Why do you think South Carolina replaced a test called the PACT with one named the PASS?
They had such high hopes for the PASS, South Carolina's replacement test to measure student achievement for NCLB. Jim Rex, SC's Superintendent of Education, fondly hoped that by lowering testing standards, he could show how much education in the state had improved under his watch.
Well, the jig is up. Despite such educrats' best efforts, not a single South Carolina school district made AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) with the new test.
According to Friday's P&C,
"When lawmakers replaced PACT with PASS, they moved to a three-level scoring system -- not met, met and exemplary -- and required students to score at the met level to meet AYP. That means more students could meet AYP because the standard for doing so was lower."
The result? "None of the state's school districts made AYP, and all of the local districts fell short in meeting AYP for its students with disabilities."
What went wrong? No doubt Jim Rex even now is hounding the test-makers about their failure to see that at least one district would pass. "Hey, stupid," he might say, "That was the whole idea behind the new name, PASS."
Those who created the tests must be really dumb.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
In the same light as the old fairey tail about a tailor selling the king a magic new suit of clothing. Our superintendent will no doubt manage to claim success for a costly wardrobe makeover. Never mind if we can't see it. The numbers are what she says they are. She can see them and that's all that matters.
High school kids still can't read. Vacancies are still covered up at Buist. More students than ever are being bussed to schools far from their neighborhoods. School choice is a sad joke to all but the well connected. The drop out rate is improved by simply selecting a narrower group to be counted. Classroom teachers are reduced while the administrative staff is expanded. School buildings are closed while charter school enrollments expand and most remain locked out of the vacant buildings. CCSD is an expensive failure.
Teach to the test. If the test results are unsatisfactory, make the test easier. As Nancy McGinley knows, just fix the reported results and declare "Victory in the Classroom."
Sure, right! My eye!
A curse on Jim Rex on the enlighened left. And a curse, too, on the right-wing Republican controled state legislature and another curse on the local limosine liberals behind the county school board. Their kids are secure and relatively safe in magnet or private schools. Even the local NAACP is only concerned with protecting mediocre (dues paying) teachers and suckup CCSD administrators who have all grown fat skimming the system. Never mind that none of these varied groups are on the same page with their national leadership concerning innovation in public education. Then again, it's these locals who have become too comfortable cutting their slice of CCSD's half billion dollars annually. These standardized test scores have almost nothing to do with educating individual students in Charleston County. The numbers are regularly changed to justify anything the Superintendent wants. Then again, the numbers can always be turned upside down in time for the next election.
We say we can track terrorists on no-fly lists. We can produce detailed credit reports, driving records and insurance scores on individuals in a matter of seconds. We can do the same for public school attendance records state wide.
So why can't we track the academic progress of individual students? Because the numbers wouldn't be useful to the bureaucrats who get paid high saleries to run the failing public school systems here.
After six years, why can't Nancy tell us why Johnny still can't read? Please give us an answer without resorting to the tired old grad school textbook cliches. Nancy doesn't really have an answer. She might tell us instead how well the surfing has improved at Folly since she came here.
What??!!!! Teachers teach to the test?? Oh no, tell me it isn't so. When I said that one time in an English dept. meeting, I was almost pushed out of the room because almost everyone denied that that was being done and so what if it were. Oh well...
Oh, I do find sadly amusing the way public school system department heads and superintendents act with such resolve when it comes to a newly discovered or defined mission. This time it’s all about improving literacy within our public schools. Wow, what a concept!
I don't know where they've been these last 42 years since CCSD came into existence, but that's what local voters and tax payers thought JOB # ONE was for those running our schools. Such a basic priority as having students reading on grade level should have been firmly in place years ago for Charleston County's most expensive public agency.
What? You mean to tell me those in charge couldn't have figured it out on their own? Why else would standardized test scores have consistently dropped over the years between 3rd and 4th grade for so many of the same kids being tested? Fourth graders are required to read the questions for themselves on standardized tests. Below that grade level test questions are read to the students who then select an answer to each question on their answer sheets.
CCSD bean counters have had the facts in their computers and published reports showing this to be the case for over a decade. Janet Rose knows how this is done and has been doing this for at least 4 different superintendents. She can pull the trigger any time for just about any set of numbers you want to see. The "rocket scientists" we pay to sit on their pedestals at 75 Calhoun and at Leeds must be pretty stupid if they didn't connect the dots long before now.
If you believe Dr. McGinley's public comments since the initial reports in the local press (and I don't), you would think she just stumbled on the literacy issue by accident and is now committed to doing something about it. For once the P&C did their homework and the superintendent was found to be lacking on a critical academic priority.
I don’t care if you call the tests PASS, PACT or “LET’S MOVE THE GOAL POST AGAIN”, if students aren’t prepared with a real education beyond what is literally “on the test”, no score will reflect meaningful progress.
You bet we've all been told to teach to the test! The major problem is someone at the top forgot to include the other things that make learning possible, if not easier...like basic reading skills. And we pay these people how much to run our public schools?
We would be wise to remember this at election time and when renewing administrative contracts because there aren't enough jobs with Burger King to employ the kids we're failing in Charleston County. It’s not the kids who will fail Burger King’s expectations that are at issue. It’s a school system is still knowingly failing thousands of our local children who are in the lower grades.
This isn’t a new problem and this superintendent continues to support a system that remains largely unchanged. Despite the window dressing, a majority of the county school board wants her to not rock the boat and perform damage control so it looks like progress. As a result, nothing much has changed for the average student since local literacy failings were exposed, except administrators are using more buzz words implying they are addressing it.
Through many different means, including programs misidentified as “choice”, the school system continues to label and therefore track kids in the earliest grades. The system determines which students they can (or will) teach and then abandons the rest. Race is just one of the factors used. There are many others, too, not the least of which is rooted in political and personal social agendas.
Defending the status quo depends heavily on manipulated statistics and gives almost no consideration to individual student needs or potential. The reality is that administrative jobs and lucrative contracts depend more on manipulating numbers than on doing a better job of educating more students.
I read Nancy McGinley's Op-Ed pieces in the P&C, like the one this morning, but I've long ago learned not to believe anything she says. Until Charleston’s public school students are encouraged from top to bottom to learn in classrooms that are focused on the possibilities and not the limitations, test scores will remain just as unreliable as the superintendent’s promises for change. Public school leaders here must learn to raise their expectations for individual students across the board. Unless that happens, the disparity between schools, some only blocks apart, will remain unbridgeable.
Simply closing schools with the lowest test scores and bussing the students that remain isn’t a long term solution. Besides, it's more expensive than has been reported.
Correcting systematic weaknesses within the district and individual schools would produce more meaningful results at a far lesser expense in treasure and human resources than we are being told. This might begin with changing CCSD's inclination to hold low academic expectations for many of its students long before they reach high school.
Too many of our neighbors already have been forever left behind because this superintendent was asleep on fundamental and solvable issues starting with when she arrived in 2004 as 2nd in command under Maria Goodloe. An honest educator with integrity should know that reading and the experiences that go with this skill are far more important than test scores. It's no good to just manipulate numbers to satisfy everyone but those in the classroom.
If our schools continue to be led this way, our local public school system will continue to fail thousands of students at both ends of the learning spectrum. The superintendent doesn’t get it and she’s hoping most of us don’t understand it either. She’s obviously not considering ideas from the grassroots.
Post a Comment