RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Let's see, "after Bush has gutted the educational system completely." Is that bad? After all, secondary education achievement scores have been dropping for the last 30 years in inverse correlation with federal funding.

Gutting the education system is a bad thing. Restoring accountability for results is a good thing. I don't care who does it but it must be done.

I wonder what Forrest Gore has to say about this?
I know, he will tell us as soon as he gets his talking points from the NEA!

Actually it is a myth that test scores have gone down and down for 30 years. The Rand Corporation did a report in 1994 that examined this question and found that:

Achievement-test scores have had a curious history in popular perception: Perhaps because bad news is news, the impressions persist that test scores started dropping in the 1960s and kept on falling, that the scores of minority students have not improved, and that education policy and practice are primarily to blame. A look at test score data from the past three decades should modify at least the first two impressions:

Scores on achievement tests did decline in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of that decline reflected changes in the demographic mix of test takers, primarily Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) takers. Nevertheless, test score data from many sources show a substantial and remarkably pervasive drop in private as well as public schools, and in Canada as well as the United States.

Scores stopped declining between around 1974 to 1980. But what has happened since then is not entirely clear: Scores have improved, but actual achievement may have improved less than some scores imply. First, many of the reforms of the 1980s were test based, which put strong pressure on schools to raise scores. One result was "teaching to the test," which inflates scores but may not signal lasting student progress. Second, the data are not consistent: In particular, many state and local testing programs have shown a much more substantial upturn than the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is less susceptible to teaching to the test.

Minority students, particularly African Americans, have made both relative and absolute gains in test scores. For example, between 1973 and 1986, mathematics scores of African American 17-year-olds rose enough to narrow the gap with whites by 28 percent according to the NAEP.

Furthermore, the report concluded that the Bush approach to the debate, to simplify it and to test on only two dimensions of education -- basic skills in math and English -- reduces what gets taught in schools, because teachers "teach to the test." The NEA certainly doesn't encourage teaching to the test, the emphasis on "accountability" does. And the system is structured to destroy educational opportunity in schools where students need more than math and English (they need those, but because of the homes the come from they need teachers to that engage more areas of the brain, to show them they can get past their shitty family life). This is aptly described by this report about the WASL test in my home state and how it affects teaching. The teacher teaching to the test is a disaster, boring 9/10ths of the students in the room to get the WASL scores up.