The Popularity of High-stress Testing

One of the most disturbing phenomenon about the high-stress universal testing movement is the dogmatic appeal that it has fostered. In America, a country who so often describes itself as compassionate, caring, and Christian values driven, there is virtually no evidence of any such practice in education.

Today, educational practice is dictated more often by business consultants insisting that they aren't hiring American workers because they're uneducated rather than because they've sold their souls to cheap, inexpensive, and insecure foreign labor. And corporations reinforce these ideas as often as they can by sponsoring talk-show mouthpieces who hammer home the subversive idea that American children are lazy, underperforming, and overindulged.

By and large, none of this is true.

What is true is that the practice of education at its worst approaches the same cruelties and attitudes that propel our so-called wars on terror, drugs, and minority communities.

To subject every human being to high-stress anything assumes that not a single one might be harmed by the practice. No such evidence exists. Nor is there a compelling argument that children [or adults for that matter] can withstand year upon year of high stress, ever increasing workloads without cracking somehow.

Let me remind you I'm not speaking of concentration camps, we are speaking of education practice.

Monday, the Courant ran yet another article describing the victimization of children by adults and educational professionals who know better. You will find no heroes in education these days - they've long ago turned their back on the best interests of chidren for the praise of the roman crowds cheering for more pain.

Testing Policy Under Scrutiny
Requirements Upset Some Disabled Students
May 29, 2006
By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Courant Staff Writer

"Every time he walked in to take the test, he would have a seizure," she said. "Finally, I said no more testing until I can get an answer from somebody." She said her son cannot read or write at his grade level.

"How," she asked, "can you give him an eighth-grade test?"

That is exactly the kind of question top-level state education officials are asking about the impact of the pressure-packed annual test on at least a handful of disabled children with serious academic problems.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, those children are required to take the six to seven hours of mastery tests at their actual grade level - tests that parents and educators believe are beyond their ability to comprehend. As in the Bristol case, the results can be distressing.

If you have the stomach for it, view the results of the Courant poll. I'm assuming this poll represents the self-described "compassionate" society that has given us Bush and a daily more unimaginably atrocious scandal a day, every day for years. Someday an Education profession will look back on these years as the dark ages for children. Until then, the educational floggings will continue until corporations hire American kids again.

Well, well, American Schools Get a Great Review

Recent articles in the Courant and elsewhere inform us that government statistics are being disseminated for the expressed intent of deceiving us [you don't say].

Today, we were told that the story about minority owned businesses doing so well was not only wrong but backward.

No surprise here. In my profession, Information Technologies, American workers are shafted routinely while the CBIA laments how hard it is to get good help - so, please send more docile, inexpensive labor from overseas to; sniff, sniff; help these poor companies purge themselves of workers nearing retirement.

Yeah, numbers can lie when you've got an administration that walks that walk.

So here's another example of the same thing about our so-called "FAILING" schools. No lie is too large to try to kill public education there's just one problem:

A snippet from: The Myth of America's Failing Schools by Tamim Ansary

Oddly enough, these numbers don't really support what "everyone knows." In the very year that A Nation at Risk was bemoaning a "rising tide of mediocrity," the NAEP seemed to show American students doing about the same as their counterparts had done 20 years earlier, even though the educational system had expanded tremendously and was serving, at that point, a far more diverse population of students, including many more with a limited command of English.

As for international comparisons, every four years, over the last decade, the NCES has participated in an international assessment called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This report compares test results from 25 to 50 countries in various categories. It focuses only on mathematics and hard science because those subjects are culturally and linguistically neutral, so the same test questions can be given to kids of different countries. Data was collected in 1995, 1999, and 2003, and will be collected again in 2007.

What the numbers show
According to the TIMSS, the United States is not "dead last" (as journalist Charles Krauthammer so colorfully put it) but "dead-middle," or a smidgen above. In 2003, overall, it scored higher than 13 countries and lower than 11 others. The countries beating us included Latvia, Hungary, and the Netherlands. The ones we beat included Norway, Iran, and Slovenia. It's hard to see a pattern that correlates definitively to economic competitiveness here.

