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About Me
- Robert Hankes
- PSPA President; PSPA Literary Magazines Evaluation Chair for many years; teaches at Big Spring HS in Newville, PA; co-advises the literary magazine Charisma with PSPA Vice-President Mike McVitty; married with three kids (23, 9, and 6).
1 comment:
The most recent NEA Today had an article by Alain Jehlen entitled "Is NCLB Working?" in which she points out the disparity between how well students are performing on the state tests used in response to NCLB and how well they're performing on NAEP, an unbiased well-respected national test of reading. The results are interesting. Students have shown improvement on state tests where schools have boiled down their curriculum to focus on state objectives and where teachers have given practice tests and focused on reteaching test objectives that students are missing. However, when you look at the NAEP, especially from 2001 to present which would be the time that NCLB has been enforced, student performance is flat. There has been no improvement over time. My guess is that if we teach to the test, then students' performance on that measure will improve; however, their overall performance will not because we're not focusing on improving students' reading ability; we're focusing on improving their performance on the test.
In fact, Jehlen sites another study in which a school switched to a new test to measure how well their students were performing. Initially, the students' scores were very low; however, after a lot of intervention, the students showed steady improvement over the next four years. Then a researcher named Koretz came in and gave the original test that had been used prior to the new test, and students' scores plummeted. In short, it is possible to teach to the test so that students' scores will go up, but the question needs to be asked what the students are really learning. My concern is that the scores go up, but students' reading abilities don't. Just food for thought.
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