□Homework is a great discriminator, effectively allowing students whose families have more to surge ahead of their classmates who may have less.
□Backpacks are literally bone-crushing, sometimes weighing as much as the child. Isn’t it obvious we’re overburdening our kids?
“Is it possible that homework isn’t good for kids? Dare we even consider such a shocking idea? Does it make children, teachers, and parents angry at each other rather than allied with each other?” (Deborah Meier, author of The Power of Their Ideas and Will Standards Save Public Education?).
“The increasing amount of homework may not be helping students to learn more; indeed, it often undermines the students’ health, the development of personal interests, and the quality of family life” (Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer, authors of The Students Are Watching).
Etta Kralovec, a recent Fulbright Fellow, earned her EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was a high school teacher for over twelve years and professor of education and director of teacher education at the College of the Atlantic for eleven years.
John Buell, PhD, University of Massachusetts, author of Democracy by Other Means and Sustainable Democracy, has taught at the College of the Atlantic.
Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids are Getting Too Much of a Bad Thing.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
LETTERS
TEACHERS’ BOYCOTTS MIGHT END PROFICIENCY TESTING
To the editor:
Oh no! It’s that time of year again—proficiency tests and school district report cards. I would think that by now, most everyone would realize that using an assortment of bribes and threats to try to coerce everyone into concentrating on test results does not work with high-stakes testing. It has been described as educational malpractice by Alfie Kohn in his book, The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools.
In grade 4, of the 97 reported Ohio school districts, the failure rate is as follows: 61 percent, citizenship; 91 percent, math; 72 percent, reading; 14 percent, writing; and 88 percent, science. Thus, it seems difficult to justify holding a fourth-grade teacher accountable for his or her student’s test scores when those scores reflect all that has happened to the children before they arrived in class.
So what is the solution to this gargantuan quagmire? Boycotts and civil disobedience, which lead to striking results. Elementary school achievement is high in Japan, partly because teachers are free from the pressure to teach to standardized tests because teachers collectively refused to administer them. For many years, they have prevented the government from doing to their children what our government is doing to our children.
Similarly, teachers in England and Wales stopped the new national testing program in its tracks, at least for a while, by a similar act of civil disobedience. What began as an unfocused mish-mash of voices became a united boycott involving teacher unions, a large number of governing bodies, and mass parental support, according to Kohn. Teachers made it clear that their action was taken on behalf of students, based on their understanding that to teach well for the tests was, in effect, to teach badly.
In Massachusetts, some tenured teachers are “just saying no” to administering the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) without harsh repercussions. However, some teachers received a two-week suspension without pay and a letter of reprimand yet still have their tenured teaching position. The time might be right to “just say no.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Education Spending on Decline
To the editor:
Mark Twain said that there are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies, and statistics. However, here are some statistics that don’t lie.
One-third of our nation’s students go to schools that are substandard and environmentally unsafe. Across the United States, state spending on education is being squeezed as the money spent on prisons and corrections expands: education, $27 billion in 1980; $16 billion in 1995 on corrections.
It’s been said that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to abandon a child.
Carl Sagan said it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World: “All across America, school bond issues are regularly voted down. No one suggests that property taxes be used to provide for military budgets, or for agriculture subsidies, or for cleaning up toxic wastes. Why just education? Why not support it from general taxes on the local and state levels?”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Blame Students, Not Teachers, for Low Scores
To the editor:
Oh yes—tests, tests, tests. Where is it said that everything worth learning is on a test? The Science Proficiency Test contains 46 questions: 17 earth science (sixth grade in our district); 13 life science (seventh grade); and 16 physical science (eighth grade).
As we are all aware, March was proficiency test week in Ohio public school districts—writing, reading, math, citizenship, and science.
I teach (instruct) eighth-grade physical science at Monticello Middle School in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District. I feel really great because if I personally get the blame for any of my students not passing the science proficiency test, I will not feel guilty.
However, I will take 100 percent responsibility/accountability for the sixteen physical science test questions. I feel confident that I covered the basic concepts. However, I’m not very confident that more than 60 percent passed the science proficiency test. We will find out soon.
I reviewed my students’ CAT (California Achievement Test) science test scores taken in October. The medium national percentile was 49. Some 51 percent of students scored higher, and 48 percent of the students scored lower.