Besides, statistics are more ambiguous than they seem, because there's always a social context to numbers. Consider one troubling pattern that does emerge consistently in the TIMSS reports. American students rank above average in the fourth grade but drop below average in 12th grade.

What's going on here?
There may be several factors, but here's one that education writer Gerald Bracey points out. In many countries, toward the end of high school, students take a single high-stakes test that determines whether they will go to college and thereby determines what social class they'll be in for life.

Kids cram for that test as if their lives depended on it because their lives do. In South Korea, there's a saying that students who sleep four hours a night will go to college, but those who sleep five hours a night will not.

Japan has a whole second school system of jukus or "cram schools" that many students attend every day after regular school. Cram schools!

I find it interesting that in India, about 7 percent of the college-age population is in college. I'm thinking Indian students must work desperately in that last year of high school to squeeze into the 7 percent. American students are more lackadaisical because here about 63 percent of high school graduates go to college the next year and the others can go later--this is a country of second chances.

If you test two groups of students, one of which has been cramming for months and one of which hasn't, the former will score higher. But are they better educated? Will they know more in a year? Four years? Ten? It's not a given. A test score is a snapshot of a moment.

So you're left with a circular proposition, it seems. "Failing schools" is the explanation of a national problem. The national problem is finally the proof that the schools are failing. If that correlation is valid, we should see the perceived problems disappearing after school reforms.

Has this historically been the case? That depends on how you look at it. The former Soviet Union directed national resources into producing scientists and engineers during the space race era, but that doesn't necessarily mean Russia is better off today. Maybe "failing schools" is not the only explanation of the poor test scores problem.

Sad Day in America

I have become convinced that we've reached a point of no return. I'm not talking about a fashionable political tipping point but a historical milestone that signals an ominous future for all of us. The past no longer looks anything like the future.

The changes we will experience in the coming years will arrive in breathtaking succession, good and bad, and thanks to the Bush administration we will not even be able to afford a metaphorical seatbelt.

We are no longer in control of our government and I'm losing faith that government is even meaningful anymore. Recent economic indicators show that all Americans are getting poorer - that means wealth is drastically shifting away from this country. It's not like we're entitled to an eternal pursuit of happiness but I would prefer that the world lift itself up in a less chaotic way.

Job preference no longer belongs to Americans in America;

Jobless rate higher for U.S.-born than immigrants
Unemployment rate for foreign-born workers fell below 5% last year, lower than the rate for native-born workers for the first time.
By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer
April 6, 2006: 5:30 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - The unemployment rate for immigrants working in the United States fell below the rate for U.S.-born workers in 2005 for the first time since the Labor Department started tracking those numbers a decade ago.

Numbers from the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that unemployment for native-born workers fell to 5.2 percent last year from 5.5 percent in 2004. But the unemployment rate for those who were born elsewhere sank to 4.6 percent last year from 5.5 percent the year before.

Wait!... it must be the fault of education... yeah, that's the ticket...

Why Mom and Pop can't afford Education

As I look at "fixed" raises built into teacher's and non-certified personnel's contracts, I can't help but think the guaranteed raises are a thing of the past. This may be the last generation of teachers to ever see such generous increases in their lifetimes.

Here's what the rest of America is suffering from already (from the Washington Post);

Will Your Job Survive?

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; Page A21

The threat of globalization and the reality of de-unionization have combined to make the raise, for most Americans, a thing of the past. Between 2001 and 2004, median household income inched up by a meager 1.6 percent, even as productivity was expanding at a robust 11.7 percent. The broadly shared prosperity that characterized our economy in the three decades following World War II is now dead as a dodo.

Also dying, if not yet also kaput, is the comforting notion that a good education is the best defense against the ravages of globalization -- or, as Bill Clinton famously put it: What you earn is the result of what you learn. A study last year by economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that it's the more highly skilled service-sector workers who are likely to have tradable jobs. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of jobs in the United States that require a college degree will rise by a measly one percentage point -- from 26.9 percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent in 2012 -- during this decade.

Since education as such won't save us, Blinder recommends a kind of particularized vocational ed. We will have to specialize more, he writes, "in the delivery of services where personal presence is either imperative or highly beneficial. Thus, the U.S. workforce of the future will likely have more divorce lawyers and fewer attorneys who write routine contracts." Now, there's a prospect to galvanize a nation.

