From that article:

"The authors estimated that graduation rates declined by 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points as a result of the state exit-exam policy, and also found that these negative effects were “concentrated among low-achieving students, minority students, and female students."

So in other words, they say that the introduction of the tests resulted in lower graduation rates, which can be interpreted in two ways:

1. The tests did not increase graduation rates, therefore the tests are not 'working' to improve the level of education among the students.
OR
2. The level of education may have stayed the same more or less (the students became neither better or worse educated), but the test highlighted the weaker students' failings where those failings would otherwise have been missed, resulting in those students failing the exit exam. In other words, without the test many of those students would otherwise have 'passed' when they really shouldn't have.

I suspect that option 2 is more likely: the problem lies in the quality of teachers and schools, not the tests. If you want to raise education standards, then take steps to do so - make it harder to qualify as a teacher (as they do in Finland) and pay these better educated teachers more to produce better educated/quality teachers; make it easier to fire poor teachers; give schools more autonomy over their curriculum; more charter schools... The tests are not the problem. The system is the problem.

Finland and S Korea have among the best levels of education in the world, with very different systems and cultures. S Korea achieves its results mostly via intense cramming and a hugely important final exam (performance on that test will dictate which university you can get into and the elite universities tend to get you into the elite jobs). Meanwhile, Finland has highly educated, well trained and well compensated teachers and a public school system where the schools have much autonomy about the curriculum and methods used to teach. (I much prefer the Finland model.) The US is somewhere in between, but most importantly the main problem in the US is nothing to do with standardised testing, but rather the vast numbers of poorly educated teachers being pumped out of US colleges and the schools' inability to fire poorly performing teachers.

Blithely blaming standardised testing is ignoring the huge issues that need fixing in the US public school system. It's a scapegoat.

The MD who supposedly linked autism to mmr had his license revoked for falsifying research.

We may all need explanations for certain things but it does not make them true

And by the way, I'm not saying the tests cannot be improved. Indeed, imposing a restriction on the students to take the tests on a computer (which some of them do), can negatively impact students less verse with using a computer, especially if the test involves writing prose. That said, if it's a multiple choice test, this is not a big issue.

Or 3. We don't know because the tests are neither reliable nor valid.


The tests, at least from the available data in this case, are certainly part of the problem. If you want tests that you can use to inform educational decisions as well as to use to dismiss teachers, you had better hope that the tests are reliable and valid.


I am certainly not going to argue about having highly qualified and well compensated teachers. However, I haven't seen data that suggests that poorly qualified teachers are a key issue in the US system; that may be true but I've not seen data for that.


I don't think anyone is saying testing is the only issue but if you're going to make important decisions about students, teachers or the system as a whole, shouldn't those tests actually do what they are supposed to do?

Shane

Can i counter?
9My wife and i are moving to france in 8 weeks or so

My 3 year old has been in a lebanese nursery since birth

She currently speaks better french than i do - and more importently she sounds french.

I worked with a medical school in london that has been running an experiment for a number of years. Kids from specific deprived post codes get affirmative entry grades e.g. go to eton you need AAAA. Go to "you could be knifed any day of the week school" you need BBC.

At the end of the first year of med school. They test no differently.

It takes as much effort to get BBC in a shit school as AAAA in a good school.

I think my daughters nursery is exceptional. She has been the only non native french / arabic speaker from birth and she / they have delivered her language is excellent and she has thrived.

I think bright kids in good or bad environments will or can succeed.

Where have you been for the past 100 days?

This will give you some data on that.

https://www.amazon.com/...ding=UTF8&btkr=1

This topic is way too complicated to break into absolutes, but I sincerely believe the problems in the US public school system are structural and more to do with what I mentioned above than simply 'teaching to a common core test.'

I've been here

If he has said i cannot believe on another occasion i will proverbially eat my hat......

I don't believe that autism is linked to MMR. What I was trying to say is that you can't say "those people are no good at science" because they believe something that the scientific community feels is scientific fact. We all have our built in bias and are pretty good at compartmentalizing it and driving other people crazy. Linus Pauling was convinced that we all should be taking mega doses of vitamin C for example.

---

They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

I think it's a bit ironic that a few days before this thread I started reading "Outlier" very interesting and quite topical. Basically the premise is that the best & brightest are more a product of timing rather than genius.

"If he has said i cannot believe on another occasion i will proverbially eat my hat......"

i probably said it. but not as much as i said it today. i fell on my road bike and have a nasty hematoma on my hip. i'm pretty sure i said it then. probably more than once.

finished the ride, tho.

---

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman