Bill Heller, a public school teacher, has written a pretty good open letter to President Obama regarding education, highlighting the successes of his own school as well as problems that federal involvement has caused for public education through the passage of No Child Left Behind.  (All block quotes are from the letter, but there is a lot more to it than I’ve selected here).

He makes it clear that problems being faced by some schools in some areas should not direct policy and law making for all schools.  I haven’t seen much vilification of public school teachers in the media, but then my radar is a little more sensitive toward the vilification of homeschoolers.  As a teacher, I received nothing but respect but maybe that is a curiosity of working in a 100% Hispanic school district.  At any rate, he does a fine job of outlining the main problems with No Child Left Behind and the testing craze it has spawned.

I.  Watered down curriculum:

First, by forcing all students to pass certain tests, we’ve essentially had to “water down” important courses. In New York, for example, the biology curriculum has been gutted of content so that everybody can pass a “Regents level” science exam. The new algebra curriculum is great, but the cutoff score is so low that students have figured out that practically anybody who can fog a mirror can pass it. Under the guise of raising standards for all, we end up selling short our most capable students. There is little reward to excel, only to “pass the test.” Both ends of the spectrum get ignored at test time just to get enough students “over the cut score.” By their very design, “magically” determined cutoff scores can be manipulated to produce a predetermined number of students who will pass a given test. Beating the testing game has become an end instead of a means to an end. (Emphasis mine).

There was a time when teachers in my district were shown a graph with a little bubble, the target students.  Children above that bubble would do fine with or without you, children below that bubble were too far from the target to waste resources on.  Almost all instruction was focused on that small bubble near the middle where the teacher was most likely to to be able to have a measurable effect come testing time.

II.  Waste of instructional time

Now, all year long, precious days are lost and enormous amounts of money are spent on annual testing. Out here in the country we have a saying: “Nobody ever fattened a calf by weighing it.” Unfortunately, we’ve figured out that only tested subjects “count” anymore. Many of our limited resources get pumped into the few areas that get tested; other areas are given short shrift when it comes to funding, staffing and, more importantly time. (Emphasis mine).

Yeah.  Once I counted up the required hours for all the “core” (meaning tested subjects), I had exactly five minutes left in the day to teach science, art and history.  I can’t help but laugh when people talk about homeschoolers potentially weak in science.  Who in the public school system cares about science anymore?

III.  Boxing Children Rather than Developing Individual Talents and Interests

In order to play the NCLB game and to avoid having the stigma of being labeled a “failing school,” there is a lot of pressure not to classify needy students in order to avoid having to disaggregate data and make AYP for special education students as a separate subgroup. In addition, students with very limited abilities are dumped into classes that are way beyond their developmental abilities instead of being given appropriate instruction at a level at which they can be successful. Some have been forced to sit through lengthy exams that they have no hope of passing. In the same vein, we need to recognize that not all students will want to pursue a four-year college degree.  (Emphasis mine)

So, uh, now that we’ve established what the current fixation on testing is really accomplishing in many schools, let’s make the homeschoolers play the game, too.

Make homeschooled students take the same tests as public school students are required to take in order to continue homeschooling.

How much sense does that make?  But I’ve written on this subject at length before and shan’t go into it again:

• Why would homeschoolers object to state testing.
• A more concrete objection to testing homeschools.

But it does seem a bit ironic to spend most of a letter attacking testing and then throw a few more kids into the crazy mess it has created.

homeschool homeschooling No Child Left Behind standardized testing

The Thirst for Freedom posted a nice entry regarding my post about researching homeschooling which received an interesting comment from Casper about homeschoolers and testing. With the accountability craze in the public schools right now, it is unlikely this is a concern that is going to go away any time soon and with the resolution put forth by one of our state senators to look into ways to bring more oversight to Nebraska homeschoolers, it is very likely to be quite relevant to us here in the near future.

