BIG BIG PROBLEM
This post recently appeared in the MAP 101 thread. That's an old thread, so the comment is a little buried. I think it needs to be brought to the surface.
Has anyone had a similar report from their child - either at North Beach or any other school?
First, if the kids don't do their best on the MAP assessment, then the teachers won't get an accurate analysis of the students' strengths and weaknesses, the primary reason for the assessment.
Second, it is bad practice for anyone to ever tell anyone to do less than their best on anything.
Third, if the staff at North Beach - or any other school - is sandbagging the fall test, they need to be supervised out of that behavior. If the principal is in on it, then the principal needs to be supervised out of that behavior.
Fourth, this sort of direction to students would put the petty concerns of the adults ahead of the legitimate needs of the students. We simply cannot have that.
This is very, very, very bad in a broad spectrum of ways for a wide variety of reasons. It needs to be reported, without delay, to the appropriate authority. I would start with the Education Director with responsibility at North Beach: Gloria Mitchell.
Elizabeth said...
When I asked my kids how the MAP testing was last week (at North Beach elementary) I was really alarmed. Tell me what you think of this story: I asked if it was hard, etc., my younger child said that it wasn't hard at all and that the person administrating the test told them "to try to get the first questions wrong so that it's not too hard." I asked if maybe there was a misunderstanding and then then my older child chimed in and said that yes, the teacher administering their test had told them they shouldn't try to get the questions right at first because then the tests later on in the year will show that they have learned a lot. The MAP test is responsive to the answers being given so that if I child is getting everything right it will make the next questions harder and if they are getting many questions wrong they will make the following questions easier. Anyway, we are so alarmed about these reports from our kids. I can see one misunderstanding, but both? It sounds as if the staff is asking the kids to "fix" the tests to show a false spike in learning later in the school year. Surely that can't be true, it's so unethical. Have anyone else's kids said this? I am hoping there is a logical explanation for this.
Has anyone had a similar report from their child - either at North Beach or any other school?
First, if the kids don't do their best on the MAP assessment, then the teachers won't get an accurate analysis of the students' strengths and weaknesses, the primary reason for the assessment.
Second, it is bad practice for anyone to ever tell anyone to do less than their best on anything.
Third, if the staff at North Beach - or any other school - is sandbagging the fall test, they need to be supervised out of that behavior. If the principal is in on it, then the principal needs to be supervised out of that behavior.
Fourth, this sort of direction to students would put the petty concerns of the adults ahead of the legitimate needs of the students. We simply cannot have that.
This is very, very, very bad in a broad spectrum of ways for a wide variety of reasons. It needs to be reported, without delay, to the appropriate authority. I would start with the Education Director with responsibility at North Beach: Gloria Mitchell.
Comments
Clearly, a kid gets confused between what he/she knows is the truth versus what they are told to do.
That said, it seems like just another chapter in the risks and pit falls of high stakes testing. Even with new and improved tests, we are at best, gathering incomplete data. At worst, knowingly directing students to participate in creating fraudulent data.
I say that not because I think Dr. G-J is trying to fix tests (I don't, at least not by cheating) but because I think that this sort of thing does indeed happen and am unfortunately not surprised to hear this.
My daughter didn't report any such thing happening at Thurgood Marshall.
I just have to point out though, that no one gets this mad about undue pressure to perform well and its negative effects on children. I'm remembering some news story about a girl being verbally abused re: her WASL effort and crying in the bathroom - some other district...but there are hordes of nervous 3rd & 4th graders in April in our very own district...MAP will not likely be an improvement on that situation.
Using data points such as these sorts of tests is helpful, but not the be-all-end-all of assessment. A variety of assessments helps triangulate, thus giving a better look at where a student may truly be at.
So: If MAP turns out to be a good test to help figure out where students are at generally, fine.
BUT: If it were to become a tool for assessing SCHOOLS, or TEACHERS, then look forward to more data manipulation, erasure of wrong answers, snadbagging etc. This is absolutely NOT to say that anyone should do this sort of cheating, but if a teacher's job is on the line, or a school's funding or autonomy...watch out.
