Are you a teacher? You sound like the editorial staff of the NY Post.

“We define ourselves by our self-perception of the self-assessed quality of our own efforts, a quality that is all too often divorced from the reality of student achievement and student growth. We then turn to any number of handy scapegoats: parents, myspace, Mayor whoever, the District, the great Satan of standardized testing, and lay at their doorstep all culpability for student failure, while retaining for ourselves nearly all credit for student success.”

Most of the teachers I know work hard and take the challenges of student success personally. But we are also in the trenches and we are well aware of the problems inherent within a system that has poor resources, inexperienced administrators, misplaced priorities, monies flowing to consultants and corporate interests all at the expense of our children. If you are a teacher, you know that standardized testing is a necessary slice of the instructional pie, but it certainly is not the whole pie. Teaching to tests is not education.

“Embracing performance pay” as you would have it is a joke. You would have your livlihood determined by criteria beyond your control? Tweed, with their cooked books that don’t match the state? Adminstrators doling out loyalty and favors? How do you rate teachers who don’t teach classes based on standardized classes? How do you “reward” teachers who provided the foundation for students to succeed while the current teachers reap the harvest? Your own list of negatives is daunting enough.

Your perception is correct. There were significantly fewer students scoring in Level 4 on last year’s state tests than there were in the previous year.

Why? Because very quietly, in the dead of night, the tests were re-normed. As a result, more students scored closer to the 50th percentile.

If you believe the state, the city, and the test publishers, this is impossible, because the tests are “standards-based,” not norm-referenced. This sounds nice, but, statistically, there is no such thing as a “standards-based” test. An exam is either norm-referenced, (e.g., questions are assigned “P-value” degrees of difficulty, which are determined by a norming sample), or it’s criterion-referenced, (e.g., the Department of Motor Vehicles test, which is strictly based on material in the handbook, with no adjustment for how easy or how difficult a particular item may be).

Did you see the article in today’s Times about how NCLB has failed to close the achievement gap between white students and minority students?

Of course it has! The results of norm-referenced tests correspond almost perfectly to socio-economic status. As long as we have an income gap, we’ll have an achievement gap. Duh.

Continued denial that these tests are normed is a perfect example of “If at first you’re not believed, lie, lie again.”

No we don’t. We define ourselves by our self-perception of the self-assessed quality of our own efforts, a quality that is all too often divorced from the reality of student achievement and student growth. We then turn to any number of handy scapegoats: parents, myspace, Mayor whoever, the District, the great Satan of standardized testing, and lay at their doorstep all culpability for student failure, while retaining for ourselves nearly all credit for student success.

If we truly defined ourselves by student success and failure we would embrace systems of growth-based performance pay, we would stop abdicating control over that which we can control, and we would temper our well-justified critiques of power-abusing sups, misguided admin, and clueless Boards with the assurance that we’ll succeed anyway, even if everyone keeps making it harder.

There was a time when the statistics would tell us how much growth a child made
from year to year. So if a child scored a
40 percentile, but made a year’s growth, that was good.

However last year some of my students went from 4′s to high 3′s on the new state ELA. And I understand that there were less 4′s than in previous years.

Without understanding the scoring, how are we supposed to gauge the improvement?

The loss of instructional time thus far has been about 4 hours and there’s more to come. Supposedly these tests will identify where our kids need help with. Gee, and all this time I erroneously thought that was part of my job.

I can’t help but think that this “data” is being collected to push future merit pay/perfomance pay schemes. I wonder how many teachers if asked would have requested these new student assessment tests? Why must the disconnect between management and classroom teachers grow wider every passing year?

“Progress Reports” are another quasi-statistical scam promulgated by the public relations experts at Tweed.

“Progress” measurements are as flawed as “performance” scores, since they’re all based on the same, norm-referenced exams.

I remember, a few years ago, when a principal got a performance bonus when her school improved from 6% to 19% at or above the fiftieth percentile on the NYS reading test.

The same year, a principal whose school went from 89% to 92% on the same test didn’t get the bonus.

Once again, I repeat the wisdom of my late father-in-law: “Figures lie and liar figure.”