I’m going to try to find out how many of the proficiency physical science test questions my students answered correctly. My awareness from past proficiency science tests is that students do not need to know any memorized facts. They are usually given in the questions. What students do need to be able to do is read, comprehend, analyze data, draw inferences and conclusions, etc. Students need to learn to read in order to read to learn.
So parents, pundits, demagogues, politicians, ivory-tower idealists, philosophers, and school administrators should not blame teachers if students do not pass proficiency tests. They should put the blame and responsibility where it really belongs—with the students.
I would not blame my dentist if I didn’t brush and floss my teeth and developed cavities and periodontal disease.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
SAT measures your aptitude.
SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, is not an assessment or achievement test. Aptitude refers to “natural ability in a given area,” “gift,” “knack,” “know-how,” “talent,” “skillfulness,” and “capacity for learning.” As Marian Wright Edelman said, “You can get all As and still flunk life.”
David A. Hancock
Chester Township
The Plain Dealer
Tests That Fail Schools and Students
In schools around the nation, assessment is dominated by proficiency, standardized, multiple-choice (or guess), norm-referenced tests. When high stakes have been attached to these tests—from reporting school scores in the newspapers to making decisions about graduation—teachers are told, in effect, that they should focus on them. As a result, the weight of standardized testing distorts curriculum, instruction, and classroom assessment practices.
Multiple-choice questions treat learning as the memorization of isolated pieces of information, rules, and procedures. This is the lowest level of learning, and this approach assumes that first one learns the bits and only later thinks. However, research has shown that students learn best by thinking and doing. Focusing on the bits provides a weak vision
of the content of any field of learning.
Norm-referenced tests place test takers on the “normal” or bell-shaped curve. But how much and what humans know does not necessarily fit such a curve, especially after good instruction. These tests are constructed so that half the students must be below average. Just think—half of all doctors graduated in the lower half of their class. The curve promotes the false belief that many students can’t learn very much, thereby reinforcing tracking! Norm-referenced tests also cannot tell us whether students have learned much or not—they are compared only with one another.
Unfortunately, schools at which students historically have scored low on standardized tests—often schools with many students from low-income families, students of color, or students whose first language is not English—are most likely to focus on raising test scores. As a result, these students get a low-level education focused on coaching for narrow tests. They are bored, turned off by school (which seems like purgatory), and don’t learn much. The tests are almost useless to teachers, and they provide almost no real information to the public.
David A. Hancock
Cleveland Heights
Hancock is a nature studies teacher at Heights High School.
Testing for Humanity
The ranking of school districts’ academic report cards is an abject, egregious behemoth, which focuses on proficiency test scores and is not the apotheosis of education or learning. It’s a cavil policy developed by the miscreants of the corporate oligarchy, the state board of education.
Other publications have advocated “firing principals and teachers—a demolition tactic—cleaning house.” Really?
It’s a fact that if all the teachers and principals from Solon High School (No. 1) or Chagrin Falls High School (No. 2) were transferred to a similar-sized high school in Cleveland for one year, academic achievement and proficiency test scores would not improve significantly. However, if all the students from a similar-sized high school in Cleveland were transferred to Solon High School or Chagrin Falls High School, academic achievement and/or proficiency test scores may improve slightly. The same analogy applies to elementary and middle schools.
How about exchanging homes for one year? Psychologists and sociologists would really be interested in this paradigm research investigation.
Teachers cannot make students learn and achieve or parents parent. Stop the blaming and complaining now. The most famous ten two-letter words are: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” As Mark Twain said, “Common sense is not so common.”
The epilogue of Teacher and Child by Dr. Haim G. Ginott states, “Dear colleagues: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
“Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.”
“You can get all As and still flunk life” (Marian Wright Edelman).
“The worst sin? The mutilation of a child’s spirit” (Erik Erikson).
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
If We Had Proficiencies in Phys-Ed, Youth Will Fail
To the editor:
This letter is regarding all the demagoguery, hysteria, nonsensical nonsense, and empty rhetoric from the standardistos (noneducators, i.e., politicians).
They know nothing about teaching and learning in a classroom or about the failure rate on proficiency tests—Ohio seniors: math, 46 percent; science, 42 percent; citizenship, 38 percent; reading, 31 percent; and writing, 18 percent—or that 60 percent is the minimum state performance standard to pass. (A 75 percent is needed to pass in grades 4, 6, and 9.)