The pressure to "close the achievement gap" is now federalized under NCLB. Schools have to show improvement in EVERY cell (look for expanded cells next year, as categories are broken down, i.e. "Black" becomes "African American" and "Immigrant African" and "Haitian" etc, finer grain distinctions such as those) or they are FAILING schools. Note that I wrote "have to show improvement every year": An impossible feat, of course, as eventually the school would arrive at 100% pass rate (by standardizing the classroom and kids both? I have no idea) and therefore could improve no more...
NCLB = money for broke schools = huge pressure for schools to "perform."
Worse, rather than isolated instances of cheating, one wonders what some school's over-eager efforts to "teach to the test" do to the rest of the curriculum and course offerings...This is no doubt more common than cheating, and effects more students.
My vote: keep MAP, make it strictly a tool to identify needs. Teachers could use some help knowing who is a year or two behind in some aras, so as to direct intervention that way. While classroom assessments can do this, regular MAP testing over time will allow students to be scheduled into appropriately leveled classes BEFORE school starts, rather than join a vastly multi-level classroom and have the teacher try to teach high, low, and everything inbetween.
A mom at my school said that her son did in fact think that it might be to his advantage to answer a bunch of questions wrong to ensure that he got easy questions for the majority of the test.
She was surprised he told her this, and if I remember correctly, he and his friends had been discussing whether or not they should all be purposefully answering incorrectly. Might have been 3rd graders?
Of course, they weren't instructed to do this; they were just being kids and figuring out how to make life easier for themselves, I suppose! But it does indicate a potential pitfall of the MAP if kids end up being taught below their level because they are goofing around and not answering correctly on purpose.
While adaptive tests are nifty cool when used properly (student does their best) they of course become easier if a student is unmotivated, slacks off, gets distracted...
So even if a student isn't trying to get easier questions by answering wrong (this might be relatively uncommon) it's certainly possible that the test with "adapt" itself down and produce a lower score.
This is the central problem tests, generally, and is the reason it's important to have an array of assessments, and observation, that allows a teacher to more accurately guage level of learning.
Of course, on the high-stakes state tests, such as WASL, uh, HSPE, the poor kid only gets one chance, and the school only gets one chance, and stuff like a bad night's sleep, drug use, distraction, teacher coaching (or cheating...eek) makes nary a whit of difference: The Score is the Score and has very serious repercussions.
I hate high-stakes tests like these. SAT scores low? Studant can take it again. WASL low? Tough, you're tracked the following year (unless other assessments prove the score faulty) and the low score potentially is used to slam you school in the media and people's minds, and potentially close the school or cause massive changes to it.
Imagine: Twenty more students this year than last have the flu; their scores drop; the school reaches step five of AYP, and suffers sanctions under NCLB (IF the school is poor and uses Title One funding -richer schools, sans Title One, need not worry (except about the bad press)
heckuva deal. Almost seems set up to declare poor schools "failing," eh? Now why would they want to do that...
spoke with his teacher the other day... while they participate in the testing, teachers dont hold much sway by the results...apparently math testing was carried out a week or so ago... on the computer... 45 questions... something of a concentration challenge I would think for a Grade One child, and a secondary challenge for my son who hardly ever gets computer time at home (and no video games/Wii/DS etc) and had none that I know of in kindergarten (AS#1) last year...
He did very well in one part of the test and not so well in two others, partly because by then he was tired and partly because we (he and I) do most of our play/learning about math concepts in discussion, manipulation and in our heads and he had little exposure to formal math in kindergarten. As it is, he's finding it a challenge to commit these ideas to paper/worksheets and now to doing it on a computer screen in a restricted time frame????
A lot I think to expect a 6 year old to cope with... and then to have the results (are they truly a measure of what he knows?) be used to categorise him and his capabilities? Not a valid process or measure, IMO...
So, another data point, I guess, if you believe my kids (and I don't think they'd fib about this.).
I thought I read somewhere that the MAP testing was funded by a grant this year.
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/board/08-09agendas/052009agenda/assessmentpresentation.pdf
The less computerized testing my kids engage in, the better I feel about their future.
IF we had a common curriculum that was aligned vertically (up through grades) and IF teacher's end-of-year reports on student progress reflected where a student was in various comptencies (Comp, vocab, etc...not just "A" in Language Arts) THEN "taking a teacher's word for it" would help that student get targeted support.
The idea behind MAP (at least in my conception of it, ignoring the obvious way it could be used to "rate your teacher," is that it (or any other similar sort of benchmarking test) allows the child's next grade level, or next school, or next teacher, to have a comprehensive idea of where the student is proficient and where they're lagging (and even where they excel) so lessons or even whole class schedule can be arranged to meet these individualized needs.
Here's an example:
Abdul "passes" 8th grade LA. The receiving HS has very little idea where Abdul is at, skill-wise. Abdul has to have a schedule, so they assign him LA9. So LA9 teacher starts teaching LA9, with no differentiation because, well, most teachers don't differentiate that much.
Abdul excels at vocab, but his comp is low. It takes a month for this information to be revealed. THEN teacher might start to differentiate...
But if Abdul came to HS with a deeper set of data about skill levels, instruction could be provided from the get-go that meets his specific needs. He might even be scheduled into classes that meet his needs more closely.
Lastly, "take teacher's word for it" is problematic when you have social promotion, particularly at the lower levels, but even through 8th grade: An elementary student could move up the grades while still not being "at level" in numerous areas. Some high school teachers address the problem of teaching students with 3-4 grade reading levels. MAP, or similar tests, could help these teachers (and registrars) understand where a student is at so as to meet that need. Should a 3rd grade reader be in a regular-ed LA9?
So this deeper data can help. But it can also hinder. As has been pointed out, good teaching is often "going with the flow" with a wide range of students (culture, language, level...) and to parse out each student to too great a level could lead to losing the forest in looking at trees, and it could narrow the forest to just those trees that can be cut into quantifiable, objective...cordwood?
(Education becomes just those things that can be MAPped, WASLed, lexiled etc, rather than the art of sweeping all students along with you as you dance amongst the great knowledge, quantifiable and unquantifiable, that swrils around the world...
WV ask that we ponde this as we ponde our children's educational futures!
When a teacher passes a student from grade to grade, that teacher is saying that the student has fulfilled the Standards and meets the grade level expectation for the grade completed.
From the promotion policy:
"Generally, except for unusual and compelling circumstances, a student who has not achieved the Necessary skills will not be considered eligible for promotion to the next higher grade."
Now, if that were true, then there would be no students who are even as much as two grade levels behind, would there? There would be no students entering the sixth grade reading at the fourth grade level.
Yet we know - we KNOW - that there are students working two years below grade level, some in more than just one or two sub-classes of a subject, some in more than just one or two core subjects.
So much for taking the teachers' word for it when the teacher says that the student is doing just fine and making good progress.
If we cannot rely on the teachers for an honest assessment of the students' abilities in this, the most solemn and critical assessment - the progress report - then how can we rely on the teachers for an honest assessment in an informal communication?
How do you measure this?
Teaching content:
1) Use of tools such as MAP testing.
2) Principal evaluations
3) WASL? If you followed a child's performance on the WASL from year to year?
Classroom management skills:
1) A principal or lead teacher should sit in on classes and evaluate performance.
Other measures
1) Principal/School and district should be responsive to ongoing and chronic complaints against a teacher (by families, other teachers, or the principal). So should the principal/school/district recognize ongoing compliments, community awards, and requests for a teacher.
2) The use of surveys could be useful. Surveys filled out anonymously by parents of children in younger grades, and surveys filled out by the students in high school. Also, anonymous teacher to teacher peer surveys could be a fantastic tool. I don't think survey feedback should be used in a formal evaluation of the teacher, but would certainly be useful to a principal. It could be a tool used to help identify a teacher who needs further training or to identify and give recognition to a superior teachers.
Charlie: You're back to the issue of bad teachers and what to do about them. If MAP testing identifies and isolates the "social promotion" problem, guess what? They'll scrap it. That dirty little secret has gone on for decades and will continue. What do you expect will happen? Do you think 100 kids at each high school will not be graduated, despite their "D", because they aren't proficient according to the MAP? This will be one hell of a challenge to overcome, and you and I know exactly what will happen. The MAP's makers will be accused of bias, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Sorry to be so jaded, but while the MAP itself may reveal some data, I think we already have the data it will reveal, and largely ignore it anyways. I just don't see this system developing the individuality, competency, or know-how to deal with the size, scope and complexity of the problems as outlined by SC. My two cents.
I'm not quite sure what to do. I may ask the teacher directly (with my son there), but...ugh. She is very sweet but not the strongest teacher. I will ask other kids' parents in the class too before escalating this. It's true that the school appears to be struggling under Bowers. The staff satisfaction levels have plummeted under her, and ask someone else noted, so have scores.
I hesitate to file a formal complaint with just a child's word as evidence because it's a serious accusation. Hopefully it was a misunderstanding; however, if a classmate confirms our kid's report, then we'll file a complaint.
Yes, the idea that there are 25 students all working at the same level is absurd. And teachers DO differentiate...on the fly, often...because they HAVE to - students who up who are way ahead and way behind.
My personal favorite response to this probelm would be (don't laugh!):
Do away with grade levels entitely, and substitute subjct proficiency. This is already being done, somewhat, at the high school level as a new policy makes Sophomores, for instance, "credit freshmen." They are being looked at using their credit attainment rather than their supposed class (their cohort). I think students effected by this new policy are called "rollbacks": They WERE looked at as sophomores, for instance, but are now frosh...or froshmores, if one felt in the mood to make light of an unfortunate situation...
So MY system, if I was king of the world (ma), would be to eliminate grade levels entirely after, say, 5th grade. Students would work for proficiencies rather than to "keep up with their grade." Students learn at different rates in different subjects - let a student work at their own pace to get through, say LA, while accelerating in MA and SCI. Their would be no ostracism (oh, you're DUMB for being "behind a grade"!); instead, all students would be working at their own speeds and their own levels to get things done.
But that ain't gonna happen...so what do we do? How do educators get a grip on teaching to a variety of levels? We've heard that differentiation is part of the current reform in SPS, what will this look like? Will teachers have smaller classes to be able to deal with the variety? Will there be other supports? Or will the classes be streamlined, made less deep, so a wider variety of strategies and texts might be used?
hmmm, WV has not an inkly, either
WV dooks the question (Scottish for duck, in the sense of jumping into water...which we have too much of lately, SC says from his flooding garage...)
I did not intend to suggest that social promotion was a reflection on teacher quality. I don't think it is. It is, rather, a reflection on a culture within the schools and within the district.
What would happen if a teacher adhered to the policy and did not promote students who did not meet the grade level expectations?
What would happen if more than one did it?
I'm curious as to your take on social promotion being part of the "culture" of the school or district (or larger society?)
What drives it?
This question relates to both this thread (teacher/school "coaching" students during test, or teaching to the test...result is score that is not indicative of student skill level) and to the thread on MAP (IF there is a test that gives accurate assessment of student level, what happens when that doesn't correlate with past student "A"s if student scores low on MAP?
This is seen with the WASLs: Students who are seen as A students somehow tank part of the WASL - could be the test, the test environment, or...maybe they weren't an "A" student. Other indicators might not correlate, also.
(And you have the "hilarious" situation of states that show beautifully rising state test scores, when on long-term, naitonwide tests such as NEAP, scores remain flat...hmmm!)
I haven't looked for a citation, but it does sound familiar to me. We (including Charlie) have had discussions about how the WASL is not an appropriate way to measure APP eligibility (I agree) and how we shouldn't expect APP kids to all meet standard on the WASL (I have not been convinced of this). I am always surprised that 100% of APP kids do not meet standard.
wseadawg, Of the APP families and teachers I know, I don't think they'd keep a kid in the program who wasn't able to do the work at a proficient level.
Is there data on how many kids leave APP and why? I do not know very many enrolled APP kids personally, but I am aquainted with two who struggled and did not leave the program (would you?). Now both are at GHS and doing ok.
Do all WMS and HIMS APP kids get As in all subjects? Should they? What if they get Ds (or 2s in 1-5), is that ok? As far as I know, there is no standard. Once they are in, they are in.
I ask because you keep asking questions that you seem to have the answers for. I missed a dinner engagement to fall into one of your endless ask-fest that you believe you already had the answers from some TOPS kids that told you that the APP program is bad... So why ASK?
My Kid is in APP because it works for her. I have talked to 100 kids who have scored 99-98 on the district's IQ test and it is working for them. (Bear in mind this is only annodatale)... But can we not all get ALONG?
