Category: Standardized Testing

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

11/3/2019

Last week my post "The New Era of Children's Author-Driven Nonfiction" discussed children's nonfiction literature that is finally coming into its own. It had a HUGE response!
I was presenting it as something new but, I must confess, nonfiction children's trade books have been noticed for quite a long time. Who, exactly, has discovered these wonderful books? First, the creators of standardized tests. They excerpt our writing for reading comprehension passages. Second, educators of kids with learning challenges and the gifted. My question is: if these books are used by educators at each end of the learning spectrum, what are the great masses of "average or normal" kids in between compelled to read in school?

Textbooks with worksheets, study questions, and quizzes
Schoolbooks with worksheets, study questions and quizzes.

I put an illustration above from Wikimedia commons to show you what these books look like. Compare it to the picture I used last week. (It's not far; scroll down.)

How come this is happening?

If we're going to give standardized tests to compete with the way kids perform in other parts of the world, we have to standardize education, right?
In order to standardize education we have to make it teacher proof. We have to assume that teachers can't be trusted to seek out their own study materials to fit curricula. We've stopped giving them creative autonomy. (Ask a public school teacher, " So, how's that working for you, lately?")

What happens when you give kids a taste of writing that is compelling, (not compelled)? Let's experiment and find out.

(Drum roll) Presenting the Nonfiction Minute --Short, self-contained essays written by award-winning children's book authors with an audio file so that the more challenged readers have access to content. Make them multi-media by including art and video as appropriate plus information about the author so students can get books at the library by an author whose Minute has whetted their appetite for more.

What are the results?
Five million page views and counting. Lots of letters and comments from teachers and students. We've added a Transfer to Teaching for each Minute (T2Ts), giving suggestions for using the material with students. (Don't know if any real kids actually went to the library, maybe someone can fill me in.)

March is Standardized Test Month. It creates so much anxiety that teachers are given instructions on how to preserve test answer-sheets with vomit on them. We hear our Minutes are used for test prep. That was not our intention.

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What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

30/7/2018

The “School Reform” movement is characterized by a top-down, disruptive administrative process bent on privatizing public education. It includes charter schools (start-up schools using public funds with little or no financial oversight thus becoming ripe for corruption and other forms of failure) and voucher programs (where public funding is siphoned off so that students can go to private schools). It has had a great deal of criticism from Diane Ravitch, who aggregates reports of successes and failures in support of public education, a necessary institution for our democracy.

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by November Learning (BLC2018) which is focused on children and how to help them learn effectively. Jonathan P. Raymond was one of the speakers. His new book Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America got my attention. As an author, I don’t know much about school administration. Raymond followed Rudy Crew as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in August of 2009 to December of 2013 with 46,000 students of which 75% had family incomes below the federal poverty line and spoke more than forty different languages. It was also the period where the State of California was in its sixth straight year of budget cuts to school districts.

Raymond moved to Sacramento with his family and entered his three children in the public schools. Then he spent the first hundred days visiting every school in his district, sometimes as many as three a day. He came armed with a vision of educating the Whole Child— “head, heart, and hands”—a philosophy that looks at children as individuals and addresses issues of readiness to learn (like good nutrition), and reaches out to the parents and community as partners in this vision. He identified the six worst schools and decided to make them a priority. He hired insiders, with proven value, to become part of his team. He is anti-standardized testing and is profoundly influenced by John Dewey and the contemporary formidable educator Linda Darling-Hammond. All of these things made me sympathetic to his journey.

There was one aspect of Jonathan P. Raymond’s preparation for this job, however, that gave me pause. Raymond briefly summed up his early career as a lawyer and politician who became a Broad Fellow at the Broad Academy for ten months in preparation for an administrative job in education. Diane Ravitch offers this post on some of what the Broad Academy has done and what it stands for. His belief in educating the Whole Child and his experience of the Waldorf school progressive education overrides some of what he learned from Broad. Here’s what Raymond says about “school reform” and teachers:

“It’s no secret that some people in the so-called “school reform” movement are at war with teachers’ unions, and whether they intend it or not, are perceived as being at war with teachers themselves. What I learned in Sacramento and keep learning as I move forward personally and professionally, is that no effort to transform a school or a district can succeed without recognizing the dignity and worth of teachers [italics, his] through appropriate compensation, opportunities for professional development and positive collaborative working conditions.”

He also said:

“The Broad Academy did me no favors with it came to union relations. ‘People who come from outside education are more used to working in performance culture versus entitlement culture,’ Broad’s director told The Sacramento Bee when my appointment was first announced. Disparaging hard-working educators by calling them ‘entitled’ is not how I would have set the table. “

His last chapter, “Solutions: Five Keys to Reimagine Schools,” puts leadership in the center with input from students, teachers, and community resulting in compromise in which all factions have buy-in. He is at odds with the entrenched top-down organization that is a tradition in most districts.

Jonathan P. Raymond’s title Wildflowers is a metaphor for the potential of all children to find a way to bloom when they encounter the proper nurturing environment for the special idiosyncratic germ within them. This is a passionate, thoughtful book that can bring vision and hope to our public schools.

