Debating the value of college admissions ‘test prep’ programs

Education Week reports:

Derek Briggs, the chairman of the research and evaluation methodology program in the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has examined how much SAT score increases can be attributed to the effect of test prep.

Test-prep programs generally include three elements: a review of test content, practice on test questions, and orientation to the format of the test. In 2009, in cooperation with NACAC, Mr. Briggs reviewed three national data sets and found the average effect of commercial coaching is positive, but slight. Test-score bumps were more in the neighborhood of 30 points (on a 1,600-point scale at the time), far from what some in the industry claim. He does point out that there may be specific programs that are more effective than others, but evidence to support that is weak.

Considering the results of Mr. Briggs’ and earlier studies, NACAC concludes that test-prep activities and coaching have a “minimal positive effect on both the SAT and the ACT.”

FULL DISCLOSURE: Dr. Briggs is on the faculty at the U. of Colorado at Boulder, where I am a Ph.D. candidate. I have studied with Dr. Briggs in the past.

International Summit on Teaching reveals U. S.’s approach to K-12 education differs greatly from other nations

Writing in the Washington Post, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammod reports on the International Summit on Teaching, a first-of-its-kind event held in New York City this past month:

Evidence presented at the s ummit showed that, with dwindling supports, most teachers in the United States must go into debt in order to prepare for an occupation that pays them, on average, 60% of the salaries earned by other college graduates. Those who work in poor districts will not only earn less than their colleagues in wealthy schools, but they will pay for many of their students’ books and supplies themselves.

And with states’ willingness to lower standards rather than raise salaries for the teachers of the poor, a growing number of recruits enter with little prior training, trying to learn on-the-job with the uneven mentoring provided by cash-strapped districts. It is no wonder that a third of U.S. beginners leave within the first five years, and those with the least training leave at more than twice the rate of those who are well-prepared.

Those who stay are likely to work in egg-crate classrooms with few opportunities to collaborate with one another. In many districts, they will have little more than “drive-by” workshops for professional development, and – if they can find good learning opportunities, they will pay for most of it out of their own pockets.

Meanwhile, some policymakers argue that we should eliminate requirements for teacher training, stop paying teachers for gaining more education, let anyone enter teaching, and fire those later who fail to raise student test scores.

President Obama on standardized testing: “All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble”

President Obama is widely seen as a proponent of accountability in K-12 education (see, for example, this article).  However, comments the president made today suggest that Obama does not see standardized testing (a major subset of accountability) as a panacea.

The Associated Press reports:

“Too often what we have been doing is using these [standardized] tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools,” the president told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish-language television network at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C…

“One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you’re not learning about the world, you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math,” the president said. “All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting…”

The president endorsed the occasional administering of standardized tests to determine a “baseline” of student ability.

Wisconsin Republicans seek professor’s personal emails

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

The Republican Party of Wisconsin is seeking, under the state’s open-records law, to obtain e-mail sent by a Madison professor who has publicly criticized that state’s Republican governor, a move the professor is denouncing as an assault on his academic freedom.

Officials at the University of Wisconsin at Madison received the records request on March 17, two days after the professor, William Cronon, published a blog post examining the role conservative advocacy groups have played in formulating legislation recently proposed by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers. The most prominent of the legislation, a bill to strip University of Wisconsin and other public employees of their collective-bargaining rights, was passed after a bitter debate that featured huge rallies at the State Capitol and demands for the recall of lawmakers on both sides of the issue.

USA Today investigates DC Public Schools’ standardized testing anomalies

USA Today has published a major investigative article on standardized testing anomalies at District of Columbia public schools, many of which were praised (and financially rewarded) by former chancellor Michelle Rhee.

In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its “shining stars.”

Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.

Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.

USA Today goes on to explain that the paper launched in investigation of  DC Public Schools because of the national attention DCPS has received during and after the tenure of Chancellor Rhee; indeed, the paper reports, DCPS received tens of millions of dollars in federal funding based on its purported improvements in test scores. But there was a problem:

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones…

Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That’s more than half of D.C. schools.

Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.’s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill…

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

Bakersfield, CA teachers fear for their safety

KERO, the ABC affiliate in Bakersfield, California, reports:

“I am scared to death to go back to work tomorrow,” said teacher Sunny Mueller. “We’ve had teachers assaulted, shoved around, eggs thrown at them,” said Bakersfield Elementary Teachers Association president Brad Barnes. “Last week, there was a homemade bomb that went off in the boys bathroom,” said teacher Katie Irwin.

