The Test From Hell

Parents Forum
141

<p>Allmusic:
I’m no fan of timed tests. They often test quickness rather than knowledge. S lost $2,000 because he was not quick enough buzzing, though he had the right answer at the same time as the student who did win the $2,000. Oh, well. </p>

<p>But granted that all students would gain from more time, access to computers, etc… one has to draw the line. Even time and a half is a way to draw the line against unlimited time. My S has lousy handwriting. Trying to write legibly in in-class exams probably slows him down considerably. But that’s his fault for not practicing good penmanship at home. It’s not something that merits special accommodations. Nor is his carelessness in computing deserving of special accommodations. However, I do think that students who are dyslexic deserve accommodation.</p>

<p>The question is one of abuse of tests ro determine eligibility for accommodation. Then the issue should be how to curb abuse, not to deny that some students have a legitimate reason for being accommodated, or that their disabilities are non-existent.</p>

<p>And since many posters keep on arguing that students who struggle on timed tests such as the SAT should not aspire to attend top colleges, I will reiterate that in my experience, college profs are far more willing to accommodate students than the CB.</p>

142

<p>Following AllMusic’s response in post 135, guess I take this all much <em>less</em> personally than NMD. I believe in spirited debate. Many of the spirited debates I’ve participated in have caused me to change my position; on other threads posters have stated sometimes publicly, sometimes privately, that my arguments have gotten them to change their view of a subject, and that other people’s positions have also, or alternately. (This is both students and parents.) I’ve seen threads go from oppositional to partly or very collaborative on many occasion. But that doesn’t happen when contributors don’t go the distance because they don’t like it that people aren’t immediatey agreeing with them. Do not confuse vigorous defense of a position with “taking things personally.”</p>

<p>Interesting: there’s a thread in the Cafe right now where the main debaters are male. They get pretty heated, much more so than on this thread, but they’re not confused, it seems, that the debate is “personal.”</p>

143

<p>How much “abuse” of the system has been documented?</p>

<p>I tend to agree that kids who really need the added time will benefit greatly from it, and those who don’t really need it will see their scores increase relatively little. This is just my gut feeling. I don’t think having extra time is going to get anyone into Harvard who wouldn’t have a shot at getting there in the first place, in case that’s what people are worried about.</p>

<p>Parents like AM resent the money spent on special ed, but there is no other solution, unless teachers are granted more autonomy in their classrooms, and as we all know, they are increasingly being given less, not more. </p>

<p>Other parents resent what they perceive as some kids being given “a leg up.” From my experience, you’d have to be a masochist and also enjoy inflicting pain on your own kid to enter the wonderful world of public school gifted and special education if you didn’t absolutely have to. It’s very rare that either one does its job well, and, in our state at least, there is no oversight for either.</p>

144

<p>You bet I resent the money spent on special ed, because I have seen such rampant abuse (including frightfully expensive private placements for kids without noticeably profound needs), and because I have witnessed first hand how the special educaiton budget isn’t touched (in fact, it is expanded) while the regular ed budget is decimated. </p>

<p>It happens every year…we don’t have enough money for printer paper, but little Johnny, with some diagnosis like Non-verbal learning disorder, is in a private placement with ten kids in a class and a conference room with leather chairs.</p>

<p>I have a highly gifted child, whose public education has been supplemented with $12K of music education (annually), and another who just spent a year in a $20K private school, at our expense.</p>

<p>So our taxes pay for someone else’s children to have small teacher-student ratios, and individualized instruction, and modifications, and we pay for our own children to have the education they need. Great.</p>

<p>What about the children who don’t fall under the special ed umbrella, and whose parents cannot afford to do this?</p>

