While not specifically about homeschooling, an article by Brian Gresko, a stay-at-home dad and writer, explains his view that childhood is under attack by the very people who should be protecting it: parents. His article In Defense of Childhood: Let Kids Be Kids! explains:

Many of the most important skills are untestable — imagination, general optimism and lightness of heart, the capability to love another creature, to empathize and demonstrate compassion. These are things a child can’t bubble in on a Scantron sheet, and yet cultivating these attitudes matters more in determining how my son will exist in the world and what kind of contribution he’ll make with his time on Earth.

Read the entire article at the link above.

In Defense of Childhood

The effort to develop a new assessment system is the subject of a commentary by Robert Rothman:

A Seamless System of Assessments

Is testing a waste of time? Teachers seem to think so. In a 2006 survey, 71 percent of them said that students took too many standardized tests, and 62 percent called testing a “necessary evil.”

Yet when Oregon introduced its online testing system, which allows students to take the tests up to three times a year, teachers embraced it. They apparently did not think the testing burden was either excessive or evil.

Why? Because the Oregon test delivers near-instantaneous results that show teachers how students perform on particular content strands, such as geometry or measurement.

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To envision how such a system might shift school practice, consider what has happened in the retail industry. In the past, retail stores would close their doors for a day each year to take inventory. Now, thanks to the accurate and instantaneous information bar codes allow, retailers can keep track of their inventory in real time, 365 days a year. This is not to say that students are commercial products, or that we want to slap bar codes on their foreheads. But a comprehensive assessment system could provide continuous, coherent, and high-quality information on student performance that teachers, school leaders, and district and state administrators could use to improve teaching and learning.

In such a system, assessment is neither excessive nor evil. Nor is it a waste of time. On the contrary, assessment—and the information it provides—is a vital tool to improve instruction, learning, and school practice.

This bar code theory of assessment (sorry – can’t shake the image) surely could be continuous, but, can it be coherent and high quality? Think about how your kids are maturing and how they learn?

Testing, Assessments and Reform

Education Week continues to follow reform. In a piece on the competition to develop new testing systems we learn:

Competition opened yesterday for $350 million in federal money to design new ways of assessing what students learn. Rules for the contest make clear that the government wants to leave behind multiple-choice testing more often in favor of essays, multidisciplinary projects, and other more nuanced measures of achievement.

Guaranteed to come to a state near you:

Of the $350 million set aside for new tests, the Education Department plans to award one or two grants of up to $160 million each for “comprehensive assessment systems,” and one $30 million grant that is only for development of end-of-course tests at the high school level. All grants will run for four years.

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States must band together in groups, or “consortia,” of 15 or more to apply for the comprehensive-testing grant, with five states designated as “governing,” or leading, partners. Grant applicants for the high school testing program must also have five states designated as “governing,” but face no other minimum group-size requirement.

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Tests must be able to measure if students are mastering a “common set of college- and career-ready” academic standards, and those standards must be adopted by the end of 2011. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, with the support of 48 states, have led a move to write common standards, which are undergoing final revision. Federal officials have used states’ commitment to those standards as incentives in other programs, such as the main Race to the Top competition.

If we put this much time and money into new tests, and pull together all of these public and private players, sooner or later, we will be hearing calls for testing ALL kids. So, I would suggest you read through this piece and familiarize yourself with the process and the players. Read Race to Top Rules Aim to Spur Shifts in Testing.

Shifts in Testing

Education Week’s site has another piece on the future of education, this one on assessements:

Led by Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond, a panel of experts outlined a comprehensive system that includes summative and formative tests of higher-order thinking skills, reflecting a marketplace that they say places increasing value on such skills.

They urged a move away from of multiple-choice tests that demand factual recall, toward the development of a set of deeper, more analytical questions, tasks, and projects that ask students to solve and discuss complex problems.

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Such assessments, Ms. Darling-Hammond said, can be “of, for, and as learning.” They can “embody” content standards, she said, not just approximate them. Because teachers would help create and score the assessments, and the assessments would be pegged to good-quality content standards, an aligned teaching-and-learning system would take shape that would help teachers adjust instruction in real time and help district and state administrators plot longer-term education strategy, the experts said.

I was along with what I was reading as a recognition of the limits of tests and respect for learning styles. But, when I got to, “assessments would be pegged to good-quality content standards” the warning bells went off and I immediately cooled to the idea.

Common Standards

The portrait of assessment, fleshed out in a paper by Ms. Darling-Hammond that draws on assessment practices in the United States and abroad, was presented at a discussion organized by two Washington-based groups, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They have enlisted the support of 48 states to devise common content standards designed to ensure college and career readiness.