Doesn’t this seem like lowering standards during the senior year? A study has shown that 47 percent of seniors took a science course and 60 percent took a math course in their senior year.
The United States spends $423 million on proficiency-standardized testing. The only state that doesn’t administer these tests (zero dollars) is Iowa, even though many states administer the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. How’s that for a paradoxical paradox?
This high failure rate could be a direct result of the very poor physical and general health condition of 60-plus percent of our students. After 33 years as a classroom teacher in health education / science, I believe we would have a 75 percent plus failure rate if we had a health / physical condition proficiency test.
Why? I observe many students eating donuts and Doritos at around 8 a.m.; exhibiting symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome during school hours; plopping their heads down on their desks; eating pizza, french fries, and ice cream for lunch; and walking very slowly and struggling to go up stairs.
They are too lazy to get up and walk from point X to Y in the classroom. (“Mr. Hancock, would you please bring me a pencil?”) They sit during physical education class; go to the nurse the period before PE to fake an illness; exhibit effects of alcohol, tobacco and/or drug use, sleep deprivation, obesity; and intentionally fail PE during the regular school year in order to participate during summer school for credit.
Many do not want to dress or get wet (swimming avoidance). I see unplanned pregnancy because 90 percent of students do not know when conception can occur. (I correct this factual error during the first day of class.)
Illinois is the only state that requires daily PE classes of all students K–12. Our children are the most obese of any society in the world, and after smoking, physical inactivity is the single largest health risk factor. Obesity-related diseases cost the US economy more than $100 billion per year. Statistics show that 25 percent of students, grades 4–12, attend no PE classes at all during the school week.
The superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Benjamin O. Canada, defends the elimination of recess because “we are intent on improving academic performance and you don’t do that by having kids hanging on monkey bars.”
The ancient ideal of a sound mind in a sound body was rooted in the view that the truly educated person has learned to manage his/her life physically, mentally, and morally. Training and maintaining the body is part of getting one’s overall self into shape. It molds good habits and attitudes and helps discipline the intellect.
Parents should remember to ask their children what they do during recess and PE when they discuss his/her day at school. Better yet, assign homework (just in case the PE teacher didn’t) and go for a brisk walk or bike ride. Let’s get moving.
David Hancock
Chesterland
Hancock is a science teacher at Monticello Middle School in Cleveland Heights. He was a longtime teacher at Heights High School.
LETTERS
COMPUTERS IN CLASSROOM NOT ANSWER TO EDUCATION
To the editor:
This fixation with computers in the classroom is a cheap and quick fix. The problem is, it’s not a fix at all, states David Shenk in his book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. Shenk calls putting a computer in every classroom like putting an electric power plant in every home. Planned computer obsolescence reaps billions of dollars every year for programmers, manufacturers, marketers, and PR professionals.
To those who don’t have a vested interest in coming up with an instant solution to our educational challenges or selling a lot of computer equipment, computers in the classroom do not look like such a terrific idea.
“Perhaps the saddest occasion for me is to be taken to a computerized classroom and be shown children joyfully using computers,” Alan Kay, one of the legendary pioneers of personal computing, testified to Congress in 1995. They are happy, teachers are happy, the administrators are happy, and the parents are happy
.
Yet in most classrooms, on closer examination, Kay said, “The children are doing nothing interesting or growth-inducing at all.”
“I used to think that technology could help students,” Steve Jobs said in 1996. “I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But, I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. You’re not going to solve the problem by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. Lincoln did not have a Website at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Even Einstein Couldn’t Fix State Science Test Woes
To the editor:
As a science educator for thirty-one years, I couldn’t help but muse about the latest proficiency test results, especially in science. Only 25 out of 97 school districts listed passed the fourth-grade science proficiency test, and only 9 of the 97 districts passed the sixth-grade science proficiency test. All seven districts with a 26–27 rating failed the sixth-grade science proficiency test.
I think that the inexorable quagmire created by the Ohio State Board of Education-Teacher Certification Division might have much to do with this. Most elementary teachers with K–8 certification do not have a solid background in science. Most of these teachers had only one or two classes in science. This reflects that just 3 percent of those who are teaching in grades 1–4 and whose duties include teaching science actually majored or minored in science or science education at the undergraduate level. The figure is 30 percent for teachers in grades 5–8.
The Diary of a Mad Public School Teacher Page 4