Standardized testing: When a picture is NOT worth 1,000 words.

“Could you take my picture
‘cuz I won’t remember…”

(“Take a Picture,” Filter)

An article by Motoko Rich in the New York Times makes the claim that it is easier to achieve gains in math than in reading, as indicated by test scores.

I repeat, as indicated by test scores.

On the surface, this makes some degree of intuitive sense; math questions are typically about “the right answer,” and it is easier to program students with a repeatable mechanical set of steps to reach a right answer to a math problem than it is to train the mind to perform the feats of abstract thought necessary to satisfy the typical question on most ELA assessments.

Rich illustrates this phenomenon thus:

During a fifth-grade reading class, students read aloud from “Bridge to Terabithia,” by Katherine Paterson. Naomi Frame, the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text. 

Later, in math class, the same students had less difficulty following Bridget McElduff as she taught a lesson on adding fractions with different denominators. At the beginning of the class, Ms. McElduff rapidly called out equations involving two fractions, and the students eagerly called back the answers.

But I just can’t get over the grotesque leaps of illogic that this article makes.  A few samples:

“[T]eachers are finding it easier to help students hit academic targets in math than in reading, an experience repeated in schools across the country,” which begs the question: Are the “academic targets” actual learning and demonstration of mastery and understanding, or are they simply test scores? Not the same thing.

“[S]tudents … in KIPP middle schools for three years had test scores that indicated they were about 11 months — or the equivalent of more than a full grade level — ahead of the national average in math,”  which makes the implicit assumption, signaled by that word again – indicated – that test scores are a reliable and predictable and robust indicator of actual mathematical achievement.

“Studies have repeatedly found that ‘teachers have bigger impacts on math test scores than on English test scores,’ said Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia Business School,” which at least comes right out and admits that it’s only talking about test scores, and not about the actual educational experience of the child.

“Over time, teachers hope to develop the same results in reading that they have produced in math. Already, students at high school campuses in the Uncommon network in Brooklyn and Newark post average scores on SAT reading tests that exceed some national averages,” which again, emphasizes the primacy of test scores FIRST, students SECOND.

This is not as it should be. For one thing, I categorically reject the notion that a single standardized test score in any way equates to the child’s experience over a year’s worth of math classes. New York State is a sterling example of the pedagogically self-destructive redactio ad absurdum of this line of thinking, as I blogged recently (redacted here, click on this link to read the whole post):

When the focus is “doing what you have to do to get students to pass,” the focus is not on learning, building understanding, or scaffolding for continued study. The focus is instead on a short-term, quick-fix, half-assed solution that benefits NO ONE, and the illusion of the higher pass rate, suggesting a much higher quality of education that what is actually transpiring, is convincing enough for education stakeholders to look the other way. 

With regard to the New York State Algebra Regents [state-standardized final assessment], [what you see] is not [what you get]. On the New York State Algebra Regents exam, students are given a score out of 100, a "scaled score," and it is very easy (and most people, even many teachers and guidance counselors make this mistake) to think of this as a percentage – an 83 on the Regents means you got an 83% on the test. That is SO not the case.

View this chart for the June 2011 administration of the NYS Algebra Regents. A total of 87 points were available to be earned by students on the exam. 65% of 87 is about 56.5, the number of points out of 87 that would need to be earned by a student for the Regents Exam score to actually reflect the percentage correct that the student achieved. But oh, no. A [minimum] passing grade of 65 is granted by a student’s successfully earning a whopping 31 points (the "raw score"). That’s a passing grade for UNDER 36% correct. And what’s worse, standard policy in New York State is that even if a student fails the entire course, all four academic quarters, a passing grade on the Regents Exam is de facto full passing credit earned for the course.

A student could do nothing from September through May, cram for the Regents exam in June, do a 40% job, and PASS THE WHOLE YEAR based on that 40% on that one end-of-year assessment. And the Algebra teacher gets to brag about how high her passing rate is. And she will, no doubt.

As I have blogged, and re-posted, many times before:

Popular myth and the standardized-test culture of American public education would have one think that education is about the massive and rapid accumulation of content, the purpose of which is to succeed on a state test; the error of this thinking is that it relegates the education process itself to a secondary status, making the test score the “prize” of education. Nothing could be more removed from the truth. We have become a nation of pure data, of test scores and dropout rates, ciphers which are at best simplified abstractions of critically important ideas – but raw numbers do not tell the whole story. Any educational process or notion that has at its heart the notion that it is the data that needs to be treated, and not the students, is fundamentally flawed.

