A colleague brought to my attention an editorial in the Spartanburg paper which she called "nicely done." It was headlined "Belittling Progress." Here’s an excerpt:
It’s become a regular pattern over the past few years: The state Department of Education releases a set of test scores – ACT, SAT, PACT – that shows improvement by South Carolina students, and South Carolinians for Responsible Government follows with a news release that attempts to turn the good news bad.
It happened again this week. State education officials reported that the state showed marked improvement in proficient and advanced scoring across the board in 2008, the final year of PACT administration in the state’s public schools.
South Carolina students scored higher on the tests. More of them met the proficient standard and more met the advanced standard. The numbers of students meeting those standards aren’t as high as we’d like, but the movement is in the right direction.
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So you and your colleague can state without any reservation that the children of South Carolina are better educated now than they were ten years ago? Across the state or just in certain areas? Across all subjects or just in certain subjects?
Where do we stand in relation to the rest of the country?
If so, please tell us how much better they are doing. And also please tell us when we should see the impact on South Carolina’s economy when more businesses come here to take advantage of our smarter students?
It’s just a bunch of numbers. Nothing else.
The only number we need to look at is high school graduation rate. If that hasn’t improved significantly as a result of all this wonderful testing, then please explain what the point of the testing is?
From PEW research:
“The report found that most states exaggerated their graduation rates by ignoring students who dropped out of high school before their senior year. Nationally, states reported an average graduation rate of 83 percent, far higher than independent measures, which estimate that at least 30 percent of public high school students nationwide fail to graduate in four years.
The report commended only two states — Alaska and Washington — for reporting realistic graduation rates. Measuring the percent of freshman who finish high school in four years, Alaska and Washington reported gradation rates of 67 and 66 percent respectively.”
See, most states will fudge the numbers in order to prevent scrutiny.
Some more facts.
The average graduation rate for high school freshmen in South Carolina was 60.6% in 2003-2004 as compared the the national average of 75%. No state (including D.C.) had a lower rate of graduation.
Can we get more recent graduation rates for all who entered as freshmen? That would show just how much impact PACT had on the ultimate goal. Every student who graduated or dropped out this year would have gone throught the full cycle of yearly PACT tests.
So Doug, I’m to take it that you just swore off on commenting on the ELECTION…
Doug is exactly right.
The only tests that matter are uniform, meaningful, exit exams.
The only statistics that matter are the scores on that exit exam and the number of graduates in each scoring bracket.
Brad,
Yes. I’m done with the election. It doesn’t matter.
Just like PACT.
And will you or your colleague get back to us on how effective PACT has been in decreasing the dropout rate? Because that’s the goal, right? Not just some random numbers from grade 3-8?
Someone might want to ask the Department of Ed whether a student who scored Below Basic on the English or Math section of the PACT test in 8th grade still can be promoted to high school. That would be kind of an indicator of probability of dropping out, wouldn’t it?
Doug, if your son told you he was dropping out of school, what would you do? Would you blame it on the school? Would you shrug and say good luck? Would you talk or knock some sense into him? I am quite sure my parents would have taken a very tough stand if I wanted to drop out.
Knowing how involved you are in your the lives and education of your son and daughter, dropping out is probably a pure hypothetical concept in your household, as it was in mine.
I suggest the drop out rate is largely a function of parental involvement and influence. Given that, I find the effort to use drop out rates as a measure of school performance laughably invalid.
Randy,
How would you measure schools then? My point has always been that PACT is useless. If we can’t identify how it improves education, then what purpose does it serve?
What is the purpose of public education? I have always been under the impression that it is supposed to create productive members of society who have enough knowledge to either find a good job or be prepared to go to college. That would generally mean getting a high school diploma. Failure to achieve that typically leads to negative outcomes.
It seems like a simple question to me. What did we gain as a state from a decade of PACT testing? Are the schools better? Are the teachers better? Are the students any smarter than they were a decade ago?
So before we implement a new test maybe someone should figure out what the objective of the test is.
Randy, as a high school math teacher, I think you would have a great perspective on the impact of PACT on the quality of the students who move into your classroom.
Do you see a noticeable difference in their preparedness and understanding of the fundamental concepts?
Lead story on fitsnews.com is about a scandal brewing at a Charleston elementary school which has been used as an example of great progress according to PACT test scores over the past few years.
Here’s it is: PACT scam
Let’s see if Brad and his colleague can defend that story. And let’s see if The State will cover this story or just wait til Jim Rex’s next press release comes out.
PACT was a complete waste of tax dollars that could have been better utilized in paying teachers more money. That’s where we will see the biggest gains in education. Pay for performance.
“How else would we measure schools?” Not knowing how to measure school success doesn’t make drop out rates valid by default.
I believe the state end of course exam program holds great promise. My point though is to address the drop out rates. All too often, critics jump on some statistic and wield it like a club to beat down schools. The result is we are diverted from addressing true reform.
Principals and teachers are pressured to focus on initiatives that increase the number of students receiving a diploma. They institute credit recovery programs in which students who fail a course needed to graduate can redo some work and pull up the grade. The emphasis is not on mastery of the content so we have an educated community but on the statistic, graduation rate.
The same happens with SAT scores. Principals can simply divert lower level students from taking the SAT and scores go up even though education is not affected.
And then we get Sunday’s editorial in The State congratulating South Carolinians for supposed gains on the PACT tests yet basically pointing out that in a decade of testing, it was unable to link performance on the tests with finding solutions to below average performance — or as The State says “by spelling out what we wanted kids to learn, testing them on how well they learned it and fixing the problems when they didn’t do well enough. We’ve stuck to the first two parts of that for what is by political standards an eternity.”
By any standard, a decade of useless testing is an eternity.
Does anyone from the editoral board have any training in analyzing data? or do they just take whatever the Department of Education passes along as gospel? Look at the numbers. Why is it that proficiency drops as students move from 3rd through 8th grade? It’s right there in front of you. It drops because when students perform at Below Basic levels, they are not held back. They are pushed along. Pushed along until they reach high school and then drop out.
PACT testing was like taking a patient’s blood pressure every day and not doing anything until the person has a stroke.
Don’t bother testing students if you don’t plan to do anything constructive with the results. Stop wasting everybody’s time and money.
And take a look at what happened at that elementary school in Charleston. What a tragedy. A principal apparently was fixing the tests for all the students to make it look like she was being effective. The school was held up as a model of effectiveness by the Dept. of Ed even as questions arose as to how unlikely the gains could be achieved statistically. And what happens – as soon as the district starts looking into the issue, the principal resigns and heads to North Carolina and the PACT test results for this year drop back to their unacceptable levels. That story is the story of PACT in a nutshell. And the sad thing is that now all these low income parents are coming to the realization that their kids are basically illiterate and have been duped for the past few years. All because of some numbers on a test.
Simple question – are the schools in South Carolina producing better students today than they were ten years ago? All you gotta do is prove it. If you can’t, then stop testing kids and trust teachers to do the right thing. They are professionals with special skills and should be allowed to do their jobs without all the B.S. that flows down from the Dept. of Ed and the legislature.
Any measure of schools which takes more than 1 year to identify the problems is no good, because you only have 3 years left with that set of children to change what is being done wrong. Then they will be in a different level of school, or out of school, by graduation or by dropping out.
I work improving process quality in industry. My timeline for 180-degree turnarounds is 90 days. Anyone talking about years is just stalling to collect their paychecks for doing nothing.
The story in today’s State that tries to put a positive spin on Richland 1’s dismal PACT scores is typical. When the scores are good, the results are broadcast far and wide. When the results are not so good, we get quotes like “it’s not just about testing”.
The link to the district by district results for 2004-2008 provides meaningful information that anyone without a vested interest in serving as a mouthpiece for the Department of Education can easily understand.
Let’s look at Richland District 2. The pass rate for the district in 2004 was 77%. The pass rate in 2005 was 77%. I’ll save you the suspense. The pass rate was the same for 2006, 2007, and 2008. So what exactly did PACT do for those students over the past five years? I mean besides waste a couple weeks of valuable classroom time??
Lee County ranks as the second to last district in PACT pass rates. Over a five year period, the pass rate dropped from 45% to 42%. So what did the parents and students from Lee County get from PACT testing?
It’s all just a bunch of numbers. Numbers that keep educrats gainfully employed when that money could be spent on teachers.
More PACT information for The State to ignore.
In 2008, 86% of 3rd graders passed the English exam. 71% of 8th graders passed. The percent of students who pass drops for each grade – 3rd thru 8th. Why is that?
Shouldn’t we see the same pass rate across all grades? Or does this mean that 15% of our 8th graders peaked in their learning ability in the 3rd grade?
Why do the pass rates decrease from grades 3 through 8?
Social promotions, until the students are so beyond their level of competence that they remove themselves from school altogether.
NPR today reported that in Arizona, the number of children passing the state math exit exam increased from 11% to 92%, while the SAT scores remained the same.
Obviously, the exit exam has been made much easier, and is worthless for measuring anythhing.