In Massachusetts, some tenured teachers are “just saying no” to administering the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) without harsh repercussions. However, some teachers received a two-week suspension without pay and a letter of reprimand yet still have their tenured teaching position. The time might be right to “just say no.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Education Spending on Decline
To the editor:
Mark Twain said that there are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies, and statistics. However, here are some statistics that don’t lie.
One-third of our nation’s students go to schools that are substandard and environmentally unsafe. Across the United States, state spending on education is being squeezed as the money spent on prisons and corrections expands: education, $27 billion in 1980; $16 billion in 1995 on corrections.
It’s been said that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to abandon a child.
Carl Sagan said it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World: “All across America, school bond issues are regularly voted down. No one suggests that property taxes be used to provide for military budgets, or for agriculture subsidies, or for cleaning up toxic wastes. Why just education? Why not support it from general taxes on the local and state levels?”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Blame Students, Not Teachers, for Low Scores
To the editor:
Oh yes—tests, tests, tests. Where is it said that everything worth learning is on a test? The Science Proficiency Test contains 46 questions: 17 earth science (sixth grade in our district); 13 life science (seventh grade); and 16 physical science (eighth grade).
As we are all aware, March was proficiency test week in Ohio public school districts—writing, reading, math, citizenship, and science.
I teach (instruct) eighth-grade physical science at Monticello Middle School in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District. I feel really great because if I personally get the blame for any of my students not passing the science proficiency test, I will not feel guilty.
However, I will take 100 percent responsibility/accountability for the sixteen physical science test questions. I feel confident that I covered the basic concepts. However, I’m not very confident that more than 60 percent passed the science proficiency test. We will find out soon.
I reviewed my students’ CAT (California Achievement Test) science test scores taken in October. The medium national percentile was 49. Some 51 percent of students scored higher, and 48 percent of the students scored lower.
I’m going to try to find out how many of the proficiency physical science test questions my students answered correctly. My awareness from past proficiency science tests is that students do not need to know any memorized facts. They are usually given in the questions. What students do need to be able to do is read, comprehend, analyze data, draw inferences and conclusions, etc. Students need to learn to read in order to read to learn.
So parents, pundits, demagogues, politicians, ivory-tower idealists, philosophers, and school administrators should not blame teachers if students do not pass proficiency tests. They should put the blame and responsibility where it really belongs—with the students.
I would not blame my dentist if I didn’t brush and floss my teeth and developed cavities and periodontal disease.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
SAT measures your aptitude.
SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, is not an assessment or achievement test. Aptitude refers to “natural ability in a given area,” “gift,” “knack,” “know-how,” “talent,” “skillfulness,” and “capacity for learning.” As Marian Wright Edelman said, “You can get all As and still flunk life.”
David A. Hancock
Chester Township
The Plain Dealer
Tests That Fail Schools and Students
In schools around the nation, assessment is dominated by proficiency, standardized, multiple-choice (or guess), norm-referenced tests. When high stakes have been attached to these tests—from reporting school scores in the newspapers to making decisions about graduation—teachers are told, in effect, that they should focus on them. As a result, the weight of standardized testing distorts curriculum, instruction, and classroom assessment practices.
Multiple-choice questions treat learning as the memorization of isolated pieces of information, rules, and procedures. This is the lowest level of learning, and this approach assumes that first one learns the bits and only later thinks. However, research has shown that students learn best by thinking and doing. Focusing on the bits provides a weak vision of the content of any field of learning.
Norm-referenced tests place test takers on the “normal” or bell-shaped curve. But how much and what humans know does not necessarily fit such a curve, especially after good instruction. These tests are constructed so that half the students must be below average. Just think—half of all doctors graduated in the lower half of their class. The curve promotes the false belief that many students can’t learn very much, thereby reinforcing tracking! Norm-referenced tests also cannot tell us whether students have learned much or not—they are compared only with one another.
Unfortunately, schools at which students historically have scored low on standardized tests—often schools with many students from low-income families, students of color, or students whose first language is not English—are most likely to focus on raising test scores. As a result, these students get a low-level education focused on coaching for narrow tests. They are bored, turned off by school (which seems like purgatory), and don’t learn much. The tests are almost useless to teachers, and they provide almost no real information to the public.
David A. Hancock
Cleveland Heights
Hancock is a nature studies teacher at Heights High School.
Testing for Humanity
The ranking of school districts’ academic report cards is an abject, egregious behemoth, which focuses on proficiency test scores and is not the apotheosis of education or learning. It’s a cavil policy developed by the miscreants of the corporate oligarchy, the state board of education.
Other publications have advocated “firing principals and teachers—a demolition tactic—cleaning house.” Really?
It’s a fact that if all the teachers and principals from Solon High School (No. 1) or Chagrin Falls High School (No. 2) were transferred to a similar-sized high school in Cleveland for one year, academic achievement and