Motoko Rich doesn’t realize this, but she accidentally stumbles on these points early in her article in the words of David Javiscas, a seventh-grade reading teacher at Troy Prep Middle School, near Albany (emphasis mine):

Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.

You get that, Ms. Rich? It could take months. Teaching is a process; learning is a process. A test is at best a snapshot (not a movie), and sadly, most of this nation’s "cameramen" are not themselves educators, and are not fit to wield the cameras.

Have you ever taken a bad photograph of a normally photogenic person? When my family goes to Sears or JC Penney to get family portraits done, the photographer typically takes multiple shots of the same pose. Why? Because not every snapshot reflects the right image. How is a test any different?

And this article’s insistence, both explicit and implicit, that test scores are the de facto equivalent of achievement is a sad sign of the times; thanks to all this Race to the Top fueled testing, the way students are taught nowadays, we have to take their picture, ‘cuz they won’t remember…

Hey, Dad, what do you think about your schools now?


I'm just A.S.K.ing...

In Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen!

If one more news personality places the article “an” before the word “historic” or “historical,” I’m going to have an hissy fit.

See?  Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?

Editor Judy Vorfield succinctly sums up the situation here, where she writes: “Using ‘an’ is common, but not universally accepted by experts.”  A gentle and noncommittal way of saying it ain't technically correct.  In other words, the usage falls into that ugly and contentious prescriptivist (it’s against the rule, so don’t do it) versus descriptivist (it’s the way people really talk, so it’s de facto legit) pissing match.

"An historic change in leadership is taking place..."  Oy, ‘eaven ‘elp me…

First of all, "a," not "an," is used before a consonant-initial word. And let me be clear for the non-linguists out there... A consonant is not a letter, it is a sound.  A vowel is not a letter, it is a sound.  So the word "honest" starts with a VOWEL, or, just to be clearer, a "vowel sound."  Now, if this were Cockney England, somewhere around Eliza Dolittle's old guttertown, then the letter [h] in "historic" would be silent, leaving the initial sound of "historic" instead as what we as kids learned to call the short-i vowel sound, making "an" the correct article, no different than if we were to say "an idiotic perspective," or "an imbecilic notion."

Or, if an American were trying to somehow channel Monty Python, having a bit of fun, perhaps, and pronounce the word /Is-'tor-Ik/, then again, the "an" would be correct.

However, "an" before a perfectly good American /h/-word is an artificial creation by pretentious wannabes (kind of like how Mariah Carey sometimes lapses into a faux British accent on American Idol, I guess she thinks it makes her sound deep or something?), rather like those types who use "whom" indiscriminately instead of "who" because they think it sounds more erudite.

Bollocks, I say.

But let’s make it a little more interesting.  Let’s allow for the possibility that “an historical moment” is perfectly acceptable to say by an American who is not currently trying to sell some flowers to Colonel Pickering.  Let’s compare: "A history class" vs. "An historical moment..."  Now, I think we all can agree (even the pretentious types who would actually say “an historical moment with a straight face) that “an history class” is just, well, bad.

The key determining factor seems to be the stress of the [h]-initial syllable: "History" is stressed on the first syllable [his], therefore it is much less likely to lenite (weaken to near silence). In "historic(al)" the stress is on the second syllable [tor], not the first syllable [his], so the weaker (unstressed) syllable [his] is much more susceptible to lenition, becoming less, well, "consonantal." Vorfield states, "Before a word starting with a pronounced, breathy 'h,' use 'a.'" Which is exactly my point. The (currently, empirically) incorrect use of "an" at most signals, maybe, a gradual trending in American phonetics towards a softening of non-stressed word-initial [h].  But even that would imply an order of operations that is not extant: The pronunciation of "historical" has not changed over the last generation or two in American English; the only thing that has changed is the active choice to start using "an" beforehand instead of "a." 

Some years ago, I voiced this particular pet peeve to a favorite professor of mine (who shall remain nameless since I’m sure he doesn’t want me dragging him into my petty dramas).  An English professor by trade and a historical linguist and classicist by avocation, I figured he would be the perfect one to hear my desperate plea.  He responded thus:

“To get your adrenaline flowing over usage questions bespeaks an addiction to adrenaline more than a devotion to the queen’s idiom, but we all have our peeves.  You’ve put the case pretty clearly—and correctly—in your statement, but don’t expect reformation.  Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage—a ‘must have’ for language mavens—concedes that in speech ‘an historical’ prevails, even in ‘American’.  In that case, and a couple of others, the editors cop-out by letting us do as we please based upon our particular pronunciation of the ‘h’ word in question.”

*sigh*

My take is simply that people who say it are trying to sound important, and are deliberately sacrificing correctness at the altar of pomposity.

Which is clearly an heretical thing to do… (oh, snap!)

Or am I just a crusty old prescriptivist?  You tell me, I’m just A.S.K.ing…

Shakespeare, Ibsen, The Last Unicorn, and a Big Red Rag...

[Updated August, 2017]

I used to wonder, when I was in Mr. Fischer’s English 12 class, studying Shakespeare… When we do literary analysis on the works of long-deceased authors, how do we know what these authors really meant?  Maybe all of the pretension that we heap posthumously on their work is just that – pretense, and representing nothing more than a generations-long collective best-guessing effort, that through transmission, becomes fossilized into quote-unquote scholarly analysis.  Maybe Shakespeare was just writing some cool, edgy stuff to sell tickets?

My mind goes back to my early undergraduate years at Cornell.  The year was 1988, maybe 1989.  I was up late one night, studying, in an unoccupied room in stately Goldwin Smith Hall.  As fatigue, boredom and frustration closed in on me from all sides, I took up a piece of chalk and set to declaring my frustration, in the way that only the 17 or 18-year-old I could, in the form of a colorful metaphor, possibly involving a bodily appendage not traditionally used for or while studying.  It was silly, random eruption of angst.  At some point, I left the building.
 
Sometime later that week or month, I happened across a copy of The Big Red Rag, at the time a feminist newspaper on campus.  (I think the title has remained, but it’s now an arts and entertainment publication.  Someone correct me if I am wrong?)  As I was flipping through its pages, I came across a graphic, in the middle of which was prominently displayed the very sentence I had written, and one of the Rag’s staff writers - actually a girl who had been in one of my Freshman Writing Seminars the previous year, I recognized the name - had performed an impressive deconstruction/analysis, word-by-word, of how the sentence spoke to my massive insecurities (and my attempts to compensate for them), my mommy issues, my desire to rule the world, and how I was undoubtedly a physical incarnation of the malevolent wave of misogyny that held sway in the world as she perceived it.  It was an impressive display of skillful and erudite analysis being guided by (since the original author, moi, was unavailable for comment) the desires of the analyst to conclude what she wished to conclude.  (Anybody remember Charles Manson’s “selective” interpretation of The Beatles’ “Blackbird?”) It could have been satire, I suppose.  It’s hard to tell.  If it was satire, it was artfully done.  Bravissima. If it was serious, well…

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.  How do we know that the interpretations of events we teach/learn are definitive?  How do we know what the artists intended?  How do we know what was going the mind of The Bard?  Or John Donne?  Or Edgar Allan Poe?  Or James Madison?  (What was the intent of the Framers with regard to the Second Amendment? That debate has been making the rounds lately, and I’m sure to tick off more than a few gun nuts and Libertarians when I publish my grammatical interpretation of what the Second Amendment really means…) I even read an analysis of Robert Frost’s “Birches” once that claimed that the up-and-down movement of the Frost's birch tree is a metaphor for nothing more profound than sex, or perhaps onanism. (You look the word up yourself, this is a G-rated article.) The link to that original article is now dead, but it is referenced here.

I have erstwhile written about my feelings about the “inflation” of the importance of the verse of Tupac Shakur, and don’t even get me started on the pretense heaped on certain celebrated practitioners in the art world. But I’ve always considered myself to be cynical and inquisitive enough of a critical thinker not to be sucked in by the alluring complacency of the surety that I know what’s what.  Still, when I read Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (in translation), and found a quote I recognized from a much later work, I thought I had made the discovery of the century.  In the play, Peer, the title character, embarks on a surreal set of adventures – rather like Huck Finn crossed with Odysseus – during one of which he meets with a “Voice from the Darkness,” the great Bøyg:

PEER   [tries to force a passage at another place, but strikes against something]. Who are you?
THE VOICE   Myself. Can you say the same?
PEER   I can say what I will; and my sword can smite! Mind yourself! Hu, hei, now the blow falls crushing! King Saul slew hundreds; Peer Gynt slew thousands! [Cutting and slashing.] Who are you?
THE VOICE   Myself.
PEER   That stupid reply you may spare; it doesn't clear up the matter. What are you?
THE VOICE   The great Bøyg.
PEER   Ah, indeed! The riddle was black; now I'd call it grey. Clear the way then, Bøyg!
THE VOICE   Go roundabout, Peer!
PEER   No, through! [Cuts and slashes.] There he fell! [Tries to advance, but strikes against something.] Ho, ho, are there more here?
THE VOICE   The Bøyg, Peer Gynt! the one only one. It's the Bøyg that's unwounded, and the Bøyg that was hurt, it's the Bøyg that is dead, and the Bøyg that's alive.
PEER   [throws away the branch]. The weapon is troll-smeared; but I have my fists! [Fights his way forward.]
THE VOICE   Ay, trust to your fists, lad, trust to your body. Hee-hee, Peer Gynt, so you'll reach the summit.
PEER   [falling back again]. Forward or back, and it's just as far;- out or in, and it's just as straight! He is there! And there! And he's round the bend! No sooner I'm out than I'm back in the ring.- Name who you are! Let me see you! What are you?
THE VOICE   The Bøyg.
PEER   [groping around]. Not dead, not living; all slimy; misty. Not so much as a shape! It's as bad as to battle in a cluster of snarling, half-wakened bears! [Screams.] Strike back at me, can't you?
THE VOICE   The Bøyg isn't mad.
PEER   Strike!
THE VOICE   The Bøyg strikes not.
PEER   Fight! You shall
THE VOICE   The great Bøyg conquers, but does not fight.

It’s that last line that struck me. One of my favorite novels is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. (TLU was made into a Rankin/Bass animated feature film in 1982, screenplay by the author, starring the voices of Alan Arkin, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, Rene Auberjonois, and mega-geek-cred actor Christoper Lee. Beagle earns extra geek cred for having written and directed the Trek: TNG episode “Sarek.”) In the novel, the pathos-ridden ageless and timeless Schemndrick the Magician befriends the last unicorn in the world.  Together, they travel far and wide, and eventually run up against the Red Bull, the creature responsible (sort of) for the disappearance of all the other unicorns.  Of the Bull, Schmendrick says, “The Red Bull never fights....He conquers, but he never fights.”

My brain exploded.

The Bøyg is a mysterious creature who exists outside what might be considered space-time.  He is part Tom Bombadil, part Yog-Sothoth.  I’ll let that sink in.

The Red Bull, too, “appears” from seemingly nowhere; it is unclear whether he has any real physical form, or if the Bull assumes physical form only to interact with the characters.  The caverns beneath the castle of wicked and broken King Haggard, who has more than one major secret, are said to be where the Bull’s lair is, but it is unclear who is master and who is servant.  The Bull may even be Haggard himself, somehow. 

They both conquer, but do not fight.  I became instantly certain that Beagle’s usage was a deliberate homage to The Bøyg.  I was absolutely sure of it.  How could it not be so?

Then I looked him up. Beagle, not the Bøyg or the Bull. (Living authors are a great treasure!)  And I asked him directly, via electronic message:

Hi. I'll try not to geek out too much. Huge TLU fan, and a high school English teacher in NY who is using TLU in class. I noticed that the words "he conquers but does not fight," used to describe the Red Bull, are also the words used by Ibsen (in translation) to describe the beast (The) Bøyg in Peer Gynt. I can find no scholarly mention of this curious connection, not even on fan-sites and other delicious outposts of good-natured geekery. Is the Red Bull an homage to the Bøyg? (And if so, I'm going to really have to give the Ibsen a closer read...) Thanks!

And he responded (in part):

I hate to admit this, because it reflects badly on my magpie education, but while I know a number of Ibsen's plays, I don't really know "Peer Gynt" well enough to quote from it. (Fats Waller throwing in left-hand licks from "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" for his own amusement is about as far as I get....)

If the Red Bull represents anything at all, it's the utterly unreasoning fear that I've seen take over entire populations over and over: having grown up during the Red Scare of the 1950s, I'm now seeing exactly the same blind panic in the face of the supposed World Jihad. As a Kentucky friend of mine used to say, "Some things'll scare you so bad, you'll hurt yourself." I think that's what the Red Bull's really about.

But I love even being thought of in the same breath with Ibsen. Thank you!

So much for my theory.