145

<p>I can relate to your argument. My experience (with 6 different gifted programs in 2 districts) has been that the gifted programs provided by schools are not very good. They are sometimes just accelerated curriculum with no enrichment, sometimes just aimless “enrichment”… either way, your child’s unique needs are not usually addressed. My kids have been pulled out of academic classes once each week for 1/2 a day to bus 20 minutes to a gifted theater/creative writing or academically gifted program. They were on their own to make up the missed work at the home school. None of these programs were worth much, despite the faculty and staff being very passionate and dedicated. For some kids, enrichment just has to be found outside of school, just as much of a handicapped kid’s needs must be met outside of school. It would be wonderful if those needs could be paid for by our districts, but the money is just not there. In a way it’s better, because we can pick and choose our kids’ opportunities out in the world. I am also frustrated by the way the game is ‘played’ by others who take unfair advantage. All we can do is the best for our own kids. Yours are lucky that you are willing and able to give them such great gifts.</p>

146

<p>I take it you will not vote Democrat in the upcoming election, then. The only way out of this is to back school choice, thereby giving back power to parents and letting the market do its magic. </p>

<p>Until that happens (and it’s unlikely), you have to take what the public schools give you or shut up about the costs to you personally. At least because of your income you have options–how’d you like to be a low-income parent locked into one of the many hell-hole schools around the country?</p>

<p>The public education system in this country, imo, is criminal, and teachers are being trained to be nothing but cogs in the machine. Yet some are calling for even more control at the national level.</p>

<p>To answer your question as to what people can do who can’t afford outside options to get what’s best for their kids? They have no choice but to learn to work the system. This is why there is presently so much of what you call “abuse.”</p>

147

<p>AllMusic,
Those of us who have worked in, and advocated for, Gifted Education, have remarked publicly (not just on CC) that GE is every bit as much a Special need as is LD & other varieties of Sp.Ed. While I would not for a single moment suggest that any parent on this thread with an LD child is abusing the system, or doesn’t deserve educational attention, I also have seen a disproportionate attention paid to SpEd <em>versus</em> Gifted Education. In my view, there are some political underpinnings to this ratio, at least in my state.</p>

<p>But beyond that, what disturbs me more than little Johnny getting SGI (small group instruction) while gifted Bobby does not, is that for every hour spent <em>teaching</em> little Johnny, 3-4 hours are spent administering his program & those of his small group. The emphasis, and the funding, is NOT on the teaching; it is on the administration. In that regard, I would just say in response to HH’s comment about “little oversight”: Don’t I wish! I wish much less oversight was spent on program administration, & much more on the training/performance of those teachers. I am feeling more & more isolated from the excellence of peers that I once enjoyed. Those most excellent, many of them, have left to pursue occupations where their title more closely resembles their daily tasks. I have seen this across all functions, varieties of public education: traditional schools, charter site schools, and charter home schools. Those hiring, firing, & overseeing care not about the quality of the teaching; they care about compliance with The System first; the teaching always comes second, & is often barely noticed. (Easier to get by with bad teaching but speedy data entry than vice-versa.) They want junior bureaucrats, not professionals with an intellectual interest in the field & an academic commitment and crack training.</p>

<p>Whether leather or wooden chairs, the dollars spent on the <em>administration</em> (including analysis of) SpEd are enormously excessive. That excess money would be better spent on general & specialized training, on gifted education, and on resources/materials for the standard & specialized classroom. (Unbelievably, supplies in many public schools in my state are either partly or entirely paid for by the teachers. I can’t think of any other profession where that would be tolerated, without being passed on to those receiving the services. You get to pay your customers for the privilege of serving them.) By contrast, administrators do not pay for their own supplies, and are treated like kings & queens – in power, in salary, in privileges, in perks. </p>

<p>It’s administrators first, children a distant second, teachers third. I know that may sound “off” to some of you who believe the teachers’ union is oh-so-powerful. It is, yes, but whether it truly works for the benefit of teachers is something else entirely. In a way, both teachers and children serve administration, not the other way around. My theory about the perpetual dissatisfaction of teachers on picket lines is that often they do not even realize why they’re unhappy. They’re on those picket lines whether they’re paid well or poorly (and they’re paid both, depending on where they’re teaching), and whatever their classroom/school conditions are. And that’s because they will continue to be unhappy while supporting unions which, regardless of their party line, similarly function first to serve The System (and by extension, the administration of that system), secondarily to serve its teacher members. It doesn’t matter what their chants are; what is operative is what matters. It’s not that unions are evil; it’s that they’re not credible to the general public because they serve two masters, & not effective in changing the system. They’re married to the system. Like dissatisfied teachers, couples in loveless marriages also often use money to try to compensate for their profound unhappiness.</p>

