Tag Archives: standardized exams

In Case You’ve Missed Me!

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Haven’t heard a Tweet from me in a while?

At the conclusion of a wonderful holiday visit, my four grandchildren went home after generously sharing a variety of germs and viruses. Bless their little hearts. I would make the same trade again, gladly, because they are such a joy for their Grandmother and me. The exchange does not come without consequences, however, and even had I not had other commitments, it would have taken time to get my mind and body back into the rhythm of writing.

Those other commitments have to do with administering the ASVAB (Armed Service Vocational Aptitude Battery); a subject about which I have written on many occasions.

Let me tell you what is happening in Indiana.

For the 2018/2019 school year, the State of Indiana authorized the use of the ASVAB to high school students as an alternate pathway to graduation. Students who are unable to pass their ISTEP+ exams in English language arts and math, which are required for graduation, can now take the ASVAB. Whether they believe the ASVAB might be easier for students to pass than ISTEPS—which would amount to lowering standards and expectations—or is just more student-friendly, I do not know.

If students earn a score of 31or higher on the AFQT component of the ASVAB they qualify for graduation. Coincidentally, a score of 31 is the minimum requirement for enlistment in the military. The AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) is comprised of four of the eight ASVAB subtests currently offered to students: Arithmetic Reasoning, Word Knowledge, Paragraph Comprehension, and Mathematics Knowledge.

Although I have not seen data to verify that many of the students who could not pass ISTEPs are having success with the ASVAB, I do believe the AFQT score is a meaningful threshold. AFQT scores are percentile scores, which means that 30 percent of all the individuals who take the ASVAB are unable to qualify for enlistment. As I begin my fifteenth year as an ASVAB test administrator, I have come to view the AFQT score as a “world ready” benchmark. I believe it demonstrates that an individual has a basic, if minimal, academic foundation that will allow them to have choices; to find a place for themselves in society.

Students who score less than an AFQT score of “30,on the other hand, will have very few choices. Young adults who score 20 or below, and remember this is a percentile score so there are many young men and women with such scores, are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

What does it say about public education when so many schools have so many students unable to pass state competency exams that they must be provided with alternate pathways?

Yes, I agree that these large, standardized exams are a burden on students, teachers, and schools and should not be utilized to evaluate their performance. That we are using these tests inappropriately, however, does not mean these tests measure nothing of consequence. We need to learn from the results of this misguided practice.

What these tests tell us is that a significant population of students cannot demonstrate proficiency on subject matter that we have identified as essential to their future well-being. That point is corroborated by NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) assessments; the experience of employers who are finding it increasingly difficult to find qualified young people; and, from my own anecdotal observations of the performance of recent high-schools graduates on the enlistment version of the ASVAB.

High-stakes testing has pushed public schools to change the way they teach but rather than change the way we teach to meet the needs of students with disparate levels of academic preparation, we have changed the way we teach in ways that divert us from our mission. What is that mission? To prepare young people to make a place for themselves in society where they will have meaningful choices.

As education leaders and policy makers, we have learned the wrong lessons and we are asking our teachers to teach kids things that will not help them make a life for themselves. Teachers are being pushed to teach kids to pass a test rather than to learn and retain the knowledge and skills they will need in life.

Teachers know that what they are being asked to do does not work for some children, but many of their leaders are not listening. Some of the leaders who do listen cling to the belief that if we ask teachers to work a little bit harder and if we tried a few new techniques, things would begin to change. Such tactics will not alter anything unless we redesign the process.

When are superintendents and their school boards going to step back far enough to see that what we are doing is not working for vast numbers of the children they exist to serve? When will these leaders recognize that the biggest impact of the modifications they have implemented is that they have made teaching more challenging than it already is? Their choices are putting undue pressure on dedicated teachers in our classrooms and are driving thousands of these men and women from the profession they entered because they hoped to make a difference.

