There's a Lot of Ways to Get It Wrong

The Courant is applauding this year's CT Mastery Test results in an editorial laced with misunderstanding and ignorance. They share the delusion of educators and administrators who prop up and profit handsomely from the high-stakes, high-stress testing industry.

What else can they do? Like all-good compliant enablers they buy and perpetuate the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable assertions of an education community dedicated to blind ignorance and unlimited profit. Called "Learning to Improve" - no, I'm not making that up -the editorial dutifully and patronizingly congratulates the system.

Higher scores on the annual Connecticut Academic Performance Test — in some cases increasing by double digits — are an indication that multiple efforts to boost student achievement are paying off.

Statewide, the percentage of high school sophomores meeting state goals increased in three out of the four subjects — math, science, reading and writing — over 2007. Only reading scores stayed the same. White, black and Hispanic students all showed gains.

Hartford students, among the lowest-performing in the state, made impressive strides in the percentages achieving "proficiency" or better — although that designation is still a level below state goals.

Although the trend is heartening, the gap between the scores of white students and minorities, and between low-income communities and affluent ones, persists. So must the strategies that are showing promise.

Yeah, presumably they are waiting for that utopian moment of intellectual singularity when all students rich or poor, formerly smart or challenged all get precisely the same score thus proving that the "gap" could be overcome.

That moment of intellectual mediocrity is apparently something the schools are striving for, the two-faced graduate, half Alfred E. Neumann and half-genius in everyman, a marching, compliant, ready-for-industry, test-proven, interchangeable widget that we can finally be proud of.

I know, you get teary eyed just thinking about it.

The blatant, obvious, in-your-face-fact that the schools are being blighted by this war of test scores is of little consequence. Like Iraq, the murder, mayhem, chaos, and ubiquitous corruption are a small price to pay for the opportunity to show -cough- progress.

And in a fitting tribute to the absurd, the Courant takes an opportunity to celebrate schools that taught nothing more nor improved their students an iota but managed to find a way to make the test a more palatable poison.

Improvements made in Canton, whose sophomores now rank among the top in the state, should be a model for all districts. One innovation was to spread out the testing schedule so that students took only one of the nine CAPT test segments per day rather than trying to cram them all into five days. Special education students were particularly helped by this change, according to Principal Gary Gula.

That's got to have every school principal in the state saying, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Yes sir. And now that innovation will be used in the next round to some even more progress toward the illusion of teaching kids something - usually an illiterate state employee's idea of what's important.

No, not coffee breaks or not answering the phone! Something that can be tested like -um- "You're having crumpets with the Oneupsman family, do you use a salad fork or a dinner fork?"

The Amero Whitewash at the Norwich Bulletin

A few days ago I reported the peculiar circumstance that the Norwich Bulletin Search for porn brings up the Bulletin's own vendor recommendations when shopping for "porn".

Considering their simple recipe that Julie Amero should have just "pulled the plug" or "turned it off" one cannot help but wonder why the Norwich Bulletin hasn't followed their own advice.

But what has happened at the Bulletin is far more troubling. A search of the newspaper for "Amero", "porn", and "teacher" cannot find a single one of the vociferous articles penned at the Bulletin that condemned her in the eyes of the community.

You see as a parent, a technologist, and a Board of Education member I believe our schools are on the wrong track. For thirty years conservative commentators and columnists have so poisoned our understanding of children, teens and learning that our schools have become radical social experiments in intellectual torture schemes.

Our schools no longer honor the student's interests or their well-being. Schools are run to pass tests that are almost exclusively fact oriented. In a subject such as math this is less consequential.

But in discussions with about our science curriculum, I am discovering that the mandatory and punishing Connecticut Aptitude tests (CAPT) place no value on an understanding of the human body or the study of animal life. Science teachers who use valuable class time for subjects such as this risk seeing their students perform poorly on perfunctory state tests.

We are growing a generation of young adults who cannot understand the relationship of one body part or function to another. The religious fanatics who oppose science have so twisted our educational imperatives that schools can no longer teach the relationship between stem cells and the greater body, of what cells mean to each other, of the wonders of life. All they are taught is the memorization of labels and endless, dreary factoids that drain all joy out of learning.

And society's criminal neglect of our children's education does not stop there. In a world of exponentially accelerating complexity our kids are not allowed to use computers to get and process information.

And teachers use computers as though they were little more than fancy grade books, email devices, and occasional internet browsers. Their training is menial and their ability to apply computers in class is too often pathetic. Schools fall prey to all kinds of cyber-charlatans who misguide administrators and curriculum developers often resulting in the wasteful purchase of unnecessary hardware, software, or process.

The schools are not failing America, America is failing our schools.

Every student needs a dedicated computer equipped with internet access. Period. This is not a debate it is a necessity.

And a social contract must be honored. It is that the school will provide every responsible firewall and filter it can afford to avoid unfortunate access to inappropriate materials but in the end students must act responsibly and deal with unfortunate events as responsible individuals not as victims or drama award winners.

