The Dumbing Of College

I really hate to contradict myself, even an earlier self, but I must admit that the prevalence of screens in the lives of younger generations has had a disturbing impact on the ability to read effectively. Of course, a huge portion of the culpability is a direct result of the inanity of no child left behind and other educational atrocities we have inflicted upon our children.

Competition for scores makes no sense in the collegial and highly social setting of education. It's as if we told doctors that we would pay them according to how many of their patients recovered (or survive,) so that they would hide the secrets to their success in order to can earn more money by letting the patients of their competitors die.

I can give my 40 year younger self a pat on the back for having recognized the stupidity of competitive based education and standardized testing abused as a measure of teacher and school effectiveness; which greatly contributed to the inability of our younger generations to read it understand lengthy and complex texts.

Still, I think screens are playing a part in all of this.  

>Educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core "emphasized informational texts and standardized tests for over two decades," said The Atlantic. As a result, teachers shifted from reading books to short passages, "mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests." Shifting toward truncated reading was meant to help train kids to better synthesize information from texts, Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, said to the outlet. But in doing so, we’ve "sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long-form texts in general."<

https://theweek.com/education/college-students-read-books

A Rising Tide Of Asininity

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2022/03/05/americas-school-accountability-system-is-broken-here-are-the-issues-that-must-be-addressed-to-fix-it/?sh=575473e57f96

Surprise surprise! I got it right again! (OK, I’m not always right — just almost all the time.🧐). When I took my test and measurements course for my masters degree in school administration, one of the critical points made to us (critical now but at the time just one more data point) was that standardized testing is absolutely useless at evaluating the progress of an individual student, an individual teacher, or an individual school. All it is good for is making a bell shaped curve giving a generalized placement of performance according to a very narrow limited standardized test format and placed in a very broad setting. This is very useful in special education testing but useless for general evaluation of educational quality or performance.

Then President Reagan began screwing things up, as he had to find someone to blame for his policy failures. So he blamed teachers.

A propaganda report was issued worrying about a “rising tide of mediocrity “. A nonsense phrase meeting nothing. The report was pure propaganda, almost entirely data free. Nevertheless, based on that we desperately sought out an accountability system which would be based on the virtually useless data of standardized testing. This was designed to stimulate competition among schools and individual teachers. It’s actual primary effect was destroying teachers’ willingness to cooperate with each other. A teacher who found a clever way to get high scores on the test would never share that with another teacher because she had to compete. Collegiality and the mutual self-help system which has always been the hallmark of education was instantly corroded.

As always with standardized tests, it is mandated that, by the very nature of the test, a bell shaped curve results from the data. Failure to accomplish such a curve results in a test result skewed negatively or positively. The test will then be considered invalid and a new test created which will form the proper and only acceptable result: a bell shaped curve. When students began understanding how to find averages (because teachers were teaching it) the test manufacturers changed the test. They stopped calling them averages and began identifying them as “the mean“.

In other words, the test was no longer testing the students ability to understand the concept or perform it. It was deliberately making it hard for the children to understand so as to force a bell shaped curve because too many students were learning the concept too effectively and that’s not allowed in a bell shaped curve or any kind of standardized testing.  It is absolutely mandated that no matter how well a group performs or how badly it performs, 50% of those taking the test must be at or above the second quartile (the peak of the bell’s shaped curve) and 50% must be below it. 25% must fall at the first quartile or below and 25% must place at the third quartile or above. Please note that this is regardless of the actual level of knowledge or performance.

 This means that if the competition system really worked and all second grade students in a given year were now displaying at or above college level reading skills, the test would be adjusted until it showed that these incredibly brilliant children in fact were divided into 25% failures, 50% successes, and 25% high-performing extreme successes. The same would be true if the entire system failed so badly that not a single second grade student in the entire nation knew their alphabet. The same bell shaped curve would result.

Standardized testing does not test the quality of performance.  Criterion based testing does.

Now here we are 40 years later and guess what? Accountability and competition have proven to be a disaster for our public education system. Who would’ve guessed? Answer: anyone willing to look at the facts. 

Educational “experts” who never actually worked in the classroom but had extensive degrees, endlessly praised the system and supported and encouraged it to spread. I have stated on the record and will now repeat;  they are the equivalent of a medical doctor who says to his patient, “Thee hast an imbalance of thine humors. Tis necessary for to bleed thee that thee might becometh more balanced.“

At this point I can only say that stupid is as stupid does.

