From: "GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>
Date: Thu Mar 15, 2007 11:28:47 AM US/Pacific
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>, <LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [LiteracyForAll] zero
Reply-To: LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com
Here are a few words titled "The Zero Chance of 100% Success" which is
a slight paraphrase of what Bob Linn told a joint Senate-House hearing
about the odds of getting 100% of the kids proficient. Anyone who
wants a formatted version can find it at
www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey.
Jerry
---------------------
THE ZERO PERCENT CHANCE OF 100 PERCENT SUCCESS
“There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent
target,” said Bob Linn at the March 13 joint House-Senate hearing on
the No Child Left Behind law. The Washington Post identified Bob as
the co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards
and Student Testing at UCLA and the University of Colorado. He had
actually shown the impossibility of getting 100% of students to be
proficient years ago by using wildly optimistic assumptions, to
project 100% proficiency in12th grade mathematics166 years from now.
The article did not say that Bob is the most respected living
psychometrician, a former president of both the American Educational
Research Association and the National Council on Measurement in
Education. But that is true. He’s perceived as fair and objective.
I can’t imagine anyone accusing him of grinding an ax. I’ve known him
since 1967 and the only negative thing I have heard in those years is
that when he gives a speech he speaks too slow [I KNOW IT SHUD BE
SLOWLY BUT I THINK SLOW BRINGS IT TO A BETTER HALT]. In any case,
those legislators damn well ought to have been listening closely.
“But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant,” Bob
went on, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic
standard. They don’t want to be accused of leaving some children
behind.” Indeed, US Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon actually
said “We need to stay the course. The mission is doable, and we don’t
need to back off that right now.” The Post article did not say if the
audience groaned as Simon intoned these painful Iraq war slogans. I
wonder if he also said “We can’t cut and run.”
What Bob didn’t say is that behind that rhetorically brilliant title
was a strategically brilliant plan to transfer huge sums of taxpayer
money to the private sector through vouchers and the takeover of
public schools by private corporations. Teddie Kennedy blocked the
vouchers but compromised by permitting them to be replaced by
Supplemental Educational Services. The SES deliver only a meager $2
billion of public funds each year.
“Are we going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence and say that
only 85 percent of men are created equal?” This lame analogy from
Lamar Alexander, mister-run-for-anything and currently a Senator from
Tennessee. Of course, African Americans can tell you a thing or two
about that, stemming from their 3/5 of a human reckoning in the
Constitution. (For that matter the phrase’ author, Thomas Jefferson,
rejected it in matters academic, setting up a plan for education in
Virginia whereby “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the
rubbish annually”). In any case equality was something we’re endowed
with by our creator, not something we attain by bubbling in answer
sheets properly.
The whole proficient-or-left-behind dichotomy is, of course, phony.
Achievement, reasonably defined, is a continuum, not part of an
either/or. If we set the standard for “proficient” as a score of 80,
would a student who scores 79 be “left behind?” To say so would be
absurd, but that’s how NCLB operates.
Moreover, the whole debate focuses on the wrong thing. From
Jefferson’s time through the 1940’s the schools’ function was civic.
Jefferson argued that all governments degenerate and to prevent this,
the people themselves needed to be educated. It is only in the
post-Sputnik years that the focus has shifted, mistakenly, from
education as necessary to preserve democracy test scores uber alles as
necessary to get a job and keep America competitive in the global
economy.
But test scores tell us little in the long run. A 1974 paper from the
American College Testing Program stated, “We conclude that academic
talent as measured by test scores, high school grades and college
grades is not related to significant adult accomplishment. Though a
certain level of academic talent may be necessary to complete medical
school, for example, the grades of medical students appear unrelated
to later success as physicians.”
Thus, high-stakes testing as represented in NCLB, Texas’ TAKS,
Virginia’s SOLs, Florida’s FCAT, etc., is demoralizing and corrupting
teachers and administrators by gun-barrel emphasis on something that
is, in the long haul, trivial. One can only hope that some day in the
future we will look back and ask “What were we thinking?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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