From the paper cited, Assessment Systems that Support High-Quality Learning:

Over a number of years, CCSSO [Council of Chief State School Officers] has been working with key stakeholders to develop a set of principles for student assessment systems. These principles suggest that the student assessment process should be considered as a system that supports a variety of purposes, such as informing learning and instruction, determining progress, measuring achievement, and providing partial accountability information.

I do not intend to try and unpack Ms. Darling-Hammond’s paper. However, with what seems to be an underlying deference for “key stakeholders” and a blinding lack of respect for kids and families, I am concerned that “content standards” is a pandora’s box in waiting.

Read the EdWeek piece here.

Experts Lay Out Vision for Future Assessments

A lengthy exploration of IQ testing for kindergarten placement from the New York magazine’s website adds to the growing chorus of those questioning of the role of tests in our kids lives. This article’s focus is on kindergarten placement tests but also touches on issues of class, equality, corporate influence, and, offers insights into better ways to approach assessments.

The Junior Meritocracy
Should a child’s fate be sealed by an exam he takes at the age of 4? Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless, at best.

Let’s start with the most basic problem: School starts in kindergarten. No matter how a child is doing at that moment, no matter where that child is in the great swoop of his or her developmental arc, that’s when parents send their kids off to school.

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There was a time, not that long ago, when few parents attempted to prep their 4-year-olds for kindergarten-admission exams. But then a few more began to do it, and then a few more after that, and then suddenly, normal-seeming people with normal-seeming values began doing it, too, and an arms-race mentality kicked in.

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As it turns out, intelligence tests miss lots of things, not just creativity. And perhaps that explains why IQs alone are not especially good predictors of excellence. In the twenties, for instance, Lewis Terman, a psychologist and deep believer in intelligence testing—it was he who revised Alfred Binet’s original test and came up with the Stanford-Binet model—started a now-famous longitudinal study of nearly 1,500 California children with extremely high IQs. He grandiosely called it “Genetic Studies of Genius,” and his hope was to show that these children, whom he called “exceptionally superior,” would one day form the backbone of the nation’s intellectual and creative elite, making crucial advances in sciences and public policy and the arts.

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One of the most compelling reasons to get rid of it, he [Nelson, head of Calhoun school] notes, isn’t because the test is intellectually pointless. It’s because it’s emotionally insidious. “When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that’s supposed to be qualitative at a young age,” he says, “no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents’ anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there’s a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it’s beginning at an age that’s criminal.”

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Given his druthers, Meisels, at Erikson Institute, says he’d try to get a more comprehensive picture of the child. “And that can only be found through watching children in classroom situations,” he says. “And looking at the products of their work. And getting to know them. And that can be done through observational assessments.”

I try to interrupt him, but he anticipates my objection. “It’s not very practical, I know,” he says. “It means teaching teachers how to do it. It’d be more expensive.

In reading through this piece I found myself muttering that it is about time this picture gets painted. The head of Calhoun school is quoted as saying, “I want kids who are cynical enough at age 4 to know that there’s really something wrong with someone asking them these things and think, ‘I’m going to screw with them in the process!”

My thought is that we would all be better off if more parents were skeptical of the process of schooling for their kids.

Read the whole piece here.

Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless

As educational reform moves forward we see more reality based actions in the states:

A high school exit exam is keeping hundreds of Alaska students from earning diplomas and jobs for which they’re otherwise qualified, proponents of repealing the test told a state Senate committee Friday.

Educators and parents from around the state testifying in support of a bill to eliminate the High School Graduation Qualifying Exam said the tests also eat up both classroom time and resources for yet another standardized test.

The exams’ only defender to testify was Finance Director Eddy Jeans of the Department of Education and Early Development, who relayed the State Board of Education’s position. The board sees the test as a crucial accountability tool and wants it to stay in place until there is an alternative.

“It’s the hammer in the system. It’s the only hammer in the system,” Jeans said.

Alaska students are already subject to standardized tests throughout their public education, but those tests are designed to index and track progress or skills. They provide information, but don’t hold the individual students accountable, Jeans said.

In contrast, the exit exam guarantees that someone with an Alaska high school diploma has at least minimum competency in reading, writing and math, he said. Eliminating it with no alternative would revert an Alaska high school diploma to the equivalent of a certificate of attendance, Jeans said.

Sen. Bettye Davis, the repeal’s sponsor, took issue with that assertion.

