A pedestrian characterization of state results increase?

STAR results were announced this week, and I'm sure there were a lot of unhappy people about Doug McRae's characterization of the improvement as "pedestrian."

McRae, a testing expert formerly with McGraw-Hill, said the improvement observed was not something to write home about because a decent number would be more like a 4 or 5 percentage point. California as a whole went up by 2 percentage points. You can read the entire story here.

McRae was careful to specify he was talking about California as a whole, not Monterey County, its individual districts or schools. The samples are too small for that, he told me.

Bardin Elementary teacher Daniel Delgado took issue with the story and McRae's characterization. In an email he wrote to me, he said that what McRae "failed to include in his analysis was the fact that the change was qualitative, not just quantitative."

In fact, The Californian reported that Bardin had increased its grades so much that it's already out of Program Improvement, the federal designation for schools that fail to meet federal goals of academic improvement. Since the California Department of Education has not yet announced official Program Improvement data, I will wait on reporting about that.

But I wanted to write about Delgado and his concerns -- which are not unique. I hear often not just from teachers, but also from parents, about the unfairness of the testing system. Teachers, students, administrators, parents, toil year long so the test scores improve, sacrificing precious time that could be invested in science teaching, or art, or activities designed to give children other analytical skills needed to succeed. In return, they have to wait for one test or two to be told whether they met federal goals -- which keep on climbing every year, making it almost impossible to catch up. And when the state comes back and tells schools "you're still in Program Improvement," well, it can be very discouraging.

It's the same complain we hear about No Child Left Behind: children are being set up to fail, and it's very unfair. Testing should not be the only way a child is deemed "successful." What about other non-testable qualities? Is the child kind, caring? Is he or she creative? Does he/she know how to analyze situations, to think for herself? Is fill-in-the-blanks testing teaching them how to do that?

U.S. Secretary of Education is scheduled to release next month a set of criteria states need to meet if they want to apply for a No Child Left Behind waiver -- which means California education officials could start thinking about devising other ways to measure student progress. It will be interesting to see where California goes, and if we finally leave those pesky tests behind.

Below is a copy of the letter Mr. Delgado sent me:

I am a teacher at Bardin Elementary (AUSD), and I firsthand witnessed and participated in improving our school’s test scores. What your consultant failed to include in his analysis was the fact that the change was qualitative, not just quantitative. He should have seen, with a more careful analysis, something akin to a step function, meaning a very high jump up quickly. That is precisely what occurred at Bardin

Two years ago, Bardin’s administration had the foresight to realize that we needed to rethink, with some really brilliant educational consultants (R. Miller of Educaliber), how to teach our children. The result was a teaching methodology which appears to be very intuitive and natural for children to use, and is focused on teaching the CA State Standards.

I am sure of the sincerity of your consultant’s desire to help our schools improve. But of course if you average all of the bad years of test scores, coupled with our low baseline scores due to our high poverty/non-English families, the improvement might look small. So I am puzzled by why your consultant thinks this needs to be emphasized.

I do, however, find it ironic, that this person used to work for an important educational publishing company. One huge reason we have been successful is because of the epiphany that the textbooks and other teaching curriculum that has been bought by CA are basically very poor resources in teaching what the state wants. What they clearly are, interestingly enough are huge cash cows for these companies because they supply so much supplementary material and training to make up for their deficiencies.

The bottom line is this; Bardin did not change its teachers, or get different students. It improved because we kept a clear focus – to teach what CA wants us to teach.

Unfortunately in the past, and sad to say in many schools still, we are told to teach what some academic hired by the publisher tells us to teach in poorly written teacher guides.

I am filled with joy at seeing what was in the past basically a crawling, hurt, child suddenly and mightily stand tall. This is the qualitative change I am talking about. I think this is a much better way to think about the dramatic change that is occurring throughout our district, then belittling it with a slight of statistics.