I always dispair at the superficial analysis and misleading inferences from the Fraser Institute when it ranks schools based on standardized test results. When you ask a shallow and silly question you are bound to get a useless answer. As the world gets more complex and informed engaged citizenship becomes more important than ever we need to ensure the skills we teach are those that are essential for this new and emerging world.
Of course the traditional subjects are still important but not as the only things worth teaching and testing. To compare schools and insist that they compete for credibility when private schools can restrict who they enroll and public schools will and must take all comers and to say this is a quality measure is misleading at best. This fundamental reality about enrollment and the socio-economic differences in schools make the Fraser Institute comparison reporting such a disservice. How are students, teachers, parents and the public able to use such selective comparisons when trying to discern if our education system is doing the job it needs to do to prepare the whole student for the changing and emerging reality they will face.
If students and teachers are only ranked and rated on narrow focued standardized test results we only get a bellcurve distribution but no insight as to how well prepared the whole student is for adaptation, resilience, self-sufficiency and survival in a complex interdependent globalized social, environmental, economic and political culture.
The Fraser Institute reports on public education is as helpful as counting the number of nails in a house and presuming that measures its value to those who live in it. It is not even worthy of being taken with a grain of salt. It is beyond useless, it is dangerous
It's all part of the market model that the Fraser Institute wants everything to run on. It's not about preparing young people for the future, it's about how little public money is to be spent on education and how to make students care less about education and more about meaningless standardized test scores.
ReplyDeleteA student's socio-economic status will influence how well he or she will perform on the standardize tests. Also, school boards and their teachers are now teaching to the tests based on knowing what the examiners want for excellent responses. Think APE: answer, prove, and expand. "Answer" means writing the first part of the answer based rewriting the question. "Prove" means using information from the text to answer the question. "Expand" means taking your own knowledge from your own life in order to demonstrate that you understand the meaning of the question. However, in real life, people don't usually provide answers based on the APE model.
ReplyDeleteStudents need to know how to take these standardized tests. They are not allowed to ask for help. Actually, they can ask. However, the teacher is limited in giving help. The teacher can't even tell the student to skip the question and come back to it after. This concept can be very challenging for students in grade-three.
By my own estimates, I will give 1/3 of a test score based on socio-economic status, 1/3 based on ability to understand how to take a particular standardized test, and the other third based on knowledge learned in the classroom. Socio-economic status affect a student's willingness to learn in a classroom and his/her understanding of the world. A student in a low SES is not going to understand the concept of how fast a plane may fly if one has never been on an airplane. also, someone in a low SES may not have the motivation in wanting to learn. If a child's family is on welfare or has a low income, there may not be any incentive to learn.
"Learn French. You might go to Paris someday." Yeah, right. Even Quebec is an abstract place for many students. Some of the low SES students will be lucky to leave their communities in 15 or 20 years.
There have also been concerns raised about the cultural appropriateness of the standardized tests. In other words, some contend that the tests are written with a white, middle-class, Euro-centric bias, which disadvantages students coming from other cultures. The biggest complaint I have about them is that they do not seem to measure the very skills we agree children will need in the future, things like: collaboration, innovation, and creativity. If we are testing (and rewarding) the wrong skills, we should all be concerned. The future will not be "standardized" and our children will need to be and do much more than these tests measure. Finally, I think teachers are the ones who are in the best position to accurately evaluate the learning of their students. We need to restore faith and trust in this great profession and remove the insidious pressure to "teach to the test" rather than "teach the child".
ReplyDeleteTo perceive a child as being less intelligent or worthy because he is poorer is pure bigotry.
ReplyDeleteShame on all of you.
Anonymous at 4:50 - to draw such conclusions is pure ignorance and to do it anonymously may be cowardice.
ReplyDeleteThe Fraser Report is valuable if you want to measure for the 19th century. Just wondering who makes money off these standardized tests.
ReplyDeleteIf the best we can do today is try to distil one's overall (intelligence,potential,skill-set) to a collection of numbers extracted from "Standardized" test scores, we are truly lost. The old style "statistics" as static data is quickly being replaced by much more meaniful and informative flowing,near realtime multi-dimensional data sets visualized in powerful ways that allow patterns,trends,outliers,clusters to be readily identified. If we wanted to, we could likely find ways to capture/map many of the other things that schools, and more importantly students do in their daily lives, at school and beyond that would allow such dynamic stories to be told in a visual form that might be just as powerful and revealing. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tag that kind of representation with a "single" number that can be used for ranking purposes. It is a deeply entrenched mind-set that will be hard to move away from, but at some point, the only ones who will still be worrying about "Standardized test marks" will be the Institutions and think-tanks; others will have moved on.
ReplyDeleteThe Fraser Report is only as good as if we continue to put stock into its value as a report for achievement in schools. The Fraser Report does not accomplish this and therefore its validity as a benchmark of schools and students is null and void.
ReplyDeleteIs there no better alternative to this report? Until then, tell all you know how this report misinforms the public.
Ken, anon at 4:50 actually makes a valid point and it would be worthy of you if you had chosen to address it patiently and rationally.
ReplyDeleteInstead you chose to call him or her a coward and dismissed his/her whole question as "ignorant".
The response you chose tells me a great deal about the validity of anon's accusations and that your intellectual platform is driven from poorly controlled emotional outbursts rather than anything rational.
You don't have to be advantaged to do well on these tests.
ReplyDeleteYou mention resilience in your post as a new age skill... resilient kids aren't a new phenomena, they've always been around, and they are often the ones who do well on these tests despite their disdvantaged background.
To statistically group disadvantaged kids as those who do poorly on standardized tests is to use the same logic you criticize the Guassian nature of the tests for in the first place.
I suggest reading Nassim Taleb's "Black Awan- the Impact of the Highly Improbable" -all about the part of the curve I'm interested in; the one that doean't fall in the middle.
By the way, I'm not an advocate of standardized tests, but I do think we need to come up with an improved way to measure how well kids are doing with curriculum (which incidentally needs to be reqorked and simplifies for sure.)
Blogging my ed thoughts at http://karegivers.blogspot.com/
Anon @ 7:32 - there is no validity to the comments made by the previous Anon - nobody generalized the way they accused. That is pure misdirection of the point. People are not all the same and to presume one test fits all talents is ignorant and to presume individual differences are legitimately genrealized sometimes is called racism...not in this case but the principle holds.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous commenters who do so without reasonable need which is expressed clearly have little credibility and are often cowards. Not all the time but that is as safe a generalization as they made in the first instance in their post.
Ken, I'm not sure I agree with your comments toward Anon... generalizations have been made in this stream, undoubtedly. My read is that Anon is simply defending the decidedly non-curvable phenomena of success despite odds (resiliency).
ReplyDeleteThere is a terrible tendency to statistically analyze in education things that cannot be generalized as a result of the riduclous number of variables that affect outcomes or environments.
I get where Anon is coming from to a degree- I just wouldn't call it bigotry, but rather pure bastardization of the Guassian process to effect a politico-economic purpose (read the entire purpose of the Fraser Institute)
Sound reasoning Ken! If anything I think your blog points out the kind of media/information skills we all need to develop these days in order to get at the truth, with all the pre and post-qualifiers that comes with it. The world is such a complex place its easy to delegate what we should think on this, or that topic, to a 'think tank' For me that is why I try to get my information from more than one source. No wonder then most people generally have a cynical point of view, or don't participate all together.
ReplyDeleteThe Fraser Institute's studies keep schools accountable. Danielle Smith once worked for the Fraser Institute and when she is Premier we can look forward to further efficiencies like that. The only reasons the unions don't want it is that it strengthens their stranglehold.
ReplyDeleteThe Edmonton Public School Board and the Fraser Institute share the same core value: choice. The goal of the EPSB is to provide as many niche options as possible, in the expectation that parents will find the educational model that is the best fit for their children.
ReplyDeleteI think there should be choices in education. The problem in Edmonton is that we've turned the principle of choice into the goal, instead of a tool. The EPSB boasts of its success in getting parents to drive their kids halfway across town to attend a niche school. But that's not what a public school system is supposed to deliver. Rather, the purpose of education is develop the talents of all children and prepare them, as best as we are able, for a world of almost constant change.
The Inspiring Education process initiated by the provincial government identified some the characteristics that will be required for success in twenty years: creativity, critical thinking and the ability to make connections across disciplines.
Does our current schooling model accomplish those things? Not all that well, in my view. We are focusing too much on specialization at the elementary level and by emphasizing choice, we're neglecting a more important principle, diversity. Realizing the full potential of a child requires exposure to a whole range of educational opportunities and philosophies. The EPSB's "find the right box to put your kid in" approach to learning may have been a good twentieth century strategy, but it does not prepare students for a global economy of infinite diversity and possibility.
Oh, by the way, standardized testing sucks.
I was trying to support you Anon, (if this is the same Anon) but now all bets are off. Danielle Smith is leading (as a figurehead only) a party movement that is beyond right partisan politics not interested in any point of view other than their own. It's not about efficiency, it's about considering all variables that contribute to contemporary ed. and 21st Century/beyond skill sets, some of which can't even be defined yet. How can the Fraser, or any other institute measure this empirically.
ReplyDeleteIntegrative thinking Anon, look it up and you'll see how ideas will tip- and it's not necessarily an efficient process becuase it shouldn't be.
Ken,
I get why you don't like Anon labels now...
Thank you for this, Ken. That anyone would put even an ounce of credibility to the Fraser Institutes rankings is more than disturbing.
ReplyDeleteWhat's even worse is that our own government may not publish or endorse the Fraser Institutes findings, but it is our government that creates and diseminates the numbers for datamongers to sell as educational snake oil.
Here's a novel measurement for educational institutions...
ReplyDeleteAll kinds of economic turmoil in all kinds of industries, and yet… There is a common factor. Check out this list:
* Rick Wagoner – CEO GM – MBA Harvard
* Robert Nardelli – CEO Chrysler – MBA University of Louisville
* Alan Mulally – CEO Ford – Master’s in Management MIT Sloan School
* Henry Paulson – US Treasury – MBA Harvard
* Ben Bernanke – Federal Reserve – AB Economics Harvard, PhD economics MIT
* Richard Fuld – Lehman Brothers – MBA NYU Stern School
* Ed Liddy – Chairman AIG – MBA George Washington University
* Martin Feldstein – Director AIG – BA Harvard, Harvard Prof Economics
* George Miles – Director AIG – MBA Fairleigh Dickinson
* George W Bush – US President – MBA Harvard
* Vikram Pandit – CEO Citicorp – MBA & PhD Finance Columbia
What do they all have in common besides being highly paid for destroying or nearly destroying the companies they work for? All have MBAs and/or degrees in economics.
Perhaps the problem is in the curriculum. The Fraser Institute would measure only take-home-pay because the rest of the world doesn't count.
will never forget at a mtg. once attended the glee, the jubilation both the principal and asst. superintendant expressed at the high fraser institute ranking of their school - one that makes very unwelcome anyone who is ethnically, intellectually or socio-economically outside the norm.
ReplyDeleteIf the ranking of schools as done by the Fraser Report was valid then it would make sense to put vastly increased resources into schools in inverse order to the list, Unfortunately that does not happen in Alberta.
ReplyDeleteThe theory behind the ranking is that the higher ranked schools will attract more students. With a funding framework based almost solely upon student numbers this equates to more resources for the top school which results in better programming. It also means that the other school becomes starved for funds and is forced to reduce services and likely less success. This is the same vicious circle created in the US No Child Left Behind thinking that the current funding program in Alberta is modeled upon.
When we develop an education reporting model that reflects the real, whole child and then makes adaption to programming to best support that child's learning, including resources, we will truly succeed in educating the whole child. Unfortunately this would be very expensive and not really profitable and, except for a few private schools, is not likely to come about in our province.
In my view the schools that work with disadvantaged students, students with learning challenges of all kinds, students who come to school in spite of poverty, family crisis, etc. should be ranked at the top. By the way the Fraser Institute works these schools often are ranked near the bottom of the list. This is an insult to the students, staff, and families that are working so hard to get the best education for their children.
Shame on the media and the system for doing this and perpetuating the myth.
I'd like to see the Fraser Instutute endorse legislation like Bill 44. The Fraser Institute is all about choice and should step into this arena advocating parental choice.
ReplyDeleteThe Fraser Institute should be graded an "F" for their report. I'd expect a Grade 8 student to do a better job.
ReplyDeleteThe Fraser Institute, far from being unbiased in their research, is promoting a specific agenda. As such some of their reports use data whose interpretation is open to questioning. Using simple logic I wonder how their school report cards can be given much weight based upon the accuracy of other reports issued by them.
ReplyDelete