September 17, 2009--'Rithmatic

For nearly two decades we have been told that the key to reforming public education is raising standards. For everyone involved.

Teachers and principals must meet more rigorous certification requirements—to teach math, for example, it is necessary in many states to major in math as an undergraduate and after that take a series of mandated education courses in theory and practice. Then with regard to students, they too must be held to higher standards. No more watered down courses, no more just getting by. If a kid doesn’t do well in third grade, make him go to summer school or leave her back to repeat the year. No more social promotion. No more social promotion. Tough love is what is needed.

We have an education crisis which is interfering with America’s ability to compete on the world economic stage, and unless we expect more from everyone, we will slip further and further behind. If we’re not careful, we will slip to Third World status and be forced to watch from the sidelines as the Chinese and the Indians and the Singaporeans in the fast lane pass us by.

And key to raising the bar of expectations has been the move to hold everyone accountable. The No Child Left Behind legislation gives individual schools and states a few years to get up to snuff and says that unless they do there will be real penalties--they will get cut off from various sources of federal money.

The states have been weighing in as well. If a school district here or a school there fails to improve according to strict formulas, they can get taken over or even shut down. Then to hold teachers and students accountable, there has been a massive move to require annual achievement testing. If too many of a teacher’s kids fail to learn, in some places their teacher can be reassigned or, rarer, even dismissed.

Since high-stakes achievement tests began to proliferate controversy has surrounded them. Anti-testing people claim that they are reductionist. They measure achievement in too limited a way and they are easy to defeat—teachers under accountability pressure will spend all their time teaching to the test. So, ironically, while attempting to raise standards, things will be further dumbed down. And of course, since the stakes for all are high, creativity will be used to find ways to cheat.

In the old days, cheating on tests was pretty basic. Kids used crib sheets or sneaked looks at their smart classmates’ answers; and when teachers or principals got involved, as they at times did, they slipped the questions to their students prior to administering the tests and then, when grading the answers, made a few changes before totaling the grades. All of this happened in my Brooklyn public school.

Now, with states and school districts being held accountable, and with politicians claiming fame by presenting themselves as Education Mayors or Governors, there are other motivations to cheat and other, subtler methods being employed.

Take New York City and State for example. One would think, chauvinistic New Yorker that I am, that places like Mississippi and Alabama would be at the top of the list of places puling fast ones. Not the Empire State with all is smarts and resources.

Think again. With a governor in political trouble (David Paterson) and a mayor seeking a quasi-legal third term (Mike Bloomberg), both claiming to be great advocates of education reform, it is probably a good idea to keep a close eye on how kids in public schools in New York are being tested and how the results are being tallied and reported. If Bloomberg, who gained control of the city’s schools during his first term can demonstrate that his schools have improved, he is a shoe in to be reelected, no matter how he manipulated the overturning of the term limits law.

So why was I not surprised when the New York Times reported the other day that after a few years of alleged improvement in math scores it may be that these gains have more to do with the state having lowered the number of right answers required to achieve a passing score than any real improvements in instruction and student achievement. (See article linked below.)

So much so that, to quote the Times:

The mayor has repeatedly pledged to hold back students who fail the test and do not meet even Level 2, a minimal standard. But the number of right answers needed to reach Level 2 has dropped, to the point that on some tests, a student could randomly guess and still stand a good chance of moving on to the next grade. [Emphasis added.]

This past year, seventh graders in New York could get a passing grade in math and be promoted by correctly answering just 44 percent of the answers. Embarrassed by this, education officials said that they had to lower the number required because the questions were tougher.

I thought that was the basic purpose of the standards movement—to keep raising the bar. But then again I was never that good at the New Math. Though now I get it. Which also demonstrates that it’s never too late to learn.