<p>Sorry for the slightly O/T rant. :)</p>

148

<p>hoping,</p>

<p>I think you give waaaaay to much credit to the influence of schools, which flies in the face of some interesting research, albeit not much discussed.</p>

<p>There are two ways to look at the “problem” with public education. One is that we need to figure out the magic formula that would make the system work better. The other is to realize that the problem is not public education, not a school one, but rather something outside the schools. (more on this later)</p>

<p>Based on a lot of understanding of science research, statistics and some understanding of social science research, I would argue that the public ed problem is that nothing we can think of makes a consistent difference, at least nothing that can be replicated by formula and process across schools. This is because in research, big effects are not hard to fish out in experiments or studies. The challenge is when the effect we want to measure (like improvement in education) is buried in a lot of noise (meaning individual variability of performance). If some change in education approach were to work well enough to make a real difference, (i.e. not just increase a standardized test score by a few percent…) then it would be relatively easy to evaluate this different approach. But nothing to date has worked anywhere near that well. Whole language versus phonics? Both seem to work most of the time. New versus old math? Same thing. (in both cases, of course, so many other factors outside a school’s control affect performance a great deal, including plain old neuro development).</p>

<p>My personal rule of thumb for interpreting population studies, whether they be medical epidemiological research or ed research is that if you need 10,000 rats to swill stuff to see if it causes harm in order to get adequate statistical power, then it probalby does not matter. For our kids, if folks are debating an option for very long, then it does not matter, because the stuff that DOES matter becomes apparent pretty quickly.</p>

<p>What does matter in education? IMHO, all the stuff outside the schools, and the stuff public schools CAN’T control, like who enrolls (peer influences).</p>

149

<p>In my experience, there is just enough compliance to fulfill the minimum letter of the law: there is seldom, if ever, oversight about and interest in doing what is needed to serve the real needs of the kids–for example, write a boilerplate IEP and then barely follow even that. If administrators and teachers were really doing their jobs, there would not be a need for multi-thousand dollar private school settlements with parents. Usually, in those cases, communication between parents and the school has broken down so much that no other outcome is possible.</p>

150

<p>I have to disagree, NMD. Imo, if schools had the will, and were not constricted by endless educratic red-tape and fear of ACLU-like lawsuits, they could stand a chance of changing kids’ lives, no matter what their culture at home and on the street.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_catholic_schools.html[/url]”>http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_catholic_schools.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

151

<p>hereshoping,</p>

<p>The link works. </p>

<p>Catholic schools are fine. But they do well mostly because (a) there is a good deal of self selection among attendees and (b) like every other private school, they can choose who not to allow in. </p>

<p>The story is a lot more complicated than that, of course, but believe me if there was some “magic sauce” that catholic schools (indeed any school) had found that made a difference, don’t you think we’d have a movement to replicate the “magic sauce” elsewhere?</p>

<p>Take charter schools as an example. The early ones appeared to work better. With greater numbers, the success differential disappears. So it was not charter schools per se that mattered, but something else. (what? I have no idea, and doubt anyone else does either)</p>

152

<p>I think “self-selecting” is a cop-out, as is the blame-the-parent game. I believe most parents want their children to be educated. It’s up to the schools to do so.</p>

<p>I’m not sure the will is there with the majority of public school educators. The good ones have been beaten down by the system, and the ones who remain are for the most part petty-bureaucrats. This is not to say there are not some wonderful teachers out there, of course, but the younger ones coming in are for the most part being trained to teach the kids to parrot the “standards,” not educate. </p>

<p>What Catholic schools do not have to do is teach the standards and fear the ACLU. It public schools could go back to those days, it would at least be a start.</p>

