Oh No! Actual standards!

sdw2001

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88107,00.html





Read the part about the test being unfair to minorities because it only deals with the white ango-saxon "experience".



Liberal Activist organizations will continue to oppose any accountability whatsoever. What groups such as the ones in the article want (not to mention the NEA and AFT) is unlimited funding and no basic standard of achievement, not to mention a vehicle to indoctrinate children into their liberal politcal agenda.

ena

This is also an AP story for all the FoxNews flamers....

pfflam

I like that recently aired story about the grammar question in the SAT: you might remember it, the one where the answer they wanted as correct was in fact wrong.



I think standardized tests are a good idea.

I also think that the tests themselves should be thoroughly reviewed for mistakes and also in order to weed out culturally specific knowledge based answers.





now that said: SDW are you a parody . . .. where do you come up with this 'indoktyranate with that ther libayrul genda' talk . . . . you have got to be kidding me.

you and scott are like cro magnon men of ideology: blunted eyebrow ridges and knuckles all a-draggin

bunge

Standardized tests are a poor idea because teaching ultimately changes from helping students learn, to making students 'know' the test. It's a dumb idea.

ghost_user_name

Besides these tests, how are you evaluated in high school?

giaguara

maybe the white students score in media better, because they come more often from rich, well educated families.

giant

Again, Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.



I really, really, really, really hope that sdw's distorted and completely uninformed world view does not reflect any sort of mainstream mentality. Background education is extremely important when trying to understand the world around you.



I find it particularly fightening that the person who started this thread calling for accountability in education is so obviously undereducated himself. Anyone with a decent college education knows why standardized testing has always been flawed from a variety of angles including statistically, sociologically, and racially. Anyone with a decent education also knows that standardized testing was born out of racial prejudice.



Oh, and anyone with a decent education (or really anyone with a clue) knows that little in this world really ever boils down to 'liberal/conservative.' Reducing the world to a simple dichotomy is nothing more than advertising simple-mindedness.



Which brings us back to standardized testing. Where do high school students (and those equivalent) get off bashing others when it comes to education? What a joke.

sondjata

The real kicker in this article is that persons who failed the FCAT or whatever it's called, recieved decent enough grades on the SAT to gain admission to colleges. This means that there IS something wrong with Florida's test. Exactly what is wrong, we don't know 'cause we haven't seen the test. I would like to know the breakdown of this test and it's results. How many students failed the math portion, which is arguably the only universal subject in any standardized test. Of the verbal sections what qustions were most consistenly missed by students. In the case of vocabulary, there's really no excuse. It is imperative that parents and teachers expose students to diverse reading material in order for students to absorb and develop working vocabularies. How many of the 73% of white students had the aide of tutors or other forms of test preparation which may or may not be accessible across the board?

mrmister

"Anyone with a decent education also knows that standardized testing was born out of racial prejudice."



Crazy me--I thought it was born out of the need to find a method, however flawed, of tracking student learning on a large scale with quantifiable numbers. Tell us more.

giant

Quote:

Originally posted by mrmister





Tell us more.

It's called 'reading.'* You can even get the books for free at a place called a 'library.' Hell, if you work hard enough you can apply for free money to go to 'school.' It's pretty sad if you are expecting to get your education from a computer product forum.



funny I have to explain this to someone with a book out.

tmp

The problem with standardized testing is not just that the tests can be culturally biased, but that they create a situation where the focus of education is learning the test and nothing else. You just learn rote facts and not how to learn.



It also takes out of the hands of the educators the say as to who is ready to graduate. Now, maybe some teachers and principals like that idea, but it's really their job to tell little Johnny whether he's ready for the big old world.



As an aside (and as a liberal Democrat) I would like to see what questions that these people are so head up about. I'm not talking about reading and writing skills which might not be something recent immigrants would do well on; what are these biased questions about the white experience?

brussell

Quote:

Originally posted by Sondjata

The real kicker in this article is that persons who failed the FCAT or whatever it's called, recieved decent enough grades on the SAT to gain admission to colleges. This means that there IS something wrong with Florida's test.

Or there could be something wrong with the teacher's grades.

Quote:

Originally posted by giant

Anyone with a decent education also knows that standardized testing was born out of racial prejudice.

Perhaps they were born out of an idea to be as objective and unprejudiced as possible. Why create an objective test if one can simply racially discriminate without the test?

Quote:

Originally posted by Anders the White

Besides these tests, how are you evaluated in high school?

grades, based on work in each class

Quote:

Originally posted by bunge

Standardized tests are a poor idea because teaching ultimately changes from helping students learn, to making students 'know' the test.

Yes, definitely. But the upside is that you have a more objective standard to see if schools are really doing what they're supposed to do. The test material itself must adequately cover what we really want the students to learn.

giant

Quote:

Originally posted by BRussell



Perhaps they were born out of an idea to be as objective and unprejudiced as possible. Why create an objective test if one can simply racially discriminate without the test?

It's extremely well documented. Why do it? Lots of reasons. Look it up! They teach whole classes on this. History of science is a pretty cool subject when you get down in the dirt. You really see how there's always a story behind the story.

outsider

Quote:

Originally posted by giant

It's called 'reading.'* You can even get the books for free at a place called a 'library.' Hell, if you work hard enough you can apply for free money to go to 'school.' It's pretty sad if you are expecting to get your education from a computer product forum.



funny I have to explain this to someone with a book out.

