08.07.07
Measuring Student Progress
Wandering the Internet, passing time while I was eating lunch, I ran across this article by Charles Wheelan, “Want Good Schools? First, Define ‘Good’,” who raises the issue of how we should measure education.
. . . schools with high test scores may or may not be doing a great job; perhaps their students are capable of much more. And conversely, some schools with middling or poor test scores may be doing a terrific job educating students who would otherwise be failing abjectly.
Obviously, we can spot the outliers — the school in the middle of Detroit that manages to send 95 percent of its students to college, say. If we give researchers enough time and enough data, they can try to answer the school-quality question using statistical techniques that take account of what kind of students are walking through the front door.
But even then the results are often equivocal. The bottom line is that it’s hard to evaluate school quality, which is why it’s even harder to make schools better.
What Wheelan is getting at is that not all entering students are equal. Some have vastly more potential than others, and a school district that has a preponderance of such students because of economic influences will score better than another school with fewer students with brainy parents. So we need to figure out what a good education is, but he fails to define what this is.
Yet the answer seems obvious, which is what I get for wandering the Internet when I should have been doing something more productive: The answer is to evaluate the change in each student’s abilities, not his performance on a fixed test.
That we do the latter isn’t surprising because, really, we don’t care about change so much as ability when we’re evaluating an adult who’s going to fly a passenger airplane or operate on our brains. But children aren’t adults, and our hope is as educators that we bring each child along as far as he or she can go during the semester or year.
If a student can’t write an essay at the beginning of the semester but can by the end, that’s terrific progress in 18 weeks. But that does not mean that this same student has become an accomplished writer, which is the performance measurement we apply when we assign a grade or give the student a normalized test.
The two aren’t incompatible during the education process, but they do present problems when it comes time to graduate, which is when society says that it’s time to make sure that students have certain minimum skills. The only thing that’s wrong with this is the nature of the test, which can be hard to fashion fairly in our diverse society, and the psychological impact the test has on students and their families.
But as long as we have a society that depends critically on critically skilled people, there’s no getting around the need for skills-based tests. Perhaps instead of exit exams we should have diploma classifications: first class, second class, etc.
But isn’t this exactly what grades are? If one were to always look at the grade the student achieved in getting his diploma, wouldn’t potential employers already know what they need to know? Certainly colleges already do this.
Ah, there’s the rub. The exit exams are given because some in our society believe that teachers are cheating by giving higher grades than they should. Grade inflation is the cause. So the tests aren’t about the students, but are about the teachers. Interesting.
On the other hand, these students who were said to be passing without being able to read — and the definition of “being able to read” is important here as well — probably did get their diplomas, but what were their grades? Do you really believe a teacher would give a high grade to someone who can’t read or write or do math well?
If they passed with a D, doesn’t that say something about their abilities. In other words, could we have solved this problem by just encouraging everyone to look beyond the diploma to the grade-point average that the student achieved?
There’d still be the problem that an A at one school is not the same as an A at another, so perhaps the exit exams could be used to normalize the grades, but they don’t need to be used to keep students from graduating. The teachers’ grades are perfectly capable of telling us who did well in school and who just got by.
Laurie said,
08.07.07 at 7:24 pm
Here, here, Dave. Thanks for standing up for sanity in the grading systems of our schools. Perhaps the schools should be graded, and that then factored into the student’s GPA, which would give the colleges an idea that a higher grade at a lower graded school would equal a lower grade at a higher graded school.
Bottom line, to me, is that we need tests that reflect the learning taking place in more than just two categories (reading and math) and that will allow us to get back to the teaching of creative and critical skills which will serve our society.
Dave Badtke said,
08.08.07 at 7:51 am
Laurie,
Thanks for your comment. I agree that teaching creative and critical skills is what our society needs, but I wonder if these skills are what many in our society really want.
Liz Potter, in her Feminist Theory class at Mills College, suggested that K-12 instruction tends to focus on the training of enthusiastic surplus consumers: those willing to work at jobs they don’t particularly like to get money to buy things they want that they don’t really need. Perhaps I should add to this the need to stay in such jobs, especially in the service sector, if they provide health-care benefits.
In such a measure-it-and-it-will-get-better world, as defined by GE’s Jack Welch, do we really believe that creative, critical skills will make our society better? GE, after all, brings good things to life.
In thinking about this, the idea that to be known something needs to be measured, I’m reminded of Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in the second chapter, “Murdering the Innocents,” in his novel “Hardtimes”:
Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of fact and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir — peremptorily Thomas — Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all suppositions, no existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind — no sir!
In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls’, for ’sir’, Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.
Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’
‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’
‘My father as calls me Sissy. sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?’
‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’
Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, does he?’
‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’
‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’
The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room, irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the other side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the comer of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His shortcropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.
‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’