Standardised testing. 14

[berkshire]

This was the commencement speech by the valedictorian at a high school.
This was the grandson of a friend of mine. Whilst at that age kids know everything, non the less I think he had some valid points about todays education system. Note the principal cringing from time to time in the lower right hand corner of the screen..
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

 

[rotw]

If he really scored beyond everyone (going all through standardized testing) then he deserved the right to speak and is entitled to criticize the same rules that allowed him to climb and be in due position to militate for new rules/system ;
If he did not score that at the top, then I don't care that he got valid points - I would simply not listen to him because it would be too easy.

R. Feynmam has also said : Things are learned to be unlearned.

 

[hokie66]

I know the grandfather is proud, but I think the principal is proud as well, in spite of being a bit uncomfortable.

 

[Comcokid]

No doubt he is the valedictorian of that High School. Several references in his speech, including Yeats, that indicate he is very well read for a HS Student.

 

[LiteYear]

Spectacular. I admire his forthrightness. Hopefully gets some chins wagging at the least. It's not an easy thing to fix, but realising the problem is the first step. I did like the galvanisation with teachers, many of whom feel hamstrung by having to teach to the tests.

 

[KENAT]

Meh, having been educated in a system that relied heavily on standardized testing I'm not entirely convinced on the 'sky is falling' aspect.

However, he did make some good points relating to not everyone being as academically gifted as others in some of the fields some in academics seem to glorify.

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[SomptingGuy]

Where were you KENAT? We were streamed after the 1st year so that only the top 1/6th were entered for 'O' Levels. Maybe the GCSE changed all that. I doubt it.

- Steve

 

[KENAT]

Hampshire took GCSE's in 1994 just when they'd introduced the A*, though the second half of my education was at a non state school. No real streaming during my schooling until GCSE at which in a couple of subjects (math & maybe science) they had different difficulty levels of exam. In math the class got split into 2 based on ability but there were 3 tiers of paper as I recall. I was the only person that took the top level of paper and encountered a couple of questions that I didn't recall having been covered in the class. Fortunately taking the 'difficult' paper I only had to get a fairly low % to get an A. If you took the middle paper you had to get almost perfect to get an A and if you took the basic paper even if you got 100% I don't think you could get an A. Alternatively though, if I didn't get a high enough score to be at least a C - something ridiculously low like 20% or some such - then I'd have outright failed.

That said, in my earlier schooling the 'table's' within each class were sorted based on ability and occasionally that meant getting slightly different teaching.

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[IRstuff]

The sorting in US high schools is through honors and AP (advanced placement) classes. College Calculus 1 is now split into two years, AB and BC, but it used to be a one year class. That's assuming that the high school offers AP classes at all.

Getting a passing grade (3 or higher) on the AP exam will often get you college credit. Take enough of them, and you could skip an entire year of college, assuming you can get the classes you need for your major.

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[ornerynorsk]

Yes, the AP classes are a tremendous boon to those with the aspiration and resolve. AS IRstuff alluded to, many high schools still do not offer them. I know for certainty my own path would have differed greatly had they been available. So for all of the shortcomings of the current public education system, there are definite bright spots, as well.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[racookpe1978]

They didn't have "AP" as a standardized bunch of high school classes and tests when I was in high school in TX. But I DID take college level Physics I, Chemistry I as a junior; then Calculus, Physics II, Chemistry II, English Honors as a senior. Those, with placement tests after getting into college, gave me 38 credit hours towards the engineering course requirements when I enrolled as a "freshman" the next fall.

Not everything counted directly to the final degree, but I did have 96 credit hours after two years, so that helped to get me out in 4 years with a nuke eng degree with a little bit lighter load my senior year.

 

[IRstuff]

In some respects, the lack of AP classes is a form of the haves and have-nots, since you wouldn't necessarily have an AP class offering in a school where only 5 students could, or would, take the class, compared to the US News Top 1000 schools, where the schools are ranked by how many AP tests were taken as a percentage of school population. Even schools that are supposedly geared to the same populations have radically different distributions:

School T has ~120 students taking AP Comp Sci 2, and ~60 students doing International Baccaleaurate (IB) and AP
School V has ~10 students taking AP Comp Sci 2, and maybe 6 students doing IB/AP

Both compete for the same demographic, but School T draws from the entire SoCal region, while School V only draws from its city. And School V's raison d'etre seems to be to keep its city's students from transferring to School T, since that means the state dollars go with the students.

Other schools claim to make everyone take at least 14 AP exams (I think, mainly to get into the US News Top 100), but when you can find the score distributions, no more than ~60% get 3's, while School T has a bad year if less than 60% get 5's (5 is the max score on AP exams). These are in contrast with other schools that might not have any AP or IB programs, so someone who is capable and qualified to do so, can't. There were a number of students going to School T that spent an hour on the road, each way, every day to attend, but not everyone has parents that have that much freedom and time.

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[LiteYear]

So for all of the shortcomings of the current public education system, there are definite bright spots, as well.