Tolkien was famous for not fessing up to who or what exactly Tom Bombadil is: Is he a nature spirit? A Vala? Eru Ilúvatar himself?  When someone who is not J.R.R. Tolkein (as we all, by definition, are not) makes his or her claim, however well-defended a thesis, is it really anything more than a best guess that “seems to fit the facts?” 

In the end, who are we to say definitively what character x in short story y represents, or what poem a by poet b means, or what artist p was feeling or intending to communicate when s/he painted abstract canvas q?  The secret, unless written down by the author, dies with him or her, at which point everything is more or less conjecture, isn’t it?  Put another way: is the message-directionality of expressive art forms from the writer to the reader or from the reader to the piece?  Or both? Put yet another way: from the perspective of the author (poet, playwright, lyricist), is there one “correct” interpretation of a piece, and everything else is “incorrect?” or do such creators surrender their pieces to the minds of the masses? 

If the latter is the case, then maybe that girl back at Cornell was right about me, and maybe Frost just liked to… you know (don’t make me go there).

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed...

[Updated August, 2017]

Students cheat so darn much!  Well, some.  I myself have seen a significant uptick these past few years, in students who are willing to go to great lengths to turn in a finished product, by hook or by crook.  The operative word being "crook."

But what happens when it’s the professionals who cheat?  Or, in this case, plagiarize?

Take Prof. Santiago (“Yago”) Colás, professor at Oberlin (formerly University of Michigan).  No, he’s not a cheater. He is a victim. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Yago online and (virtually) talking shop with him a little bit some time ago; we share a deep and abiding love of one particular short story. While geeking out and Googling information on said story, I came across Yago’s web page.  On it, Professor Colás describes a Julio Cortázar short story called “La Autopista del Sur” (English translation, “The Southern Thruway”), one of my favorite pieces. In this story, a traffic jam on a country freeway, a snarl of epic proportions, uncountable kilometers in length, lasts so long that an ad hoc society forms within and among the people trapped in their cars in the terrible jam. Time magically slows down. Friendships, kinships, romances form. There is death.  And then, suddenly, traffic starts moving again, and people go about their merry way, rather like nothing ever happened. I cannot believe no one has bought the film rights.  It seems ready-made for cinema.

Check out Yago’s web page, with his original content and analysis. [Link dead] 

Harvard Law School dean Martha L. Minow seems to have borrowed liberally from Colás’s decade-old online musings when constructing her 2010 Law School Commencement address (or when someone constructed it for her, to be fair, because Important People often do not do their own speechwriting). I have been a high school and college English teacher for two decades, and Minow's “liberal borrowing” MORE than crosses the line into out-and-out plagiarism. See the image below, which shows color-coded matching chunks of text. I have given students zeroes on essays for less obvious transgressions, and no professor I know would stand for (what appears to be) such blatant theft. 

Out of a sense of fairness, I have marked, with an underline, the lone acceptable paraphrase. Plus, the following Minow line is really nicely crafted, and, it seems, original: "The tendrils of connection forged in the crisis stretch and strain as the cars speed ahead." (See below for the context.)

For the record, I have corresponded with Yago Colás, and shown him the offending document. He recognized it for what it was, I think (I don’t want to put words in his mouth), and was pretty zen about it, telling me I basically could do with it what I wanted. This was around 2012. I held on to it for a while because I figured, what would be the point?  It would probably bode more well for my long term cardiac health if I could be more zen about it as well. But repeated goings-on at the other universities have just made me decide not to hold on to it any longer:

·         Harvard: Read about it here or here;

·         Atlanta City Schools: Read about it here or here;

·         And this scandal among med school students at Syracuse University.

I hope, as Harvard University comes down hard (deservedly so) on its students for such offenses, that they are consistent in their outrage at such behavior, and will investigate/respond accordingly. A Law School Dean should know better. As an English professor, I am personally outraged.  Same thing with the students in Atlanta – if they’re guilty as charged, throw the book at them (not that they’ll actually read the book once it hits them, though they may copy from it).  As for the Syracuse scandal, well, you can read about the fallout.

I hope Martha Minow did not write the speech herself; I really hope it was handed to her to read.  Politicians have most of their speeches written for them, so it's a distinct possibility.  Maybe then Minow has plausible deniability (“I didn’t write the speech myself.”)  Well… I had a student recently turn in a paper that he “didn’t write himself.” Guess what happened to him?