What Can Happen to Learning When There Is No Standardized Testing?

13/6/2018

My brilliant, enthusiastic, physically active, Xposure kids just before we parted for the summer.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out the inanity of a standardized test question that had been created out of a paragraph that I had written. The company creating the test had paid me for the rights to expose at least 100,000 kids to my words. There are many things wrong with submitting millions of children and thousands of teachers to the taking of the tests and, more importantly, the waste of instructional time spent prepping for the tests. One of the most significant outcomes of all this testing is the impact it has had on learning. All the joy is sucked out of classrooms, replaced by anxiety and stress.

But the origins of standardized testing is much more sinister than even the current outcomes. I just read a piece, “The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing,” by John Rosales, who writes for the NEA. Starting at the beginning of the 19th century, with its influx of immigrants, white Anglo-Saxon social scientists became concerned that their hegemony was being threatened. They wrote about the inferiorities of other races and designed tests, which evolved into SATs, ACT (American College Testing) PSATS, and Binet’s IQ tests to prove that blacks were not as intelligent as whites and allowed for the military to put black soldiers in segregated groups. And so it began and continues to this day.

Rosales cites Gil Troy’s article “The Racist Origins of the SAT,” slamming the originators of these tests: Binet, the Frenchman who created a test that evolved into the IQ test; Carl Brigham, who developed aptitude tests for the US army; and Lewis Terman from Standford, who adapted Binet’s test for the Stanford-Binet IQ test. “All-American decency and idealism coexisted uncomfortably with these scientists’ equally American racism and closemindedness.”

As a long-time associate of my alma mater, Columbia’s Teachers College, I have attended meetings and conferences with lots of hand-wringing on the “Achievement Gap.” Isn't it possible that test results demonstrating the under-achievement of African and Hispanic Americans is an artifact of racially biased tests that are still being used today? FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, has won a lawsuit against the Texas TAAS test for its racist bias.

My new stand for education is to throw out all the testing and bring the joy of learning back to the classroom. I don’t have hard evidence about how this can be transformative but I just finished working with a group of boys (4th, 5th, and 6th graders) at an Xposure Foundation after school program. (Dog whistle—no tests.) Originally, I had planned on having the kids make videos of science tricks from my book We Dare You!. But then we decided to settle upon one interesting trick involving air pressure.

The trick in question is called “A Really BIG Sucker” and it asks the question, “What is the length of the longest straw you can suck through and still get something to drink?” I had a very intense first session with the kids, invoking Socrates by asking them question after question until they came to realize that it was the force of air pressure on the surface of their drink that pushed the drink up the straw. Suddenly, there was that wonderful light in their eyes. Instead of making a video of the trick, the boys were fascinated by the science! They began asking questions that led us to new experiments (ones I hadn't thought of) on subsequent days. They discovered that they could get a some fluid through an 8.5 -foot piece of aquarium tubing used as a straw. This led to experimenting with a 25-foot length of tubing, with the drinker in a stairwell, sucking from a glass of juice two stories down!

At our last meeting at the end of the school year, I gave each boy a copy of my new STEM Award book How Could We Harness a Hurricane?, which includes yet another discussion of the many powers of air pressure. It’s a challenging book, but I have no doubt it will be a highlight of their summer vacation. This is this kind of learning experience that changes lives. One boy said to me, "It's an honor to have met you." I feel it was my honor to have met them.

I’m not sure how you could measure their experience on a standardized test. But I saw no evidence of an achievement gap. There was no agenda here except inherent joy of learning.

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

25/4/2018

Wikimedia Commons

Now that teachers and students are almost through surviving this year's standardized testing, I thought you might be interested in a time when a standardized test was no big deal.

I started my career as a teacher in the early ‘60s. For most of you who are too young to remember, let me tell you what it was like. First, I had a very hard time finding a job. I was 22 years old, married, and armed with a Master’s degree in high school biology, chemistry and physics instruction. I had no experience, except for student teaching; yet, I had to be paid a higher starting salary because I had an advanced degree with no guarantee that I'd be any good. And I was married, which implied that I would get pregnant and create problems for a school to replace me. I was routinely asked at interviews what my intentions were for starting a family (now against the law). I was ultimately hired by an unmarried, careerist, public school, female principal to teach 7th and 8th grade science. She put her arm around me and said, “I think you have great potential as a teacher. Whatever time you give us, I’m grateful for.” I gave them 2 ½ years and was forced to quit in my sixth month of pregnancy because I “showed.”

Make no mistake. I LOVED teaching. The department chair handed me a textbook to teach from. I took one look at it, and decided I couldn’t inflict such dry, pedantic stuff on my students. I also noticed that my classroom door was closed and no one was watching me. So I went to the library and found exciting books on the same subjects I was required to teach. I used them to create my own materials. Perhaps I was an outlier. I had no idea with my colleagues were doing in their classrooms. One day, when Mr. Dinsmore, the militant, scowling, assistant principal unexpectedly dropped in to observe me, my students and I were in the middle of deriving the equation for the Doppler Effect (in 8th grade!). (The Doppler effect is the change in the pitch of a sound from a moving source--you've heard it from ambulance sirens and locomotive whistles as they approach and pass you.) They knew I was being evaluated and rose to the occasion. Every hand went up. Every kid was in lock step with me. They broke into applause when he left after an abbreviated time! That spring, my students took the assessment tests (after about three days of test prep); they did just fine.

