eight and 11 pass the TAKS to proceed to the next grade level. It would also create two types of diplomas: one for students headed to college, and another for students seeking training in high school for a particular career or trade. That dovetails nicely with local efforts to develop a local workforce by encouraging school districts to expand and improve what used to be called vocational programs.

Not every student is college-bound. Indeed, most aren't, according to statistics. It stands to reason that Texas schools need to do a better job of helping those students be prepared to join the workforce — especially in these tough economic times.

As Senate bill sponsor Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, put it, "We have counted on testing and testing only. And it's caused a lot of angst in the schools."

The present system isn't working. Campuses are primarily judged by the state as to how well their students perform on the TAKS, and how much improvement has been made. Under Shapiro's bill, and its House companion, filed by Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, campuses would be recognized for improvement in a number of areas — from student achievement to preparing students for the workforce.

Student testing isn't going away under this measure. But it will cover more than minimum skills, and it will do what it's supposed to do — measure a student's academic improvement from one year to the next. That would be a considerable improvement over the present system.

As Shapiro further said, "All of the foibles, all of the fallacies in the system here just became glaring."

We suspect many teachers and parents would agree. We certainly do.

Eugenics is Alive and as Sick as Ever in Rockland County, New York

In defiance of common sense, core research studies, the best thinking from universities, ethical norms, and humanitarian principles, the loons in charge of schools in East Ramapo, New York have run the clock backwards by almost a hundred years to a time in America when it was cutting-edge thinking to propose identification and segregation of defective individuals that stood in the way of American aspirations for purity and perfection.

Today in East Ramapo, instead of using the crude IQ tests that Yerkes, Terman, and Goddard devised to separate the poor and the brown from others with non-defective "germ plasm," we use crude standardized achievement tests on young humans (1st graders) whose normal developmental differences would make such tests a joke, if the results were not being used to fail first graders, to segregate them, to drill them in math and reading, and to remove art, music, social studies, and science from their lives.

Can you guess the snazzy title of this test-and-segregate policy for first graders? The Gift of Time. Let's all nominate Dr. Mitchell Schwartz, retiring superintendent, for the 2008 Orwell Prize.

Can this really be happening in 2008, in America? From the NYTimes:

By WINNIE HU

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — With the increasing emphasis on standardized testing over the past decade, large urban school systems have famously declared an end to so-called social promotion among youngsters lacking basic skills. Last year, New York flunked 6 percent of its first graders, and Chicago 7.7 percent.

Now the 8,400-student East Ramapo school district in this verdant stretch west of the Palisades is going further, having revived a controversial retention practice widely denounced in the 1980s to not only hold back nearly 12 percent of its first graders this spring but to segregate them in a separate classroom come fall.

The special classes, which are limited to 15 students and follow a pared-down curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic, are called the Gift of Time and come with extras like tutoring and field trips to a local farm.

School officials say that adding resources — about $2,000 per child, in a district whose average general-education spending per pupil is about $13,000 — and tailoring the lessons for low-performers works. Nearly 80 percent of the 54 first graders and 47 second graders in Gift of Time classes this past school year now read at grade level (although they are, of course, a year behind their age group); at least 30 percent of the younger group and 11 percent of the older group are above grade level, according to district evaluations performed last month.

Iraida Hada, the principal of Hempstead Elementary here, said that merely holding back students without a special program to address their needs would not have been as effective.

“How are we going to make it work the second time around, if it didn’t work the first time?” asked Mrs. Hada, whose school was one of five in the district that inaugurated the program this year. “What are we going to do for them? What are we going to change? I believe this program has afforded them another opportunity.”

But some parents have greeted the idea with skepticism, and many education experts say it doubly stigmatizes vulnerable children by combining two practices widely discredited by research: retention and tracking low-achievers.

“This is very worrisome,” said Jay Heubert, a professor of law and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, arguing that both holding back students and separating them can lower self-esteem and academic achievement, increasing the likelihood of dropouts.

Michelle Brown, 34, a certified nursing assistant, fought unsuccessfully to keep her son, Nallehc, out of the program this year for fear that he would be picked on — which he was.

“We believe that for you to have to repeat first grade, it means that you are not capable, you are a dunce child,” Ms. Brown said. “It was bad enough to repeat, and then to repeat in a Gift of Time class. I thought it was a polite way of saying he’s a special-needs child.”

The concept, often called transition classes, was tried in kindergarten in thousands of schools — including East Ramapo’s — in the 1970s and ’80s. Lorrie Shepard, dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said such programs were generally abandoned after students failed to show significant academic gains and often developed a worse attitude toward school.

“Kids as young as kindergarten were aware that they were being held back and that what they were doing wasn’t normal,” Dr. Shepard said.

But with the federal No Child Left Behind law and a battery of state mandates increasing pressure on schools to raise test scores, efforts to end the longtime practice of promoting children based on age rather than achievement have taken on new urgency. Districts in Milford, Del., and Lakeland, Fla., are among a handful nationwide that have been experimenting with transition classes in recent years, though both dropped them in the face of parental resistance and, in Florida, concerns among teachers.

“I had a hard time putting just the low-achieving kids together,” said Betty Fitzgerald, principal of Lakeland’s Churchwell Elementary, which ran a separate class for repeating third graders for two years in response to tougher state standards. “It’s like saying, ‘You all are low kids, and you all didn’t pass.’ ”

(The Delaware schools scrapped the retention piece: low-performing kindergarteners are promoted, but grouped in a first-grade class that emphasizes basic skills)

Supporters of the separate classes say they give struggling students a chance to learn at their own pace rather than setting them up for future failure by shoe-horning them into a uniform timetable. Since the 1970s, several schools scattered around New Hampshire have placed kindergarteners in what they call readiness classes for up to a year before starting first grade; the classes are usually smaller and promote social development as much as academics.

“I feel it raises the academic bar in the entire school,” said Dillard E. Collins, principal of an elementary school in Hampstead, N.H., who enrolled his own son in a readiness class in nearby Nashua in the 1980s. “If all the children are ready to go, it’s like moving the starting line up.”

Here in Rockland County, the East Ramapo district serves a mostly poor and minority student population: nearly three-quarters qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program; about 56 percent of the overall public school enrollment is black, 25 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Asian.

District officials said they revived Gift of Time classes to address a widening gap in the vocabulary and other skills of the youngest children. Similarly, the district began requiring full-day kindergarten last year for the bottom one-fifth of students.

Dr. Mitchell J. Schwartz, a psychologist who retired this spring as the district’s superintendent, said East Ramapo had similarly tried separate classes in the 1980s to address an achievement gap between boys and girls (boys were behind). He said those classes, also called Gift of Time, were successful but were eliminated after several years for financial reasons. . . .

Yesterday Congressman Miller got through the House a bill that would shut down the human rights hellholes that operate under the name of youth boot camps. Where is the bill that would put an end to the kind of publicly supported abuse and humiliation that is happening in Rockland County's first grade classes for poor children? Inspired, no less, by that policy fiasco we shall never forget as No Child Left Behind?

Some price to pay, huh, for a school privatization plan gone haywire?