It's a good point to make, and not having been educated in America it's nice to hear of some of the positive details. From a world perspective though, there's a worrying trend that seems to be directed towards de-valuing precisely these positive traits that have been highlighted in this thread. Pasi Sahlberg, Finland's Education Director, has coined it the Global Education Reform Movement, GERM. I think it is best summarised in the vernacular used by Bush, the No Child Left Behind policy. If that becomes your guiding principle, then these "AP" classes don't make sense. If you need to show no child is falling behind, then we must all be tested to the same yardstick and the emphasis naturally then tends towards reaching a threshold on that yardstick. That's hardly a lofty goal for national education.

The problem is that the GERM or NCLB principles run counter to the inherent benefits to society that prevalent education brings. A nation of "satisfactory" achievers in a handful of fields that some committee considers worthwhile today, turns into a sorry story a generation later. Compare that with a generation that has been exposed to a variety of fields, encouraged to excel in disciplines in which they show aptitude, and feel empowered to show creativity and individuality in even the mundane fields. In essence, dumbing down education to make sure everyone achieves the same baseline does very little for the education of a nation.

 

[IRstuff]

I don't think the NCLB means that everyone needs to be treated the same. There are not enough jobs for everyone to be a physics or math major, or that everyone MUST go to college. College Physics 1 is a "weeder" class that is made sufficiently hard to discourage all but the most fanatical from pursuing physics. My roommate, who started freshman year thinking he was going to be a physics major, declared English Lit as a major afterwards.

NCLB should mean that no person is so poorly educated that they can't perform in any job, or to even calculate their own salary. Standards are often wacky; the US News college list has encouraged some schools to require that every student take something like 14 AP exams, whether or not they wanted to, or cared to, or were even planning on going to college. Nevertheless, there are some minimum standards that everyone must be capable of, like being able to read, or being able to figure out one's own salary. These standards do not mean that everyone should be, or would be, taught only those two things, because we still need people to figure out satellite orbits and so forth.

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[SomptingGuy]

One problem with education is that those who argue about what's best can only draw from a sample of one: their own. It's quite rare to hear someone complain about their own education and suggest how it could have been given to them better. The kid's speech posted does just this - very refreshing.

Of course my (UK, '79-'86) high school education was perfect ;-) We potential scientists and engineers had double maths physics and chemistry rammed down our young throats long before anyone mentioned "college". We started university, essentially committed to a "major" from day 1. Most just extrapolated what they'd focused on for the last two years of high school.

The divisive, selective school system with its killer exam at 11 to decide who succeeded and who failed in life had been abolished in favour of leveling Comprehensive schools for all ... which streamed kids into losers and succeders anyway. The better kids managed to get into the few remaining schools from the selective era (Grammar schools), where two more years of education beyond the mandatory 16 yrs of age was the norm rather than the exception. It doesn't sound too different from the US system, just that the problems, goals and solutions have different acronyms.

- Steve

 

[LiteYear]

Nevertheless, there are some minimum standards that everyone must be capable of, like being able to read, or being able to figure out one's own salary.

No argument there, and my mistake if that's what NCLB pertains to. The subject of the speech was secondary school standardised testing, and that's my interest. If primary school has been effective, then reading, writing and arithmetic are givens and we're in the game of specialisation and refinement. That's the point where mandatory levels of competence become a little disingenuous.

 

[IRstuff]

Actually, sample of 3, me and my two sons. ;-)

Part of that argument, of course, is that those that have samples of the other kind are mostly not going be in this forum, except by proxy or by Youtube. There have been studies:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S37/75/69M50/index.xml?section=topstories

that suggest that poverty alone can adversely affect cognitive performance, so even if those schools were a School T or even a School V, they, as a collective whole, might not be able to take advantage of them.



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[SomptingGuy]

Wow! That link reads like a study aimed at proving an in-going assumption. That poor people are inherently stupid. That "mental bandwidth" (to use their phrase) can actually be lost through wasting it on mundane basic survival tasks. Only the idle (idle rich) have enough spare time to be intelligent.

Some say the reverse is often true. The downtrodden have to fight harder, not having been handed things on a plate. Aspiring to, not expecting success.


- Steve

 

[IRstuff]

"That poor people are inherently stupid"

The study is basically about environmental factors, not genetics. This is not different than childrens' academic performances typically taking a nose-dive when their parents get divorced.


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[berkshire]

Something Guy
My education in a UK school was at the leading edge of that, "self leveling comprehensive school system". In 1953 I had just passed the 11+ examination, My parents had given me a new bicycle as a reward and all was rosy . Then the government dropped a bomb on us, our grammar school was being combined with a local secondary modern school to form an experimental school. A BILATERAL COMPREHENSIVE school. Say what?
At age 12 I was having a hard time with schoolwork. my father was "helping me" with my homework , and he and I were practically coming to blows. My teacher did not help, when he wrote on one of my homework sheets " Hey Ken ( my dads name) your quadratic equation’s are getting better." over the next 3 years I did less foreign language, I had been studying French, and German. More Math and more metalwork. English was my worst nightmare, as I left, I remember my teacher saying ," how do you think you are going to get through life not knowing how to write properly." I look at some of the paperwork I get today, and think I am better than this, maybe my teacher did a better job than I thought, even though she did complain about my run on sentences.
When I left school I took an apprenticeship with one day of college and 3 nights in my own time. because I wanted to make things, not shuffle papers, and remember according to my teacher I could not write.
B.E.


You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.