In the private sector, if providers of goods and services were to produce unacceptable outcomes, year after year, their customers would demand that they redesign the entire production or service delivery process to produce the outcomes those customers want. The truth to which all public school educators must open their hearts, minds, eyes, and ears to is that this is exactly what the “school choice” movement is striving to do: replace public schools. These reformers will not cease and desist until public schools begin to produce better outcomes. And, no, advocates of “school choice” are not ready to acknowledge that charter schools are not meeting expectations.

With respect policy makers, superintendents, and their school boards, their intransigence is placing public education at risk by refusing to challenge their assumptions about what they ask of their teachers and why. Because our society relies on public education to prepare young men and women for the responsibilities of productive citizenship, that intransigence is placing our democracy at risk.

It is the easy way out to conclude that our teachers cannot teach and that some students, disadvantaged kids in particular, are unable to learn but these conclusions are absurd.

Teachers can teach and they are committed to their students and to their profession, but they can only do what the education process allows them to do and for which it provides the structure and support. If we can craft the process around teachers everything will change.

Our students can learn if we take the time to understand and respond to their needs. Once they begin to gain confidence in their ability to learn, their motivation to learn and their pace of learning will accelerate.

Please consider an alternative approach to education. Please consider an education model engineered to meet the needs of students and their teachers by creating a process that exists to serve the important work they do rather than one that forces compliance and conformity. Check my model out at: https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/

The impact all of this testing has had on me, personally, and has contributed to a reduction in Tweets and blog posts, is that the number of schools offering the ASVAB has more than trebled. In the past, I might have administered four to five schools a month, I am now testing three to five times a week and each test, depending on the number of students who will be taking it, requires significant pre- and post-test preparation time. This quickly erodes the amount of time I normally allocate for writing and drains my energy, particularly when my nose is dripping and I am coughing. Not counting the three enlistment test sessions I have administered in the first 10 school days of the new year, I have tested over five hundred students in six schools.

Over the balance of the month of January, which is nine school days, I am scheduled to test up to 500 more students in six schools, in addition to two more of my weekly enlistment tests. During the first few months since the start of the school year, and up until the holidays, I tested over 3000 students in twenty-four high schools in Northeast Indiana. Please note that I am only one of several test administrators who are testing in high schools both in NE Indiana and throughout the state.

Thanks for your inquiries, and I hope to be writing more, soon!

Learning is a Process, Not a Competition!

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The way we grade the academic performance of our students in the overwhelming majority of American schools, public or private, suggests that we view the educational process as a competition rather than a pure learning process.

State standards lay out very specific academic expectations for all students beginning in first grade and progressing up to the point that we assess their readiness for graduation at the end of the twelfth grade. Toward the end of the child’s third year, at least here in Indiana, we begin administering the ISTEP+ exams to evaluate whether our students are where the state thinks children should be by the second semester of the third grade and each grade, thereafter.

Given the wide disparity that exists on an academic readiness continuum between young children who arrive for their first day of school, one can only wonder why we would ever consider it realistic that students should all arrive at the same place, relative to state standards, by any arbitrary point in time.

If the ISTEP+ exams and the standardized exams used in other states were meant to be purely diagnostic they could provide useful information that would help teachers adjust their classroom strategies to the unique needs of their students.

The moment, however, that we begin evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ performance on such exams, it becomes a competition. If we stop and think about it, the same could be said for the grades children receive at the end of each grading period or semester. If those grades were meant to gage which children need more help and which are ready to move on to new material, the grades could be useful tools. We all know that this is not the way it works, however.

We do not set aside the time to provide extra help for students who are unable to demonstrate sufficient mastery of the subject matter unless they are so far behind their classmates that moving them forward seems problematic but, even then, we agonize over the decision. Do we hold them back in spite of the perceived social and emotional consequences to insure that they will have more time and attention to master the subject matter or do we move them forward with their classmates even though we know them to be woefully unprepared for success in each succeeding grade?

What this dreaded dichotomy should tell us is that a system that requires educators to make such choices is dysfunctional and ignores the needs of our most vulnerable children, to their great disadvantage.