“I can’t believe this is the glue that’s holding the system together,” she said. “We’re doing a disservice to our children.”

You can read the entire article here.

Alaska Bill Tries to Kill High School Exit Exam

This 56 page report by the Advancement Project subtitled, How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School to Prison Pipeline is not a surprise but to see it backed with documentation is an eye opener.

From the Advancement Project’s download page:

Test, Punish, and Push Out: How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School to Prison Pipeline.

“Test, Punish, and Push Out” provides an overview of zero-tolerance school discipline and high-stakes testing, how they relate to each other, how laws and policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have made school discipline even more punitive, and the risk faced if these devastating policies are not reformed. The report explores:

* The common origins and ideological roots of zero tolerance and high-stakes testing;
* The current state of zero-tolerance school discipline across the country, including local, state, and national data;
* How high-stakes testing affects students, educators, and schools;
* How zero tolerance and high-stakes testing have become mutually reinforcing, combining to push huge numbers of students out of school; and
* Successful grassroots efforts to eliminate harmful discipline and testing practices.

Reading this report makes one wonder how on earth anyone could call for more regulation of homeschoolers and makes any such effort all that more cynical.

Test, Punish, and Push Out

In Dr. Brian Ray’s discussion, of the West “Harms” article he writes:

To set the stage for this discussion, a very brief summary of research on home education is important.

Repeated studies by many researchers and data provided by United States state departments of education show that home-educated students consistently score, on average, well above the public school average on standardized academic achievement tests. To date, no research has found homeschool students to be doing worse, on average, than their counterparts in state-run schools.

Continually justifying homeschooling’s success by citing test scores traps homeschoolers into the discussion of test scores without furthering a critique of the tests themselves. We need to move beyond test scores and assessments before we can effectively address the underlying “Can parents be trusted?” question.

Our institutions are structured and run based on answering that question negatively. Since the late 1970′s homeschoolers have been challenging that attitude with increasing success. “Proving” homeschooling with test scores may be politically expedient, but it is a trap. We will continue to face calls for greater regulation precisely because we have been distracted from the strong statement homeschoolers have been making for decades. That is, parents can be trusted.

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Parents’ Work: Invaluable but Nearly Invisible

“Proving” homeschooling with test scores

The first reading of new restriction put forth by the governing board of Gilbert Arizona’s public schools address testing, assessments, record keeping, credits, online courses and involvement in student oganizations for homeschoolers.

Board to consider homeschool, online class restrictions

by Emily Gersema, The Arizona Republic

The Gilbert Public Schools governing board is mulling a series of proposals that would impose new restrictions on students who are home-schooled but take a few GPS courses, and junior high and high school students who take online courses.

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The message of this policy is largely philosophical. Board members such as Helen Hollands and president Thad Stump have said at recent work study sessions they believe the district needs to emphasize traditional classroom instruction as the preferred method of learning.

The board stresses in its proposal: “It is the belief of Gilbert Public Schools that students learn best in a traditional classroom setting.”

Homeschoolers are the focus of these restrictions and on most levels they make sense. But how will proposals like these play out in Arizona’s quest for Race to the Top money?

Making a Stand for the Traditional Classroom

Dr. Yvonne Fournier answering questions from a homeschooling family which moved to a testing state. Some highlights about the inherent tension between homeschooling and achievement tests:

Hassle-Free Homework: Achievement Tests Contribute To America’s Decline
By Dr. Yvonne Fournier,

U.S. School System Discourages Divergent, Creative Thinkers

In a world that begs for divergent thinkers (people who can think “outside the box,” meaning thinking the uncommon that could lead to extraordinary innovations), our children are measured, through achievement tests, on their capacity to be convergent thinkers – to select the one right answer to a problem that actually may have multiple answers.

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Homeschooled children, because they read between the lines and think of possible answers that the test writers did not consider, are often penalized. According to standardized tests, they seem to lack ability because they did not or do not follow the “herd” mentality when answering test questions.

Instead, homeschoolers are able to question the questions, yet when a test expects the homeschoolers to stay with “the herd,” straying or adventuring is a definite negative.

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In today’s world, convergent thinkers are no longer as valued in the workplace as divergent thinkers are. The number of pink slips covering the country is proof of this, and a message we certainly should take seriously.

Regardless of what your child makes on these tests, be comforted in the thought that standardized tests are simply another dinosaur in a dinosaur land called the U.S. school system.

Dr. Fournier also offers suggestions on dealing with the tests and testing.

Read the whole piece here.

Homeschoolers and Achievement Tests