Nice thought. If you follow the money, you find that the main benefactors of these tests are the curriculum providers, which also happen to be the test providers. Pearson is one company that is benefiting.
Many people mistakenly think that CC is just a list of testing requirements. And honestly, that is the part that looks good on paper, but what you see as standards–what is used to sell the testing–is not the actual tests. What CC actually does is create an opportunity for the test creator to craft a testing method and mindset that so particular to their test that only students with exposure to that same company’s curriculum ($$$) will be able to perform best on the test. My kids tell me about their tests and the crazy questions they are given. The ambiguity in the multiple choice answers is maddening at times. But helpfully, some teachers know the tricks about these questions and so guide their students on how best to deduce what the testing might have intended.
So what is a school system to do when Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s CC testing is crammed down their throats? Why, they cave in and buy Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s curriculum to match it. Traditional pencil and paper curriculum providers like Pearson are threatened by the advent of the digitized classroom and the promise of plentiful knowledge and learning at the mere cost of a monthly ISP connection. The CC tests and the associated curriculum is their attempt to lock in school systems with decade-long curriculum contracts, much like a cell phone contract with a free phone, providing free computers to students as enticement.
From the link below:
“…Mann chose the Prussian model, with its depersonalized learning and strict hierarchy of power, because it was the cheapest and easiest way to teach literacy on a large scale…”
One of many links you may use to understand where Cory’s comment comes from:
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment which produces information within an international frame of reference about education, learning outcomes and informal learning.
How is this not a standardized test? Could certainly be a much better test, but a test nonetheless.
I read this a couple days ago. The takeaway for me was towards the end, when the author states that Colorado is not an opt-out state, and that’s why the administrators were freaking out. Of course, it would make more sense if they had just told the author that in the first place.
Frankly, the way the US sends teachers out there is really, really fucked up in the first place.
Let’s pretend you take a job at any company ever. You are then left alone at your desk for several weeks and your boss says you can go talk to them anytime about anything. Except this is your first job after college, and you don’t want to make waves. And you have some jaded colleagues that you see once and a while who have been there for five years and they kind of guide you at points, possibly telling you that talking about the problems you see at your desk aren’t going to go away after you talk about them. So you soldier on, doing your job, and your boss comes and watches you work one afternoon, just staring at you and writing things down.
If this was any other job on earth we’d recognize that this is a terrible system. There’s no mentor/trainee, there’s no feedback, there’s no system to recognize things that work or aren’t working with certain elements of the curriculum or how one student from last year had issues until you did this one thing that seemed to work well.
But the fact that we essentially hire these kids straight out of college, leave them alone for the most part and then judge them on how well this random group of students does on a standardized test at the end of the year is exactly why most teachers get burned out. They’re left out to teach a curriculum they have no control over and get no feedback from their boss or their student “clients.” On top of that they get paid poorly and are told by parents that it’s their fault their kid isn’t doing well. It’s a system designed to drive out all but the most starry-eyed or most cynical.
Of course, the good specialized public high schools in NYC have a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. The system seems designed to keep involved parents so busy trying to get a seat at a decent school for their kids that we don’t have the time or energy to fight for better schools.
Good Grief! Who the heck are these guys?
Prussian-Industrial model?
This is a totally wacko outlier school system. Good thing they only have 3 schools.
“The New American Academy”… sounds legit.
Comparing our education system, broken as it may be, to these guys is like jumping to accuse someone is a nazi… The conversation basically ends there. It just does a disservice to the vast majority of educators that are trying to make a difference.
They don’t appear to test all students, instead selecting a sample randomly.
They use that & questionnaire(s) as a portion of a broader assessment of the system as opposed to testing all students against a curriculum content & calling that result an indicator of performance.
IMO with this method they can gauge several aspects with no knowledge of the curriculum used which would be far more useful information for improving a system.
I’ve long though this is just a veiled form of institutional racism, because it’s always the inner city and ESL schools that are getting clobbered by these budget cuts, the ones that have the hardest jobs and the lowest budget already.
I mean what the hell are the teachers supposed to do when they get a batch of students who barely speak English and can’t do basic arithmetic and get zero help from the parents in their high school class? Then the teachers get shit on by the system because they aren’t teaching deities and lo, their students test below the state average and don’t improve much during the year. It’s no wonder teachers get burnt out and fed up.
The worst part is that the politicians then believe that they can solve the problem with vouchers (IE: taking money from the schools and giving it to private companies who have the luxury of ignoring lots of these state mandates), insuring the death spiral for the public school.
That point about non-intuitive methods for teaching math: My wife is an mechanical engineer, I’m a software developer. We both use college-level math in our work and we feel fairly competent in our understanding of mathematics at the primary and secondary education level and we’ve seen some of the most bizarre homework and test problems from our kids. In early elementary years, this isn’t so big a deal, but after a few years, of this it becomes infuriating because we realized the material was so needlessly obtuse and alienating to us.
It has slowly dawned on us that many parents must be far more alienated than we are. How do they help their child understand something that alienates them? We are told that a primary factor in a student’s success in school, and in the success of a school on the whole, is parental involvement. Certainly there is some link between student performance and how well a student’s parent can understand the student’s homework?
While I used to shrug off the “new” math of the 21st Century and the bizarre methods, I now see such curriculum as a polarizing agent in the primary and secondary education system. I know that Very Smart People with lots of letters following their names develop these standardized curriculum, but who are they trying to impress? Do they forget who is expected to digest their material?
Sure. If they are hired by that same school they did their student teaching in there is a system in place to have a mentor.
But let’s say that school doesn’t have the funding to hire anyone that year. So the teacher who is fresh out of college finds a job in a school that they didn’t student teach at and are given no framework to help them fit in the same way they don’t give any framework to someone who’s been teaching for five years who moves.
If you end up the same place you student taught you’d probably be in better shape. If not… good luck out there kid. Did you learn everything you needed in college? On the job training shouldn’t extend to educating children.
I’m kind of torn on it because, on the one hand, I applaud the goal of trying to figure out ways to teach math that help people “get it” who aren’t getting it the traditional way. I think of it like reading: I’m one of those people who was lucky enough to just “get” reading and writing (not spelling, but that’s a whole other issue). I know other people who really needed phonics to figure it out. Meanwhile, any exposure I’ve ever had to phonics has been weird and alienating. Different brains need different things and hurrah for us acknowledging that.
EXCEPT, this doesn’t actually do that … it just substitutes a familiar way of teaching for an unfamiliar one, when what you probably really want to be doing is giving teachers tools to teach different kids in different ways.
AND EXCEPT, from what I’ve heard from people with more math/education knowledge than I, this particular method isn’t so hot anyway.
Soooo, I guess, “A” for thinking about it but “F” on execution?
I’m honestly not sure if you understand the link or not. Prussian-Industrial model is what our US public school system is based on. The website I linked presents those facts more succinctly than Wikipedia:
"Under the auspices of the board, but at his own expense, he went to Europe in 1843 to visit schools, especially in Prussia,…In 1852, he supported the decision to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Shortly after Massachusetts adopted the Prussian system, the Governor of New York set up the same method in twelve different New York schools on a trial basis…
The practical result of Mann’s work was a revolution in the approach used in the common school system of Massachusetts, which in turn influenced the direction of other states… Mann is often called “the father of American public education.”
Our public school system still follows an industrial “economy of scale” model, instituted by Mann, and aptly described by Cory in the BB article.
Ah, I see what you mean. What I remember with student teachers when I was in school was they would teach the class while the regular teacher of that class observed, took notes, and (I assume) gave feedback afterwards. And they were there for what seemed like quite a while. A month or two I think.
Standardized tests are stupid for evaluating teacher performance, but I’m not sure what can be done to help a new teacher fit in at a school. The other teachers have their own classrooms to deal with.
How do they help lawyers? You start out not going to a courtroom by yourself but you come in as an associate and learn in a courtroom by sitting in. And then the legal team sits down and discusses strategies. There’s no need to toss these people out there every fall into the deep end without a lifeguard, assigning one teaching mentor for them to just vent about, like many women in the military have, even for 15-30 minutes a week, would be a great first step.