I will no longer debate the merits of APP on this site and would welcome anyone to start a APP specific blog so that the naysayers can be ignored and we can actually discuss the merits of the application of very valuable program. WOW did i just save myself a hell of a lot of time going forward!
Finally back to MAPS not a problem in either of my children's classes... But this should be sorted out as it's just plain wrong.
There are so many reasons that any individual child might not perform well on that high-stakes bubble test—anywhere from having had a bad night's sleep to stress about the high stakes.
One test should never be the end all—especially if it's connected to teacher performance. I believe the biggest issue we have at SPS around poor-performing teachers is poor-performing principals. My personal experience saw some very ineffective teachers hang on during the time of a very bad principal, only to see them removed quite quickly when a new, effective principal came on the scene.
Right Melissa, APP students can be exited just like all general ed students can be "held back". It doesn't happen. The fact is, we don't hear Charlie advocating for APP student accountability, and we don't see it happening.
No, it really can't. There are no out-of-level questions -- the only reason people don't more often get perfect scores is that the questions are so often badly written and ambiguous, that it's almost impossible to get the "right" answer every time, even if you know the material well.
Go check out your child's test sometime. The scoring is FAR too subjective to be useful for anything more than a pass/fail test. I had the benefit of seeing my twin daughters' tests next to one another, so I could see examples where one got full credit for an answer and the other didn't -- as far as I could see, the scores were the wrong way around as often as not.
I had one daughter go from a high 2 on the reading WASL (the first year she'd taken it, as we'd been boycotting previously) to a 4 the next year. There wasn't a bloody thing different in her ability to read and write (apart from the ordinary increase in maturity at that age) ... she had just figured out how to answer WASL questions better.
Helen Schinske
Yes, they did. There have been APP parents asking for out-of-level testing since ITBS days.
"Is the kid who got 2, the same one that required private testing to get in?"
Nope. Qualified for Spectrum based on school-administered CogAT and ITBS. We did submit talent search scores as well, but the CogAT and ITBS scores were above the cutoffs anyway.
Helen Schinske
But here's a blanket statement to rebut. Not all APP families are against out of level testing. In fact, the very first time I met Bob V when my son was a first grader at Lowell I asked for this and was told no. The reason I objected to the wasl (and my son didn't take it while in APP) was that it's supposed to be a measure of accountability for the teachers. Grade level wasl for those kids most certainly does not provide that. (and many teachers I encountered needed better accountability).
Not all parents are against accountability for the kids in the program either, but that conversation needs to happen along with discussion of mission, best practices of admission testing and curriculum. All places that the audit pointed out weaknesses (and some of us parents have been discussing weaknesses for years. And years.) That sounds like a cop-out. I don't mean it to be. Just years of frustration and disillusionment.
You are also making another assumption here. Helen's daughter who scored a 2 on the WASL was never in APP.
Typically these kids of involved parents are not behind enough to be rated as below grade level, or it's only in one subject, so their being passed on with a continuing deficit is insufficient to be called social promotion, but it's all part of the same problem: that accurate assessment and intervention isn't being done. If it's a problem for our kids, we assume that children with less-involved parents are very much at risk of falling through the cracks.
That kind of thinking is behind a lot of activism: if such-and-such policy is bad even for my kid, who presumably has it pretty easy, it must be worse for kids X, Y, and Z. We are all on the same side here. It is not about just caring for what happens to our kids.
Helen Schinske
And as Robert pointed out, it's the non-APP parents with a bee in their bonnet about APP who are hijacking the threads, not the rest of us.
Enough already.
I'm pretty neutral on APP, as I don't know all the ins and outs (tho' I would say I'm of the opinion that it IS a sort of special ed issue: students at the very tippy-top of intellectual abilities are somewhat unique, both academically and socially, so a cohort model, particularly in the lower grades, seems appropriate.
My feeling about "hijacking" threads is that since there a fair proportion of APP-affiliated parent/guardians on board here, the subject often turns to APP.
On THIS thread, it was Reader who hijacked the thread by bringing up APP...
While problems with testing do relate to APP (as has been mentioned ad infinitum) because of the entrance test(s), this thread was about bubble tests and the liuke until Reader brought up APP.