Mayhem. That’s how teachers last night at the Bakersfield City School District board meeting described their classrooms and schools. Specifically Curran middle school, Stiern middle school and Mckinley elementary.Also kids are allegedly bringing drugs, alcohol and weapons on campus…

Teachers say the problem is lack of discipline enforcement by the district. “Kids are not being suspended for bad behavior,” said Irwin.

The union says BCSD is not suspending, expelling or rotating students because budget cuts have left fewer resources to do so. Also, schools only get paid when a student is physically in school, so money is lost every time a student is suspended. Barnes says about $675,000 is lost per year from suspensions which is why the district has enforced a policy to reduce student suspensions 40 percent.

USA Today on why teachers cheat

USA Today reports:

Teachers cheat sometimes and so do principals, according to academic studies. Why it happens and how often — and the seriousness of efforts to stop it — are open to debate. Punishment varies from state to state, too. In an investigation of standardized testing in six states and the District of Columbia, USA TODAY found that an infraction such as casually coaching one student can carry nearly the same punishment as deliberately changing answers for a whole class.

The consequences can be drastic: Cheating can cost school districts thousands of dollars for makeup tests, set back the careers of gifted teachers and create confusion for schools and parents over a child’s academic progress.

In an Arizona State University survey published last year, more than 50% of teachers and other educators admitted to some kind of cheating on Arizona’s state tests. The authors of the online survey of more than 3,000 educators defined cheating broadly — from accidentally leaving multiplication tables on classroom walls to changing answers.

March 10 K-12 news round-up

• The Obama Administration held a conference on school bullying today at the White House. In his remarks to the educators, psychologists, parents, and others in the audience, the president acknowledged that he himself was bullied as a child. “I have to say, with big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune. I didn’t emerge unscathed,” Obama said. [ABC News]
• Reuters reports that in Wichita, Kansas, “three middle schools have gone to single-sex lunches. Principals say the new lunch system has reduced misbehavior and helped students focus on eating.”
• U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that the percentage of schools designated as ‘failing’ under guidelines set forth by the No Child Left Behind law could increase from 37% to 82% in 2011 as states raise academic standards in an effort to comply with NCLB. The Obama Administration advocates the reform of NCLB. [Associated Press]

Investigative report profiles the tactics of “an online college empire”

The Huffington Post reports:

Inside the red brick campus of Ashford University, perched on a bluff above the Mississippi River, the door marked “President’s Office” remains perpetually shut. Telephone calls to the university’s head are swiftly transferred to a corporate office some 2,000 miles away, in San Diego.A new, 500-seat football stadium adorns the campus, and is featured prominently in Ashford’s promotional literature, though the university has no football team. Signs around campus proudly read “Founded 1918″ and “90 Years Strong,” despite the fact that Ashford — one of the nation’s fastest-growing for-profit colleges — has existed for less than a decade.

The perplexing campus landscape here in Iowa amounts to an elaborate stage set for a lucrative, online education empire that uses these trappings to sell itself to students as a traditional college experience. That strategy was the brainchild of the corporation behind Ashford: Bridgepoint Education Inc., a publicly traded venture started by a group of former executives from the University of Phoenix, a name now synonymous with for-profit higher education and the controversial marketing practices that have brought the industry crosswise with federal regulators.

Read the whole story at The Huffington Post

Findings of widely-cited Gates Foundation study on teacher effectiveness called into question

Late in 2010, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has sponsored much research into teacher effectiveness, released the Measures of Effective Teaching report (PDF). The report’s analysis was developed using a statistical methodology called value-added modeling, which attempts to quantify the impact an individual teacher has on students’ learning outcomes by examining student standardized test scores over time and across different classes. A number of education reformers, including Arne Duncan, U. S. Secretary of Education, have touted value-added modeling in general and the Gates Foundation report in particular as important new tools for understanding teacher effectiveness.

Now, an analysis of the Gates Foundation report by a U. of California at Berkeley economist challenges the conclusions of the Gates Foundation report:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) Project seeks to validate the use of a teacher’s estimated “value-added”—computed from the year-on-year test score gains of her students—as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Using data from six school districts, the initial report examines correlations between student survey responses and value-added scores computed both from state tests and from higher-order tests of conceptual understanding. The study finds that the measures are related, but only modestly. The report interprets this as support for the use of value-added as the basis for teacher evaluations. This conclusion is unsupported, as the data in fact indicate that a teachers’ value-added for the state test is not strongly related to her effectiveness in a broader sense. Most notably, value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments, meaning that many teachers whose value-added for one test is low are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, the MET results are sobering about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations.