You know, my opinion of "No Child Left Behind" style attempts to measure "failing" schools is as low as anybody's, but even I think this new Ohio State study sounds ridiculous:
Up to three-quarters of U.S. schools deemed failing based on achievement test scores would receive passing grades if evaluated using a less biased measure, a new study suggests.
Ohio State University researchers developed a new method of measuring school quality based on schools' actual impact on learning - how much faster students learned during the academic year than during summer vacation when they weren't in class.
Using this impact measure, about three-quarters of the schools now rated as "failing" because of low test scores no longer would be considered substandard.
That means that in these schools mislabeled as failing, students may have low achievement scores, but they are learning at a reasonable rate and they are learning substantially faster during the school year than they are during summer vacation.
In other news, people who bought lottery tickets were substantially more likely to win the lottery.
I mean, seriously, this is a proposed standard? We're supposed to think that schools are doing an adequate job if students learn more than when they're on vacation?
I'll happily agree that schools where students improve their skills more in the summer should be razed to the ground, and the ground sown with salt, but don't you think we ought to demand a teensy bit more from our schools than that they be better than no school at all?
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They don't say "learn faster", they say "learn substantially faster". That's horribly vague, but a more charitable reading would suggest that they set their "failure" rating somewhere much higher than zero improvement.
They still failed 25% of the schools currently tagged as 'failing', and also failed an additional 17% of schools not tagged. It may be a bad standard, but it's not a trivially stupid standard.
Having said that, it seems one step from arguing for refocusing resources from low-achievement schools to higher-achievement, "low impact" schools. That would be misguided to say the least. In the end, it's the achievement that matters. The best use of this kind of measure would be to reward and reinforce the low-achievement, high-impact schools, rather than punishing or eliminating them.
This almost sounds like they are giving schools bonus points for student attendance. Does this standard suggest that all year-round schools automatically get good ratings? After all, for those districts the students never experience a learning-free summer, so they must have a learning rate that far surpasses students who take a few months off.
It's not as trivial a standard as you seem to think.
I went to school till halfway through fifth grade, then quit for a summer-vacation style unschooling.
Then I started college four years later (at 14- so four years ahead of my peers).
Thus, obviously, my summer vacations would have been 2X as effective as most people's schooling.
(and since I did actually attend school for a time, I can be pretty sure that my summer vacations were actually more educational for me than school was).
In other news, the only way to make money is not to win the lottery.
After my years of teaching, the past year in public schools, I am sad but not surprised. Cue the band:
Well we got no choice
All the girls and boys
Makin all that noise
'Cause they found new toys
Well we can't salute ya
Can't find a flag
If that don't suit ya
That's a drag
School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces
No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks
Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes
School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces
No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks
Out for summer
Out till fall
We might not go back at all
School's out forever
School's out for summer
School's out with fever
School's out completely
"School's Out" is the 1972 title track single from Alice Cooper's fifth album, and perhaps his best-known song.
Cooper has said he was inspired to write the song when answering the question, "What's the greatest three minutes of your life?". Says Cooper: "There's two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you're just getting ready to open the presents. The greed factor is right there. The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school when you're sitting there and it's like a slow fuse burning. I said, 'If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it's going to be so big.'"
"School's Out" reached #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart, thus propelling the album to #2 on the Billboard 200 pop albums chart. The song reached #1 on the UK singles chart for three weeks in August 1972. It also marked the first time that Alice Cooper became regarded as more than just a theatrical novelty act. In 2004, the song was ranked #319 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
As wikipedia sayeth: "The lyrics of 'School's Out' indicate that not only is the school year ended for summer vacation, but ended forever, and that the school itself has been blown up. It incorporates the childhood rhyme, 'No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks' into its lyrics. It also featured children contributing some of the vocals, just as in Pink Floyd's 1979 hit 'Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).'"
Advocacy is a stomach: it has no brain; it knows it is hungry, and its inevitable results are somebody else's problem. Ignorance is not a form of knowing things, nor is an MA/Edu or $6 billion/year Head Start.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/masters.htm
bottom
The insane are in charge of the asylum. OTOH, all the paperwork is being submitted in full and on time so nobody is complaining. Where there is process there must surely be product.
The hilarious thing here is that apparently 25% of schools DON'T teach kids more during the school year than during the summer.
Leaving aside a journal that merges two fields held in infinitely high regard by physicists (sociology AND education), they could have a valid point.
I might have learned more in the summer than during the school year because I didn't have any school work to get in the way of reading and learning. My schools probably rated an "A" back when I was there, but they did not push me at all.
On the other hand, when I peruse the testing data our local paper publishes, I am always struck by things like a sixth grade class at an "F" school that has lower reading scores (meaning lower grade level) than they had when they were in fifth grade. They went backwards! It is entirely possible that they lost an entire year (or more) over the summer and then spent all year struggling to get back that year while working with books that were now more than a year ahead of their reading level.
The concept of "adequate yearly progress" only makes sense if you evaluate where the kids start in the fall rather than assuming they lost nothing from where they were in the spring. Although schools can help, the solution to this problem might not be in the schools, as Obama's statements to that effect pointed out while to the irritation of Jesse and others.
# 6 | Colin M says:
I'm not sure whether to ROFL hysterically, cry my eyes out, or just scream in sheer frustrated rage over the fact that "No Child Left Behind" has been shown repeatedly to be a relative term and has been such an EPIC FAIL in real terms that every child has been left behind. So if you'll all excuse me, I think I'll go find a quiet corner to do all three simultaneously..........
That study seems indicative of the same culture (intentionally or not) that has produced the students I have taught over the years who believe they are entitled to an A simply because they can breathe.
I think you're misreading the point. The argument is that a school should be ranked based on the school's impact, rather than the combination of its impact and other factors (e.g., learning at home).
The summer vacation period is used to gauge the impacts of other factors. It was *not* used as the failure line.
There was a study out of Baltimore, which I can't now find (the study, not Baltimore), documenting what someone called the "Harry Potter Effect" and concluding that most schools do a pretty OK job, and a pretty consistent one across the board, of raising students' performance from pre-exisitng levels. To put it pseudo-mathematically, student A came into grade 4 with a performance level of 5x and student B came into grade 4 with a performance level of 3x. By the end of the year, A was at 6x and B was at 4x. Over the summer, A, a middle-class suburbanite, read Harry Potter and did other intellectually stimulating stuff while student B, an inner-city kid, watched TV or opened fire hydrants. Because of these different ways of spending summers, at the start of grade 5, student A was now at 6.2x while student B was at 3.8x. At the end of grade 5, A was at 7.2x while B was at 4.8x. Rinse and repeat. Conclusion: schools do a consistent and pretty OK job of adding value and the differing results are explained by non-school factors. Or so the study suggested.