No matter what anyone does, unfortunate access to inappropriate material will happen - nothing is absolutely safe. But our mission in schools is to learn, to process the best information we can, to explore, and to think boldly and without fear. And this goes for teachers as well. They should be able to surf professionally and personally. There is nothing wrong with this as long as their historic behavior isn't deviant of the school or the community.

Information processing is the future and schools are devoid of it today. But even if our children were to surf the web freely they'd never find Julie Amero on the Norwich Bulletin site. And that's an injustice that must never be allowed to be covered up.

If the Bulletin is embarrassed by their past journalistic coverage they should admit their mistake and advocate that Julie be free on her own recognizance until this nightmarish trial is thrown out.

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Stupid Is as Stupid Does, Legalized Extortion

Last night's Board meeting was a barnburner. The results of last year's Connecticut Aptitude (CAPT) test took one center stage. Doug Melody presented the Board with stacks of statistical comparisons of schools, scores, and number crunches. And there was absolutely nothing in the test results that isn't obvious by examining the community. Yet another well-educated, middle-class, suburban community providing honest public education comfortably, predictably, and uneventfully passes the CAPT test overall.

The cost of this Norman Rockwell moment is approximately 5 weeks of exhaustive and comprehensive preparation and test involvement. In our school district this translates into between $500,000 and $1,000,000 of education entangled resources expended, a curriculum distortion to pander to the testing, and a major fraction of the school year dedicated to looking in the mirror and seeing the same educational profile that this community has been for twenty or more years.

CAPT testing is the equivalent exercise of counting our fingers and toes every year while burning $1500 of taxpayer money on the front lawn of the school. Yep, ten fingers and ten toes.

As Board members we dutifully pore over every percentile difference between this competing school and that but after furrowing our brows, rubbing our chins, and uncrossing our eyes there is not a single worthwhile statistic to truly care about. Nothing that isn't obvious and well-known already except for some ever-so-useful school rankings. "Hey, we beat out... so and so. Woo-hoo!" If the test disappeared tomorrow our teachers would still have as much insight into the needs of our kids as they have today. If honesty is our measure, CAPT has no value add to the equation - the esoteric merits are not worth talking about.

Our Board chairman, Fran Archambault, started by questioning whether or not the teaching process is affected from one year to the next considering the different populations, class sizes and other factors involved.

Insert sound effect: crickets chirping.

I followed up by asking what the teaching staff interprets these numbers to mean since they are a measure of how well the teachers are doing.

Somebody quickly corrected that assertion. "Oh no. CAPT doesn't measure the effectiveness of teachers, it measures how well PARENTS ARE DOING!"

Oh wah! As a parent this is the first time I've heard this news. I always thought the premise of this absurd nonsense was to hold the schools accountable. My how bullshit rolls downhill.

I don't think they were kidding either. I really have a hard time wrapping my head around that but maybe it's just me.

Shortly, Bob Kremer, followed up, "What exactly, do we get out of these numbers?", and so on.

"Well, um, ah, eh... what do you mean "get", ah, ..." Nobody had a good answer. Apparently, the teachers were as taken aback by the idea that these numbers had meaning as everyone else. It was like the scene from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" where a group of scientists, teachers, and guests are staring out into space at this thing that lands that has all kinds of flashing lights... looks expensive... you don't want it in your living room... and everyone wonders, "What the hell is this all about?"

It became comically clear that the CAPT exercise is a dance we do because the state extorts the school districts into participating at the threat of losing State and Federal tax dollars. The test merely quantifies without a shadow of a doubt that the State is still maintaining a clearly defined class society much to the relief of the real estate market.

The State Department of Education can rest easy. Are those ghettos still there? Yessir! Are those ghetto kids still failing? Yessir! Do we have proof? Yessir! Good work, stay the course!

Schools are failing because America never learns from its mistakes. The sign of a fool is someone who after learning that they've made a mistake keeps repeating the very same mistake with the very same results. CAPT testing is a perfect example. In fact the State and Federal Departments of Education are perfect examples of stupid ideas that have failed but won't go away and who refuse to learn.

Our kids aren't dumb. They look at what the schools practice which is willful institutionalized ignorance, stone-walling and petty nonsense, and wonder how important the platitudes about learning and passing tests can possibly be. If the people in the Departments of Education can keep their jobs then being professionally learning disabled has rich career rewards.

So Goes CAPT, So Goes the Courant

The link will take you to The Courant's page listing the entire State's results (with a few exceptions).

In reading, Region 19 (EO Smith)was one of the State's biggest gainers. Overall the results were disappointing. But so is the Courant's coverage. The front page graph is wholly graphically misleading. This year's 46.5 percent of students reading at grade level's graph bar being shorter than 2002's 44.8 percent.

I know many of the reading specialists in Mansfield and Ashford and I'm familiar with E.O. Smith's very real commitment to reading improvement so I take great joy for everyone who works so hard at improving our kids.

However, I would've argued just as hard that our teaching staff was doing the right thing even if the CAPT scores had tallied differently. Testing is useful, vindicating when the results reflect the effort, and so on but these isolated metrics can never deny the professionalism and hard work that Board members see routinely.

Our teachers deserve a kind word of thanks all the time because they earn it and our kids showit, test or no test.