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9486 in the collection
Bracey: School test scores too often misused, abused
This is actually good news: A journalist having a serious conversation with Gerald Bracey.
by Fred Obee
For more than half a century, the American people have been told this nation's public schools are failing and our students are falling behind the rest of the world.
In the Cold War years, the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite launch spurred a new call for science and math education. In 1983, the "rising tide of mediocrity" in our schools was chronicled in a government report titled "A Nation at Risk."
"Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world," the report begins.
Most recently, President George W. Bush championed No Child Left Behind, which sought to improve the performance of primary and secondary schools by increasing standards for states, school districts and schools.
The problem, according to new Jefferson County resident Gerald Bracey, is that No Child Left Behind, "A Nation at Risk" and virtually every other political call for educational reform rest on the unstable foundation of unreliable and misleading standardized test scores.
"There is only one misperception, really," Bracey said, "and that is that standardized tests are scientific and objective and are adequate instruments to evaluate children, teachers, schools, districts, states and nations."
Bracey's opinions carry some weight in educational circles. He is currently an associate of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, a fellow at the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, and a fellow at the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He maintains a website, the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency, which he says is dedicated to debunking misinformation about public schools.
A native of Williamsburg, Va., Bracey attended the College of William and Mary and obtained a doctoral degree in psychology from Stanford University. After serving as a research psychologist in the Early Childhood Education Research Group at Educational Testing Service, Bracey became the associate director of the Institute for Child Study at Indiana University in Bloomington. He recently moved to Kala Point, south of Port Townsend, where he lives with his wife and mother-in-law.
Bracey doesn't claim all is fine inside American schools. Without question, some schools face serious problems. Dropping test scores may indeed indicate something is happening somewhere, but that somewhere might not be the classroom, Bracey says.
"There really is no way to evaluate education across nations in terms of 'better' or 'worse,'" Bracey said. "Schools are embedded in a larger culture and reflect that culture. About all you can do is look at what other countries do and decide if you can or want to adopt any of their programs and processes."
Bracey became well known among educators in 1990, when he responded to a Washington Post column by Richard Cohen titled "Johnny's Miserable SATs," which was commenting on what Cohen saw as the deplorable state of student achievement. Bracey challenged Cohen's assumptions about declining scores.
"I showed that if you took into account demographic changes in who was taking the SAT over the years, there was only a small decline in verbal scores and none at all in math," Bracey said. "Education Week [an education magazine] published that as 'SAT Scores: Miserable or Miraculous?'"
That started the ball rolling. Bracey collected more research and, using a snippet from the 1960 musical "Bye Bye Birdie," titled his next piece "Why Can't They Be Like We Were?"
Diane Ravitch, then assistant secretary of education, attacked Bracey and others in a Washington Post opinion column in November 1991. Her take on the statistics: "U.S. Schools: The Bad News is Right."
The escalating war of words sent Bracey back to the research, and he started digging into all the statistics gathered on public schools.
"I never intended to write a series, but more data arrived and I wrote a follow-up with a title like 'The true crisis in American education,'" Bracey said. The editors of the Phi Delta Kappan, a prominent education journal, changed the title to "The Second Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education." For the last 18 years, the annual Bracey report has been a prominent part of the national education debate. The 18th report appeared last October.
But two decades of railing against the misuse of statistics hasn't slowed the flood, according to Bracey.
"It's depressing," Bracey said with candor, slumping on his couch in his Kala Point home.
No Child Left Behind, according to Bracey, is the poster child for misused statistics and testing run amok.
"No research supports No Child Left Behind's contention that the way to improve schools is to test every child every year in grades 3 through 8 in reading and mathematics and to fail schools and districts that do not make the required - and wholly arbitrary - adequate yearly progress," Bracey said. "Indeed, research argues against the use of such high-stakes testing as an instrument of school reform. As researcher Donald Campbell noted many years ago, the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more the indicator and the users are likely to become corrupted." No Child Left Behind is all about high-stakes testing.
"No Child Left Behind depends solely on punishment," Bracey said. "As schools fail to make the arbitrary adequate yearly progress, the law imposes punitive, increasingly harsh sanctions. The law follows the grand tradition of 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.'
While standardized test scores can serve a purpose, most don't really get to the heart of what makes a student or a school successful.
"More important [to success] are the important personal qualities like creativity, perseverance and ambition," Bracey said. "Our obsession with testing has given us a powerful instrument for suppressing creativity. The skills for life which everyone keeps talking about are probably better learned in extracurricular activities than in the classroom, and tests don't begin to measure those."
While Bracey has compiled the Bracey report for 18 years, he now is beginning to change tactics. The Phi Delta Kappan, which has been the home for the report, is looking for shorter pieces. His report usually runs about 12,000 words, some 10 times longer than this article. So his research column continues only online at the Phi Delta Kappan, and a modified version of the report has been commissioned by the Colorado and Arizona state groups.
To keep the conversation going throughout the year, he is a contributor to the website The Huffington Post, where these days he's weighing in on the education policies of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama.
"So far you can't give Obama a grade because he sounds like an empty vessel repeating, uncritically, stuff that he has been told," Bracey said. For example, Obama said recently that eighth-graders in the United States had fallen to ninth place in math.
"It is true that they finished ninth in the most recent international comparison," Bracey said. "That means they finished ahead of 36 other nations. Perhaps more importantly, when this test was first given in 1995 they were 28th. They're falling up."
When he isn't roughing up the current administration on the Internet, Bracey is getting familiar with his new surroundings. Since settling in at Kala Point, he's become a volunteer at the Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center. One thing he misses about his Virginia home just outside Washington, D.C., are the great season tickets he had for the National Symphony. And before our cool spring gave way to warmer weather, he was still getting used to the chill in the air.
But, he likes his new home, he said. There is less traffic and the people are friendlier. And the way his work is going these days, he can live just about anywhere a computer can hook to the Internet. In his downstairs office, he plugs away, writing books and columns and riding herd on all who would misuse educational test scores.
Bracey says schools sometimes deserve praise and sometimes deserve blame, but generally they are doing a better job than they are given credit for.
"There are many things that affect test scores that are not under the control of the schools," Bracey said. "Prenatal care; prenatal ingestion of alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamines; family stress and violence; lack of health care; pollutants and neighborhood conditions all bring down scores and all have negative effects on poor families much more than on more affluent families."
The basic political premise since Sputnik - that American schools do a poor job - is woven throughout our culture, regardless of the truth of falsity of the claim. Bracey calls it the "schools suck bloc."
When test scores are low, Bracey says poverty is often the culprit, well ahead of teachers or curriculums or test scores.
"In the 'Progress in International Reading Literacy Study,' American kids in low poverty schools stomped the top-ranked Swedes," he said. "Even kids in schools with up to 50 percent of the students in poverty attained an average score that, had they constituted a nation, would have ranked fourth. Only American students attending schools with more than 75 percent poverty rates scored below the international average of the 35 participating countries."
But didn't Russia beat us into space because of low school standards?
The ultimate irony of Sputnik, Bracey notes, is that the United States had a satellite-capable rocket in the air more than a year before Russia's 1957 launch.
"It orbited nothing because of political and diplomatic decisions in the Eisenhower administration," Bracey said, "not because of lagging technology or failing schools."
Sidebar
Gerald Bracey's new book, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality, is now available through his publisher, Educational Research Service. Here's how the publisher describes the book:
Are America's schools broken? Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality seeks to address misconceptions about America's schools by taking on the credo "what can be measured matters."
To the contrary, Dr. Bracey makes a persuasive case that much of what matters cannot be assessed on a multiple-choice test. The challenge for educators is to deal effectively with an incomplete accountability system - while creating a broader understanding of successful schools and teachers. School leaders must work to define, maintain and increase essential skills that may not be measured in today's accountability plans.
Those who work in America's schools will find Dr. Bracey's work uplifting and convincing. Those who seek the truth about our schools will develop a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted reality, rejecting a simplistic view of school success. Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality is an excellent book study for school leaders and educational teams working to increase true student achievement and dispel the misinformation about schools so often disseminated as truth.
Price: $30
Educational Research Service
— Fred Obee
The Leader
2009-07-22
http://www.ptleader.com/main.asp?SectionID=36&SubSectionID=55&ArticleID=24743&TM=76376.02
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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