Bill Evers on TV on Standardized Testing

I joined Sean Reardon, an associate professor at the Stanford School of Education, for a half-hour discussion on statewide testing of K-12 students in California.

Within the over-arching topic of testing, Sean & I discuss:

-- Can you test such matters as civic understanding and ...
creativity?
-- Can you have effective school reform in the absence of
data from student test scores?
-- Is money per se the key to effective
school reform
-- Is the racial achievement gap narrowing?
-- Is there a "stereotype threat" that leads girls and African-American and Latino
students to underperform on tests? And if so, what should be done about it?
-- Should California renew its accountability system in 2010? Should it retain its statewide grade-by-grade tests? Its high-school exit exam?

The program is entitled "Class Action." The show aired on Sunday, November 8, NBC Bay Area (KNTV, Channel 11), and the video has now been posted online. The host is KNTV news anchor Jessica Aguirre.

Sandy Kress Raises Questions about National Standards

Austin attorney Sandy Kress was President George W. Bush's principal adviser on drafting the No Child Left Behind law and, earlier, was the chief architect of Texas's school accountability system. (Prior to that he had a long history at the highest levels of the Texas Democratic Party.)

Kress recently (June 5) commented on eduwonk on the current fascination with national academic-content standards.

He speculates that governors, chief state school officers, and others are under the spell of utopian "good feelings" about national standards that do not yet exist.

But once the good feelings "wear off," Kress says, they will start asking questions. Writing national standards will stir up perennial controversies: whole language vs. phonics, computation vs. concepts. Then, Kress points out, come all the questions of detail "that arise once you get below the level of 30,000 feet."

At this point, Kress says, policymakers may get to the place where they find out the new national standards under consideration are not ideal, not perfect, indeed no better than (or even possibly worse than) the standards that the states already have.

Kress asks reasonable questions about the horse-trading and interest-group jockeying that will inevitably arise:

Could it be that the tradeoffs that happen nationally will be the same as those that occur in the states? Could the same interest groups intervene? Could this nice dream [of national standards] be interrupted by the demons that bedevil state standard-setting? Could these interests be the problem as much as variation [among state standards documents]?

Then Kress brings up the centrally important issue of a nationally uniform grading policy (technically known as "performance standards"):

If we ever get to detailed, precise [national academic-content] standards in each grade for reading and math, do the participants agree to common performance standards? If they don’t, who’s kidding whom? The real problem today is not so much that some states have vastly higher [content] standards than other states; it’s more that their performance standards are greatly different.... [W]ill the states, commit to making those the same? If not, [the national standard-setting process] will be utterly fruitless.

Although Kress did not make this point in this eduwonk comment, he and those he works with have often pointed out that revising academic-content standards can be a time-consuming excuse for not doing the hard work of fixing failing schools and closing the achievement gap.

For example, the Washington Post reported on June 1 that immediate-past U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has voiced a cautionary note on this matter. Spellings said in a recent interview that she supports a process of states working together from the bottom-up to raise academic standards. But she is concerned that the strenuous effort required to create new national standards could divert attention from students who are failing right now:

We have a speedometer, and it says we're going too slow. Should we get a more precise speedometer? Sure. But the most important thing is speeding up.

Jeb Bush Lauds Fla. Experience with Opportunity Scholarships

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has a column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today (Mar. 4), in which he is hopeful about the effort of Georgia State Sen. Eric Johnson to bring opportunity scholarships to Georgia children -- such scholarships give low-income families access to high performing schools and can put competitive pressure on low-performing schools.

In his column, Jeb Bush gives a rousing defense of opportunity scholarships, citing particular their positive effect in Florida (where they were in place 1999-2006):

[R]esearch by Harvard and Cornell universities concluded that Florida’s choice programs...improved the quality of education in public schools. Fearing the loss of students, public schools developed innovative ways to help students succeed, such as offering Saturday morning tutorials and after-school intervention.

There is irrefutable evidence our education reform formula is responsible for Florida’s rising student achievement. Nearly a quarter of a million more children are reading at or above grade level today than a decade ago. Florida is scoring above the national average in reading and math. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Education recently recognized Florida as one of five states to close the achievement gap for minority students.