> The foundation of every recent accountability system, from the dawn of No Child Left Behind to the dusk of Common Core, has been the Big Standardized Test. And that foundation has cracked and crumbled. It has produced no results in the evaluation of teachers. It has produced no progress in student scores. Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) has recently detailed how the bipartisan coalition that supported testing has disintegrated, in part because parents have lost faith.

…High stakes testing has had a hugely corrosive effect on education, pushing to schools to see their goal not as the full education of the whole child, but as preparing students to score well on the big test. It has shifted school resources away from any topics not on the test. <

Civilization? Not In My America!

-- more than half of students enrolled in U.S. public schools live in poverty --  What's wrong with American schools? Glad you asked! This is what's wrong with American schools. We are wasting billions of dollars on our ineffective, counterproductive, self-destructive standardized test  obsession while we allow this atrocity to occur to our children.

No other civilized nation in the world allows this to happen to its young. Let me correct that. No civilized nation in the world allows this to happen to its children. Civilized people wouldn't.

Professional Malpractice

If it were up to me, I would ban the use of standardized tests in education except for the purpose of psychological evaluation. These tests are not designed for the evaluation of school compared to school or even individual student progress. Their use for such is professional malpractice.

This then, leads to the question, why do we misuse them?  The answer I think, lies in the fact that very few people have any understanding of exactly what a standardized test is. Unless you are a trained educator, and unless you are an educator particularly trained in the use of tests and measurements, it is unlikely that you have even the vaguest notion of what the term means.

Most people assume that the word standardized means that the test has been made standard. That is to say, that it is the same test given to all the children so that the results will be the same matter where the test is given across the country. This is not what it means.  A standardized test is a test which has been carefully designed to create a particular statistical distribution of all the people who take that test.  The results must be a bell shaped curve and only a bell shaped curve. Any other distribution of results means that the test is flawed and inaccurate.  It is not properly standardized and its results are not reliable. 

This means that if we accept standardized testing as the methodology by which we judge how well our schools, teachers, and students are performing, certain statistical consequences are inevitable.  Standardized tests will always, let me emphasize ALWAYS result in 25% of our schools being rated excellent, 25% of our schools being rated substandard, and 50% of our schools being judged as falling in between those two extremes.

This means that if American teachers, parents, and students do a miraculous job of teaching and of learning so that all American fourth-graders were reading at a 12th grade level, the standardized test results for that year would show that 25% of those gifted fourth-graders would be reading at an excellent level, 25% of those gifted fourth-graders would be reading below an acceptable level, and 50% of those gifted fourth-graders would fall in between those two extremes.

But if fourth-graders are actually reading the 12th grade level, and if the tests are fair, 100% of those fourth-graders should be shown as reading at an excellent level. Well, not if you're taking a standardized test. A standardized test always places 25% of test takers in the substandard category, 25% of the test takers in the exceptional category, and the other 50% of test takers as falling in between those extremes. That's what makes it  "standardized".

Now let's take a look at the opposite possibility. American teachers, apparently crazed by union membership, decide to do nothing at all in class all year long. American kids, being incredibly lazy, spend all their time in class sleeping. And American parents, not caring about their kids' education, don't do anything about it.  Things are so bad that not a single American fourth-grader can recognize all the letters of the alphabet.  What would the standardized test results for that year show?

That's right! You got it!  The standardized test results for that year would show that 25% of those ignorant fourth-graders would be reading at an excellent level, 25% of those ignorant fourth-graders would be reading below an acceptable level, and 50% of of those ignorant fourth-graders would fall in between those two extremes.

Exactly the same results that we would get if all students suddenly turned into super geniuses. If this sounds crazy to you, then you don't understand how standardized tests work. The entire purpose of a standardized test is to compare where a person places on a bell shaped curve. In terms that Americans unfamiliar with statistics, tests, and measurement might better understand, it's grading on the curve gone insane.

Standardized tests are very useful under certain circumstances. For example, in evaluating where a person falls in the range of intelligence or some other specific trait.  However, they are 100% totally ineffective and inaccurate for judging how well a teacher is teaching, how well a student is learning, or how well a school is performing.

I repeat: These tests are not designed for the evaluation of school compared to school or even individual student progress. Their use for such is professional malpractice.

But this still leaves the question unanswered, why do we misuse the tests in this manner?  It isn't surprising that average Americans don't know much about standardized tests. Why should they? This is specific expert knowledge.  But mathematicians, psychologists, psychometrists, teachers trained in tests and measurements, and many others do know these facts. So why aren't they speaking up and questioning the way in which these tests are being misused?

I don't know. It simply makes no sense to me. They know this is true. They've been taught this is true. So why are they silent? I still don't know. You'll have to ask them.