My own sense (which I develop at greater length in the April issue of the American Prospect) is that nothing short of a radical reordering of our economy will suffice if we're to save our beleaguered middle-class majority. Every other advanced economy -- certainly, those of the Europeans and the Japanese -- has a conscious strategy to keep its most highly skilled jobs at home. We have none; American capitalism, dominated by our financial sector, is uniquely wedded to disaggregating companies, thwarting unionization campaigns and offshoring work in a ceaseless campaign to impress investors that it has found the cheapest labor imaginable.

Legislating Deadly Education

American education is being strangled by bad education law. These laws, often sugar-coated with magnanimous sounding titles, do far more damage to society than anyone can dream.

AREN'T I GOOD? I WILL NOT LEAVE ONE CHILD BEHIND! I MUST BE GOOD.

The most mean-spirited monsters America has ever created hold the levers of power these days. They win elections by convincing their all too eager followers that kids are lazy, distracted, stupid, and unworthy of promotion through the school system. Their sneering animous for teachers, schools, and children rewards them richly with re-election time after time.

You are all supposed to believe that children aren't working hard enough. Oh, and parents are too lazy to control their kids or spend enough time with them or... And kids disrespect authority - they can't read or write or remember everything Conservative Holy Seers like William Bennett DEMAND they know. "Don't know it yet - we have time - we'll repeat it and repeat it and repeat it... YOU MUST KNOW THIS BECAUSE I KNOW THIS"

Oh, yes. These kids need testing till their eyes bleed and their fingers blister. It's all for the good brothers and sisters.

Let's be sure that the CMTs punish all kids not passing and any schools who pass too few. Let's just PUNISH EVERY childhood educational thing we can - it is all corrupt (unlike the Carlyle Group or Halliburton).

Yes, all this testing is for our own good. Where are you if you aren't an absolute clone of the student sitting next to you? We wouldn't want anyone to be different because that would mean SOMEBODY'S exercising illegal individuality!

Forget what you read in the NYTimes. Things like;

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: March 20, 2006

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

The tangle of legislation, the mind-numbing emphasis on high-stakes testing, and the neo-nazi enthusiasm for educational conformity to the Bush oligarchy and Orwellian "accountability" practices is paralyzing schools. We can no longer provide even second-world standards of education to our kids. And curriculums are near impossible to change for the better.

In Ashford, school computers are TEN YEARS OLD. In technological terms, we are three generations of technology removed from yesterday. The school owns one smartboard.

EOSmith, similarly, offers far too many programs that beg and cookie-sale their way through the school year. The school needs a new curriculum, up-to-date technology (smartboards, iPOD server, teacher training, curriculum development finances, freedom from idiot-driven legislation, the right to experiment to improve education for our kids no matter what NCLB says, and so on). We need the ability to develop programs tha that inner city students can plug into. We need regional programs that would currently violate even more idiot laws. We need to free ourselves of Texas education and get back to Yankee ingenuity. We need some Hartford insurance companies to sponsor Chinese teachers with insurance and cost-of-living so that the schools and businesses here can learn together.

Connecticut has some of the very poorest cities in the country and we live in a state hell-bent on not graduating our students, not creating alternative prohgrams, not trusting teachers, not promoting individuality, not thinking independently, not exercising its federal autonomy - in short, kissing Bush's ass rather than treating education as a sacred trust. That has got to change.

We don't need one more day of right-wing propaganda about schools, kids, or teachers. Not one. We need relief from bad law, we need federal funding and state funding and we need a moritorium on media jackasses who freely bash our kids, parents, and schools without a fight.

The educated get poorer

In this article we find increasing evidence that educated individuals are valued less and less in America.
I happen to believe that is worrisome in dozens of ways. It also dispells the myth that education is failing to supply big business qualified people.
Big business is, in fact, fleecing college educated people. Read on...

The Poor Get Richer
Blue-collar workers are making salary gains -- but don't cheer yet.
Fortune Magazine
By Geoffrey Colvin, FORTUNE senior editor-at-large
March 13, 2006: 10:13 AM EST

"The real annual earnings of college graduates actually declined 5.2 percent, while those of high school graduates, strangely enough, rose 1.6 percent.