It makes no more sense to evaluate students on the basis of their ability to keep up with their peers than it does to judge teachers and schools as failures when the percentage of students who are falling behind crosses some arbitrary line of demarcation. Teachers and schools have no control over the aggregate levels of preparation and motivation of the students assigned to their respective schools and classrooms. Even more importantly, students have no control over how well their parents have prepared them for academic success.

What kids who arrive poorly prepared need is a process that acknowledges their unique situations and is structured to give them the time and special attention they need to be successful academically. What teachers and schools require is a process that is designed to give them the latitude necessary to respond to the “special needs” of these children.

Let us take great care not confuse our use of the phrase “special needs.” A student who is developmentally delayed due to environmental circumstances is not the same as a student who has a clearly defined learning disability or an emotional or psychological “disability.” Quite possibly, many students are diagnosed with some learning or emotional disability simply because we have not been cognizant of the fact that they were held to expectations that were unreasonable given their level of preparedness.

In effect, the thing we have been most successful in teaching these students is that they cannot learn as well as the majority of their classmates. The reality is that these kids got off to a late start and the professional educators on whom they depended were unable to recognize and respond to the unique realities of their situations.

The standard response to this dilemma, on the part of many educators, is to throw up their hands in figurative despair and respond “what are we to do?”

The answer to the question “what are we to do?” is relatively simple. We simply need to come to an agreement that the structure and flow of our current educational process has become so brittle, over time, that it no longer meets the needs of an incredibly diverse population of Twenty-first Century students. All that is necessary is to reinvent the structure to give both teachers and their students the time they need to learn within the context of a unique academic path with ever-rising expectations. When these children and their teachers, discover that they can be successful, academically, everything changes from their view of the world to their belief in themselves.

Providing one example of how this can be accomplished is the purpose of my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

Powerful forces are poised to rip control of education out of the hands Teachers and communities

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Yesterday’s (5/8/14) report, by Kimberly Hefling of the Associated Press, under the headline: “Nation’s students not improving: Exam finds no gains in seniors’ critical skills since ’09,” is certain to renew exclamations that our teachers are failing America’s children.

However absurd such proclamations may be, it is time for teachers, working collectively and with their communities, to take the lead in advocating substantial reforms of the educational process. If teachers permit educational reforms to remain exclusively in the hands of the government and corporate reformers, they are putting America’s children at risk and are leaving the teaching profession unprotected.

It is not sufficient to take a defensive posture and cry out against such reformers. What is needed are proactive proposals that the entire teaching profession can support with all of its political influence and might at the local, state, and federal level.

The reforms themselves must be substantial and they must literally reinvent the American educational process so that it:

• Is focused on success in real and substantive ways that allows teachers to teach children how to be successful;

• Shifts the focus back to subject mastery rather than test preparation, using the NAEP definition of “proficient” as a model where the expectation is to help students acquire the ability to apply what they learn to real-life situations;

• Puts teachers in a position to teach in an intimate environment in which they can form close, nurturing relationships with both students and parents;

• Help children experience the fun of learning under the tutelage of a “favorite teacher” rather than deal with the stress of looming annual, standardized exams;

• Integrate student assessment and teacher accountability into the instructional process, much like industry has done with quality systems, obviating the need for annual standardized examinations to demonstrate competency;

• Provides teachers with state-of-the-art technology and other tools to facilitate rather than obstruct what they do, where the technology is as seamless and productive as the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets and purses; and,

• Begins the challenging process of re-establishing the highest possible level of trust between parents and their children’s teachers.

Teachers must also use their collective might to aggressively pursue grants for creative programs that engage parents as partners in the education of their children (I encourage teachers to count the number of such programs of which they are currently aware).

I offer my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, as a model for implementation at the local level in schools and communities all over the nation. It is a model that can also serve as catalyst for brainstorming or as a springboard for the development of other models.

In any case, it is time for teachers to act before their credibility is completely tainted and their social capital squandered.