Today’s public school teachers are not trusted with the kind of autonomy I had. They are burdened with paperwork and have all kinds of rubrics to worry about both for themselves and for their students. A friend of mine, who is a professor in a CUNY school of education, tells me that teachers in public schools advise her students NOT to become teachers.

Education has made some progress since I left the profession. We now have a lot more resources and knowledge for teaching children with special needs. Technology and the availability of information are having an impact. When we look at Finland, which is successfully creating a knowledge-based economy, the teaching profession is the profession of choice for bright people. Each school faculty operates as a team to do whatever it takes to get students to learn. If you are not aware of how this works read this article from the Smithsonian Magazine. Finnish schools trust their teachers and give them the support they need to do their job. Contrast this with the current exodus of American teachers from the profession and the damage that has been done to public schools by the high stakes placed on the standardized test.

A few years ago, at an education conference, I interviewed Finnish Professor Jorma Routti, one of the founders of Finnish venture capital and one of Europe’s leading technology experts. “Education cannot be rushed,” says Professor Routti. “There are no short cuts, no magic bullets. It’s a law of nature. It takes nine months to make a baby and 30 years to make an engineer.”

How do we educate the powers-that-be to see the light? Testing will die a slow death. Problem is that there is too much money in it. Please comment.

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

10/4/2018

wikimedia commons

First, you have to read a paragraph: (Note, this is for a grade 6 test)

The modern wood pencil was created by Joseph Dixon, born in Massachusetts in 1799. When he was thirteen years old he made his first pencil in his mother's kitchen. His sea-going father would return from voyages with graphite in the hull of his ship, which was used simply as ballast, or weight, when there was no cargo to transport. This graphite was later dumped overboard to make room for shipments for export. Joseph Dixon got some of this excess graphite, pounded it into powder, mixed it with clay and rolled it into long strips that he baked in his mother's oven to make the "lead" for his pencil. This dried the "lead" and made it firm. He then put a strip of "lead" between two grooved sticks of cedar and glued them together to make a sandwich. He chose cedar because it is soft, can be easily sharpened, and is relatively free of knots. All you had to do was sharpen the pencil with a knife and it was ready to write.

Then you have to answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. You can tell from the passage that it was important for ships to be
a.) heavy enough b.) fast enough c.)wet enough d.) big enough

2. Dixon got some graphite that had been used to replace
a.)cargo b.)powder c.)clay d.) wood

3. What happened to the graphite that Dixon didn't use?
a.)It was thrown away b.)It was used for ballast c.)It was shipped as an export 4.) It was used to build houses

4. Why did Dixon heat the mixture of graphite and clay?
a) To harden it b.) To melt it c.)To turn it into a powder d) To make it dark.

5. Dixon chose cedar because it was
a.) easy to shape b.) firm c.) long d.) cheap

6. How did Dixon get the "lead" inside the pencil?
a.) He glued it between two pieces of wood. b.) He poured it in when it was melted c.) He slide it into a hole he had drilled.) He rolled it in a mixture of sawdust and glue

7. In this passage the word knots refers to
a.) hard spots in wood b.) difficult problems c.) a measure of the speed of ships d.) tying ropes

Now, here are some questions that might interest you about the test questions.
1. Where did I get this information? From a contract asking permission to use the passage from a book I wrote (The Secret Life of School Supplies.)
2. What are the chances that the students read the actual book in their test prep? Nil Ever? Close to nil.
3. Did the students find the passage riveting reading? Probably not. It was taken out of context.
4. Why is it important for students to regurgitate information from the passage in their responses? I have no idea. If they have no real interest in the invention of the pencil, if the story isn't interesting enough to repeat to someone else, it is a manufactured trap to give anxiety to students, parents and teachers. It's the previous paragraph in the book that describes the problem that the invention of Dixon's pencil solved that makes the test paragraph more interesting and memorable.

I would hope that the passages selected by the test creators would be stand-alone attention grabbers. But apparently two paragraphs would be too long. FYI, The pencil happened to be an extremely useful invention for land surveyors. They had to be able to write outside with a permanent dry writing instrument, since at that time, most writing was done with quill and ink, which wasn't suited to noting down critical information in the wind and the rain.

Do you think preparing to answer this kind of question is a good use of your time or your students? I can tell you it's not one of my better paragraphs. Maybe, if they had read more of the book, they wouldn't need test prep to get the answers right.

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Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

What Can Happen to Learning When There Is No Standardized Testing?

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

Vicki Cobb

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Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

What Can Happen to Learning When There Is No Standardized Testing?

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

Vicki Cobb

​Archives

Categories

Links

Company

Contact

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