I have gone into the testing issue a few times and my objections really rest on the fact that in a free society, private citizens are not accountable to the state. The state needs probable cause to search my home for evidence of illegal activity and the same should hold true for the mental capacities of my children. It is a philosophical objection based in my understanding of individual rights and of what it means to have a limited government. In the interest of saving a little space, I’ll just point out two past posts which really go into this issue in more depth:

• Why would homeschoolers object to state testing?
• My written testimony before the NE state legislature

But there are other issues with standardized testing than individual liberties in a free society. First, we need to look at the purpose of standardized testing:

• To report how well schools are performing to the public.

This is the real thrust of the accountability movement and is really an important function of standardized testing. I think this has gone to an unhealthy extreme in American education and I hope the pendulum will soon begin to swing the other direction. But the goal is a good one: provide parents with an independent measure to aid them in making educational decisions for their children. The point is similar to that made in the entries I linked above: in a free society, it is the state that is accountable to the people and it is we that maintain oversight of its functioning. I as a parent and as a taxpayer have a right to know what is being taught in the public schools and whether or not it is effective. I, however, am in no way accountable to the state or to the public for what I teach my children.

• To focus learning and instruction to state standards and key concepts.

This is the real problem with testing homeschoolers. We are not bound to state standards and we do not necessarily purchase curriculum aligned to state standards. On the surface, it may seem that a child that can read should be able to pass a reading test or a child that has been taught math should be able to pass a math test, but this is not necessarily the case. Almost half of my first grade class flunked our first benchmark when I was teaching because the district tested using a test from a different publisher than the math program our school was using. When we threw out the problems that had not yet come up in our program, my kids excelled. Looking over one standardized math assessment, my daughter would struggle with the section on congruent shapes because we haven’t talked about them yet. And there are other issues. The test talks about “fact families” but this concept has another name in her math book. She may or may not be able to figure it out from the question and available answers, but who knows what she will decide a “family” is when applied to numbers. She can, however, add and subtract numbers to three places with regrouping, a skill which is not on the test. So if she did poorly on this test, would it mean we had “done nothing?” Or just that we are doing things differently than the state schools?

And there are other problems which come with high stakes testing in general, whether it is in the public school or the homeschool. This gets a bit technical, but standardized tests, even those which are “criterion referenced” are not designed to make sure that all students have mastered a certain proficiency level. They are designed to discriminate between high achievers and low achievers, meaning that a student could achieve a basic proficiency in the subject matter and still fail the test. A summary of how these standards-based tests are developed which demonstrates that the idea of “some basic quality control testing” is not as easy as it might at first appear:

During the construction of both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests, test makers use a pilot test to determine which items (test questions) will appear on the finished test administered to students on testing day. The survivor items are ones that possess the proper statistical profile: survivor items are those that “discriminate” between high-scoring and low-scoring students. In other words, test makers only want items that are answered correctly by high scoring students and answered incorrectly by low scoring students. Any items that are answered correctly by almost all students will be eliminated from the final test. Items that almost everyone answers correctly are considered “too easy for the target population” (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2005, p. 102). Such “easy” items provide little helpful psychometric information; in selecting test items, test-makers want to choose the items that will be most helpful in distinguishing among students of differing abilities. Validity of high-stakes standardized test requirements for homeschoolers: a psychometric analysis

I am reminded of a situation related in a professional development seminar I attended in Texas back when Bush was governor. Texas students had gotten a little too good at the story problems and were recognizing the “key words” to determine whether a story problem called for addition or subtraction. So the language of the test began to change, resulting in problems that I as an adult had to read twice to figure out what they wanted…for a third grade assessment!

It is not that I think standardized testing is “evil.” It is just that I recognize its limitations. I have no problems with parents testing their own children. Many do…and I have as well. But the scores should be for the parent’s information to guide instruction, not as a comparison to children in other educational settings and certainly not as a requirement to continue to homeschool.

And one more old post for those of you who just love reading about psychometric testing: Standardized Testing: An American Addiction.