Or you can skip all that and play ball really, really well and get a free ride.

alcimedes

Quote:

High schoolers have as many as six opportunities before 12th grade to pass the exam. Twelfth-graders who have failed so far can take the test again in June.



State officials say FCAT scores this year have actually increased for the first time overall among minority students, and call the boycott a politically motivated protest against the Republican governor, a frequent target of Democratic voters in the black and Hispanic communities.



Frances Marine, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education, said at least 40 percent of students who aren?t graduating because of the FCAT haven?t passed other criteria ? like credit hours and grades.

so, approximately half of the people who aren't graduating also haven't passed based on other criteria. not sure why they're lumped in with the group of "kids who aren't graduating because of this test".



other than that, standardized tests are also good at picking out bright kids who don't try, something grades often miss.



as for a racial bias, it should also be noted that for the first time ever, there was improvement across the board for minority students. guess the tests aren't being racist enough.

brussell

Quote:

Originally posted by giant

It's extremely well documented.

It is extremely well documented, but not by people like Gould. The people who started educational/standardized testing were liberal radicals like James Bryan Conant, a Harvard president who hated the class-based admissions used there. He later became the first Chairman of ETS.



Him and the others who started standardized educational testing in the US were egalitarian liberals who wanted to break down society's pre-set boundaries, already very racially prejudiced, and instead use objective tests.



Of course, it has backfired, because the tests do find racial differences. But they weren't originally based on racial prejudice.



In my view, saying the tests are biased or the people who initated them are racially prejudiced is blaming the messenger. Blacks do worse on test than whites? Well, wouldn't you expect that after centuries of some of the worst treatment and denial of educational opportunities? There would be something wrong with the tests if they didn't show any effect of that history. Blaming the test is blaming the wrong source.



Here's a link to a Frontline program about the SAT, with links about the history of educational testing.

giant

We are talking about wo different stages. I'm focused more on the idea that blanket mental tests of any sort and the idea that they provide much useful information, whether you are talking about statistical overviews or individuals. Reliance on testing was born out of racial issues, though whether folks were aware of it at the time is debatable. I'm also coming from the understanding that Binet's test was one of the first important tests to really try to assess the abilities of students (of course, they would have been grammar student age).* I'll check out your link and learn more about standardized testing and college entrance exams in particular. I find this stuff really interesting.



If anyone needs any help in realizing the european bias, when in high school did you take any sort of class detailing pre-colonial african history and important figures? The high school I went to almost a decade ago is not only considered one of the best in the nation, it is half black. Yet somehow african history courses were sparse if existant at all.



*[edit] see below that the SAT descended from the Army Tests.

timo

Quote:

Originally posted by BRussell

In my view, saying the tests are biased or the people who initated them are racially prejudiced is blaming the messenger. Blacks do worse on test than whites? Well, wouldn't you expect that after centuries of some of the worst treatment and denial of educational opportunities? There would be something wrong with the tests if they didn't show any effect of that history. Blaming the test is blaming the wrong source.

The problem that you're skirting, of course, is the legitimizing quality of these tests. They are used to differentiate, and their claim of being objective is transfered to the act of differentiating. Differentiation is a power game and labelling tests "objective" is one way to render opposition to the tests irrelevant.



In the Florida case, you've got kids who have jumped through all the hoops set up for them, sans one. By giving the test so much weight, the Florida system is also saying "hey, it doesn't matter what kind of effort you put into school, the only thing that matters is mastering the logic of muliple choice."



It is also well documented that specific test-prep regimes, like Kaplan, can improve a standardized test score, which begins to poke holes in just how "objective" the whole enterprise is.



Now, if the tests were given and the passing grades noted, with the info plowed back into the schools as a check, I'd say why not. But what we've got here is a system that penalizes the very students it needs to better address.

giant

Quote:

Originally posted by BRussell



Here's a link to a Frontline program about the SAT, with links about the history of educational testing.

Just as I thought. Read the short history of the SAT and you see Brigham's Army Tests as the source. Well documented by Gould and exactly what I am talking about.

scott

Quote:

Originally posted by Sondjata

The real kicker in this article is that persons who failed the FCAT or whatever it's called, recieved decent enough grades on the SAT to gain admission to colleges. This means that there IS something wrong with Florida's test.





...

There's no other possibility?

pfflam

There are some good arguments here, pro and con. (well... except that moronic bit about a 'conspiratyrany of Librls') I'd like to modify my notion a bit:



I believe that we should test students and yet that the test should not be the full measuring device for final analysis: I think that the problem of creating an environment where students learn towards testing rather than learn towards character development or 'edumacation' is a real problem.



ANd yet and yet and yet . ...



Strangely enough, in that I am lumped together with those Liberal Conspiratorial agenda mongering pinkos, I actually believe in the notion of the Western Canon . . . I think that it should be porous and ever shifting, but, there should still be a touchstone of a historical tradition that defines excellence with regards to critical and literate thought.

but I also believe in balance

The Canon should also include Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddhist texts, Mencius etc etc, and more contemporaneously, Mishima, Tanazaki, etc etc . . ..



In the same light, standardized tests should be given but with the understanding that there are many forms of 'knowledge' that simply do not lay down and play dead for quantifiable analysis.



There is also something to be said for testing towards certain goals: if you will go to college in the Humanities then Eglish and writing *edit* imean riting* should be tested, etc etc.



Balance . . . Im all about balance