Why can one school like Learning Center Charter have decent scores and a sought-after reputation? Why can't their success be replicated throughout the district?

linky wrote:
Quote:

greenville wrote:
Education starts at home, if your not educated by your parents you'll have trouble trying to learn from a stranger. Too many parents in this city have bad luck, didn't try hard enough to get a good job that would let them have more time, are too stupid, are criminals, or/and have made too many mistakes in their lives including having kids to care about their kids education.

Pretty rough...................but I taught Elementary School Basic Skills Math and Reading, and I have to admit that it's true.

I'll have to add to it and say that to truly value education one must come from a family and community which values education.

linky wrote:
Quote:

greenville wrote:
Education starts at home, if your not educated by your parents you'll have trouble trying to learn from a stranger. Too many parents in this city have bad luck, didn't try hard enough to get a good job that would let them have more time, are too stupid, are criminals, or/and have made too many mistakes in their lives including having kids to care about their kids education.

Pretty rough...................but I taught Elementary School Basic Skills Math and Reading, and I have to admit that it's true.

I'll have to add to it and say that to truly value education one must come from a family and community which values education.

K-Lo wrote:
I was not dismissing standardized testing, merely the conclusions that are required to be drawn by NCLB. According to some NJ educators, the NJASK tests themselves are well structured and well thought out. They test actual knowledge and reasoning, rather than the ability to pscych out the test. Comparing annual scores on these tests is effective.

I don't know how many schools in Jersey City are small ones (though my children do attend smaller schools). The point of the article I posted above is that smaller schools, something that all educators agree are generally better for children, suffer under the way the scores are used. There really isn't any controversy that smaller schools and smaller class sizes improve education. Yet the method of federal reporting on standardized tests penalizes the very structure that is best. The federal goverment has set up a conflict in what is best for children and what schools must to do beat the system.

greenville wrote:
Education starts at home, if your not educated by your parents you'll have trouble trying to learn from a stranger. Too many parents in this city have bad luck, didn't try hard enough to get a good job that would let them have more time, are too stupid, are criminals, or/and have made too many mistakes in their lives including having kids to care about their kids education.

K-Lo wrote:
The principal at Learning Community Charter School explained it to me -- but I am not an educator or statistician. This excerpt from "Small is Volatile" by Wayne Au does a good job of it.

* * * * *

Big Trouble for Little Schools

"High-stakes standardized tests like the ones Bush is proposing can only mean big trouble for small schools. All other arguments about testing aside, small schools are extremely "volatile" when it comes to measuring their progress statistically through standardized test scores. To be volatile in a statistical sense means that you may be subject to wild swings in test scores from year-to-year, grade-to-grade, and school-to-school.

In their oft-cited article "Volatility in School Test Scores: Implications for Test-Based Accountability Systems," education researchers Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger found that in North Carolina, the smallest schools had 50 percent more variability in test scores than the largest schools. In layperson's terms, this means small schools had swings in their scores that were 50 percent "wider" than large schools.

If you take a moment to think about it, the logic of this test score volatility makes absolute sense. Say you have a small high school or school-within-a-school of 200 students (50 per grade). In one year, you may have recruited 20 students who achieve higher test scores relative to the rest of their grade. Because your high school is small, and these 20 students (fully 10 percent of your total small school population) did well on a test, your school will show strong gains in test scores and AYP. Kudos for you and your school.

But say that in your next year, you recruited 20 more students who perform poorly on standardized tests. Suddenly, this new group of students' test scores, because they represent 10 percent of your student population, will have a drastically negative impact on your school's overall test scores. Whoops! You've shown a drop in scores, didn't meet your AYP, and are now placed on the NCLB school watch list where, if you don't improve in three years, you could be privatized or reconstituted.

Perhaps one of the twisted implications of small school volatility has to do with its impact on diversity. From the angle of high-stakes tests scores, small schools are better off having homogenous populations. If a small group of either high-scoring or low-scoring students can have such a drastic impact on your school's high-stakes test scores, and the future of your small school depends on the standards set by AYP, then it serves a small school's interest to keep low-scoring students out. Because we know that statistically black, Latino, and low-income students perform poorly on the high-stakes tests relative to white and middle-class populations, there is an incentive for small schools to keep poor students of color out of their schools for fear of having scores that don't meet AYP.

A similar logic extends to other, non-racial, subgroups that are counted for AYP. If, for instance, you have a significant number of bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) students, then you have to show AYP on test scores for that subgroup. If you don't have any bilingual or ESL students, then you have no reason to show improvement in that category because the subgroup simply does not exist for you. The more subgroups you have, the more ways there are for you to fail to meet AYP. In an article in Education Week, "Subgroup Reporting and School Segregation," authors Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel, and Colin Chellman note, "Ironically, be-cause of the way the law is written, the schools and districts that could end up being most heavily penalized are those that are the most heavily integrated." Looking at it from the other direction, homogeneously tracked or privileged small schools can insulate themselves from NCLB's "close the gap" mandate by avoiding student populations with test-score gaps in the first place.

Small schools may be able to sneak under the subgroup reporting radar, however. If you are a small school and you have just enough diversity, but not enough to be required to report subgroups under NCLB, then it is possible that you might avoid having to report test-score data for any group at all. Many states have set their magic number at around 30 to 40 students in any one subgroup to be counted for AYP, but predominately rural states like South Dakota cannot work with subgroup reporting numbers that high, since many of their schools are so small that they have no "official" test scores to report for AYP.

High-Stakes Battle

Many of us who have taken up small schools reform have done so for the best of reasons. I know that I loved working in a small school. I knew my students' home and life situations, I knew their academic histories, and best of all, I knew them personally. Small schools hold the promise of building community and allowing us to create institutions of learning that are not as alienating and inhumane as the large factory-school prototype.

But NCLB and its focus on high-stakes testing and AYP puts a stranglehold on small schools' abilities to work effectively with kids, especially if we build our small schools around diverse student populations. Issues like social justice, equity, and opportunities to learn don't count for much on the tests. Thus we are faced with having to wedge our schools into a behemoth assessment and "accountability" system that is structured for standardization, not creativity and social justice.

Many people have already been resisting high-stakes testing in high schools. A coalition of more than 45 education, civil rights, child advocacy, disability, and religious organizations including the NAACP, the Children's Defense Fund, the National Education Association, and the National Alliance of Black School Educators recently sent a letter to Congress protesting Bush's new plan to increase high school testing. This same group of organizations released a "Joint Organizational State-ment" in October 2004 calling for substantial changes to NCLB. Addition-ally, small schools in New York waged a fierce battle against the Regents tests, touting a portfolio assessment system that was far more rigorous than the tests [See "Standardizing Small," page 15.] Even though policy-makers ignored the power of portfolios, this spirited and organized resistance shows that communities are standing up to the tests.

To add fuel to our fires, and maybe to "empirically" prove what many of us already knew, a recent study by the Northwest Evaluation Association found that the high-stakes tests weren't really working anyway. This study, which used data from more than 320,000 students in 23 states, found that test-score gains have slowed greatly, and improvements may be attributed to students getting used to taking tests as they grow up in an educational era dominated by NCLB. Additionally, this study found that test-score gaps between students of color and white students were still widening, instead of closing. "

It's not that all standardized tests are bad - not at all - but the way these tests are used, and the conclusions that are required to be drawn from NCLB laws are the problem.

fat-ass-bike wrote:
I'm sure McCann will sort it all out !

but if you know what these numbers actually mean, you'll toss those stats in the trash.