153

<p>Some parents clearly put more emphasis on the value of education than others and also the importance of respectful behavior. A lot of teachers have to put way too much energy into discipline because some kids aren’t given that at home.</p>

154

<p>Most parents may want their kids to be educated, but hereshoping I don’t think you have a clue what the kids are like in some inner city public schools. I have a friend who taught for several years in the Bronx and then moved out to the suburbs because she was getting burnt out. She’s not a better teacher now than she was before, but her kids have homes, their parents aren’t dysfunctional, they aren’t on drugs, they own books, they aren’t continuously moving. It makes a huge, huge difference if the kids come to school ready to learn.</p>

155

<p>I agree with HH about standards-based education. What a crock this movement has been. Nothing like requiring already well-performing schools to waste time by teaching and adhering to a set of state imposed “standards”. These schools were already performing well. The failing schools? Still in trouble for the most part. What an adventure in bureacracy and money wasting state testing has been.</p>

<p>NMD has it right though, about self-selection in Catholic schools. Private schools do not have to deal with special needs, including both learning and behavioral problems, with English Language Learners, with drugged out low income parents. They aren’t requred BY LAW to be an open door to every learner, and then to have to accommodate every learner, including the slow processor, the Mandarin speaker or the boy who throws chairs.</p>

<p>Sure is easier to teach without having to deal with all the riff raff (is there a little sarcasm icon? ;)). That’s what private schools can do. A head of school or two has already told me that they start with the top 50% of kids, and then sort from there. Hardly can compare private and public for these reasons.</p>

<p>Charter schools have been a dismal failure and seem to be underperforming even their public counterparts.</p>

156

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<p>Ho, ho. If you only knew.</p>

<p>I love when the liberals (who control public education) blame the parents when kids aren’t learning and teachers aren’t teaching. What irony.</p>

157

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<p>And I love when self styled experts just “KNOW” it is all the fault of the schools, and especially the corrosive effect of (take your choice) 1. teachers unions 2. Standards 3. petty-bureaucrats 4. the ACLU. </p>

<p>Side comment: It is nice to know the “liberals” are so powerful. Gee, who’d a thunk that a state like, say, Texas, has let education be overtaken by liberals! and that parents vote Bush into office but let liberals run their school boards. I guess HH thinks voters are pretty stupid…</p>

158

<p>Here I thought we were having an ideological discussion about education, and it has to devolve into a diatribe against liberals! LOL!</p>

<p>If you want to go that route, let’s look at the political composite of state school boards, shall we? Do you want to start with Texas, or Kansas, or Georgia? We have many choices, so let’s start looking at all that liberal ideology from the state ed head honchos!</p>

<p>(Do you want to talk about abstinence education or intelligent design, foundations of liberal thought, first?)</p>

159

<p>The job of schools is to educate. It is not the job of parents to educate.</p>

<p>This is a fundamental truth that has been lost in the ongoing effort to release those in control from any responsibility.</p>

<p>Another ruse is to continually point to two or three “school boards” who are run by some kind of Christian fundamentalists. The overwhelming majority of “school boards” are controlled by federal and state money. They do the bidding of the higher-ups, or lose the money. Most will take the money–even if they use it for swimming pools.</p>

<p>Yes, when it comes to education in this country, “liberals” are the ones in power.</p>

<p>Time to blame Bush? Ha ha. He “reached across the aisle” to Ted Kennedy. Ted is still big on NCLB. He just wants more money for it.</p>

<p>Vote for someone in the next election who is for school choice. It’s the only chance to change anything in education in this country.</p>

<p>Then you can send your kid (assuming you’re not a drugged-out, penniless, inner-city mom who has no clue what is going on with her kid, LOL) to a school that is not running scared from ACLU like lawsuits if they dare try to impose some * discipline* and self-control on their students.</p>

<p>I shall bow out–obviously I get way too exercised about this subject (and the last time you were in a classroom was when, again, NMD??).</p>

160

<p>If you can’t see that blaming parents should be the opposite of the “liberal” position, AM and NMD, then I give up. I have no clue why so many are so invested in protecting the education establishment in this country. Maybe you all could clue me in.</p>