Vilifying test-based accountability is ludicrous
Tuesday, February 26, 2008Written by: Uncle Charley
From time to time I read education pieces with which I disagree but find to be thought-provoking. Then there are those that border on the laughable, like this opinion piece in yesterday’s Denver Post written by liberal activist and former state legislative candidate Angela Engel. It begins as follows:
In 2000, Citizens for Quality Public Education published “Senate Bill 186 and The Truth About Colorado Educational Reform,” a report warning about the consequences of grading schools based solely on standardized test scores….
Since then, everything the report cautioned concerning high-stakes testing has come to pass: narrowing curriculum, negative school climates, disenfranchised teachers, frustrated parents, and children who quickly losing sight of the value of their own education.
One blog post doesn’t allow enough space to refute this catalog of dire prognoses. But one might pause to ask what else state and federal school accountability laws are responsible for: Childhood obesity? Bullying? School gun violence? Attention deficit disorder? Male-pattern baldness? Global warming?
It’s bad enough that this opinion piece touts a publication nowhere to be found on the Internet, apparently published by a former political committee registered with the Colorado Secretary of State (unless there’s an eponymous organization without a Google listing). In the few traces of its record, CPQE is financing the same candidates backed by the teachers union. Okay.
Yet perhaps the most absurd sentence in the entire piece is a characterization of Denver’s Cole Middle School pre-SB 186 as “a thriving school for the performing arts.” In other words, this suburban liberal activist believes everything was just fine with this troubled inner-city Denver school before the state started measuring its performance. Hmmm….
Then Engel adds this description of one of the alleged ills caused by accountability:
Students now have fewer course electives. A survey by the Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of NCLB and high-stakes testing, 71 percent of the nation’s school districts have reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects.
One can only imagine how upset Engel might be to hear news from Albuquerque, N.M., about a proposed policy that would disallow students who do poorly on state tests from taking electives (H/T Intercepts). Some local middle school students didn’t react too well, either, sending their opinions to a local newspaper:
Of eight letters published, seven of them are full of grammar and spelling mistakes:
"I know I wont wont my eletive tooken away. wht about the sped kibs? Hae you thought about that!"
The students are responding to the possibility of APS taking electives away from students who fail state tests for math and reading.
Another student writes, "I dissagree with your oppion. If students dont have there electives we will have no reason to come to school. And if kids start not coming to school it will be your fault."
Read the story and watch the accompanying video. Quite disturbing, but not as surprising as I wish it were. While it may seem like an irreverent and unscientific response to Engel’s sketchy opinion piece, the New Mexico story does raise some pertinent questions, such as: Are these students’ literacy skills being harmed by No Child Left Behind and school accountability? Will they be better off taking electives and not able to read and write?
State and federal accountability policies are far from perfect, but they aren’t the cause of all the academic ills Engel suggests. In many cases they have highlighted the problems that were already there, and in a few cases have actually provided motivation to enact effective reforms. Maybe Albuquerque has something to learn, too.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I’d have to totally agree with Charlie, I laughed and then almost cried reading Angela’s evidence free argument.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Angela Engel always has been single-minded in her dislike of CSAPs, but I’ll agree (for once) with Uncle Charley that she’s really gone too far in attributing everything that’s wrong with education to standardized testing. The column was a recap of testimony she recently gave in the House Education Committee, complete with her garbled history of Cole Middle School.
In fact, a decade ago, part of the Cole building was home to the Denver School of the Arts, before it moved on to an unused building and then to its current snazzy site. None of that, of course, had anything to do with Cole’s troubled history as a middle school.
Apropos electives, the new “Profiles of Success” study by Donnell-Kay found that a broad range of classes, including arts and humanities, including arts and humanities, is one of 10 successful practices of eight Colorado schools that have been consistently successful in raised achievement of low-income students. See the full story at http://www.ednewscolorado.org.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Thanks for your comments. I think the “Profiles of Success” study is especially instructive here, since the highlighted schools have found ways to thrive under high-stakes testing while preserving the arts and humanities focus. And these schools aren’t alone, either.