That is so contrary to the conventional view of this major economic trend that it demands explanation. One possibility is that it's just a blip. Could be, but remember that 2004, when the readings started going haywire, was a year of strong economic growth, low unemployment, and rising productivity, offering no obvious reason to expect weird results.

The other main possibility is that something unexpected and fundamental is changing in the way the U.S. economy rewards education. We don't yet have complete data, but anyone with his eyes open can see obvious possibilities. Just maybe the jobs most threatened by outsourcing are no longer those of factory workers with a high school education, as they have been for decades, but those of college-educated desk workers.

Perhaps so many lower-skilled jobs have now left the U.S.--or have been created elsewhere to begin with--that today's high school grads are left doing jobs that cannot be easily outsourced--driving trucks, stocking shelves, building houses, and the like. So their pay is holding up.

College graduates, by contrast, look more outsourceable by the day. New studies from the Kauffman Foundation and Duke University show companies massively shifting high-skilled work--research, development, engineering, even corporate finance--from the U.S. to low-cost countries like India and China. That trend sits like an anvil on the pay of many U.S. college grads.

We need more evidence before concluding that we're at a major turning point in the value of education to American workers. But it certainly feels like one, based on what we can observe. Higher education still confers an enormous economic advantage. Just not as enormous as it used to be.

As for income inequality, pretty much everyone has always hated it, and its growth was a certain cue for handwringing and brow furrowing. Well, it's not growing anymore. Because our best-educated workers are earning less, and the incentives for higher education may thus be declining, the result could be a more uniform--and lower--standard of living. Be careful what you wish for."

The Bullshit Human Capital Story (BHC)

In an opinion piece at TPMCafe called "IT'S WHO YOU KNOW, STUPID" by Max Sawicky, a recent Paul Krugman argument is analyzed.

This fallacy is that income or wage inequality results from an increasing "skill" differential. It's your own damn fault you don't make more money. You should have spent more time drilling calculus and less in all-night games of hearts followed by excursions to Dunkin Donuts. If you're worried about outsourcing, you're a weenie; real men are not afraid to compete in the new world economy.

I would label it the Bullshit Human Capital story (BHC). BHC was big in the Clinton Administration and lives on in the Gospels of Sperling (a.k.a. Gene Gene, Neo-Liberal Machine). The Clintons attributed the suffering we must endure from free trade to lack of investment in training and education, and they had the courage to actually devote several teaspoons of resources to look like they were fixing that problem.

In an important departure, Krugman says it's about Power. It's not that more education is not always better than less; of course it is, and more public support for education and training should be welcome. But BHC does not strike at the root of the problem, nor its solution. It's about who makes the rules of the game, including the labor market game. We are not living under meritocracy. Merit is substantially compromised by privilege.

Privilege derives from wealth, race, and gender. It biases decisions in college admissions, employment, housing, political appointments, and credit allocation. It reduces economic efficiency and growth because a biased decision entails waste of real resources.

The resulting elite is what PK calls an oligarchy.

On a related note, Average family income drops 2.3% by Sue Kirchhoff, USA TODAY

From 2001 to 2004, average family income fell 2.3%, to an inflation-adjusted $70,700 from $72,400 in the 1998-2001 period. By contrast, from 1998 to 2001, average income jumped 17.3%. Median income — the midpoint of the income range — rose 1.6% to $43,200.

Fed economists said the figures were "strongly influenced" by a more-than-6% drop in median real wages during the period. Also, investment income was less than in the stock market boom years of the late 1990s. (Related: Full report)

Real net worth — the difference between family assets and liabilities — rose only slightly from 2001 to 2004. Median net worth rose only 1.5% to $93,100 during the period, vs. a 10.3% gain from 1998 to 2001. And liabilities rose faster than assets, due largely to a big rise in mortgage debt.

As we discuss next year's budget, Certified salaries will jump approximately 4.0% as will benefits.

In the free market world people all over CT are losing their jobs, taking massive pay cuts and both losing and paying larger deductables for their benefit packages.

Just something to think about.