May 12, 2006

big news in the world of standards-based testing

A California jurist has declared that 47,000 California students can graduate this year without passing the state's exit exam. (Washington State, for my unfamiliar readers, has its own version, the WASL--and similar lawsuits may be in the works.)
Morrison & Foerster filed a suit in February on behalf of 10 students. The suit claimed that the test was unfair, particularly to English learners and poor students who were more likely to have unqualified teachers and supplies necessary to learn the material on the test.

The suit also asserts $20 million in state money aimed at tutoring for students who failed the test was unfairly distributed. According to the complaint, 166 districts with failing students received none of the money.

Judge Freedman called this argument the most significant.

"Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their claim that the State's arbitrary distribution of the $20 million allocated for remediation purposes constitutes an additional violation of the equal protection clause."
This is just the beginning, I'm sure.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's all well and good, but the huge assumption that underlies all of that is the same one that underlies all the public discourse on education (and, in my opinion, makes it utterly irrelevant): the assumption that education is successful or not based solely on how well information is pushed (i.e., were there many hours of instruction? were the instructors "qualified"? were the facilities well-equipped? was much money thrown at the educational process?) and not at all on how much the students pulled (i.e., did the students show motivation and initiative? did the students try to perform despite their circumstances? are the students independently curious?).

Everybody loves inspiring stories of individual students who, by their own initiative, overcome circumstances to perform beyond expectations. (For instance, like the story told in Stand and Deliver.) But when it comes to public educational policy, we are all about using circumstances as an excuse, and we only perpetuate the disparity by doggedly clinging to the myth that poor kids, minority kids, and immigrant kids are somehow incapable of competing with rich kids, white kids, and kids whose families have been here longer. I think people like the plaintiffs in this case have been so indoctrinated by our cultural ideas about academic success that they start to believe for themselves that they simply cannot do as well as their economically advantaged peers.

But that's b.s. There are plenty of kids who are recent immigrants to the United States, who are learning English as a second language, and who are surpassing their "native" peers. Just a couple weeks ago I sat at a luncheon hosted by one of the local bar associations where scholarships were granted to students who wrote essays on the doctrine of separation of powers and all three winners were non-white children of recent immigrants (all from different ethnic backgrounds even). Why did those kids win? Because they choose to exercise their innate, independent curiosity and pull the learning, instead of waiting and relying on the educational establishment to push it on them.

There is not a reason in the world why a poor kid who is learning English as a second language can't succeed in school or pass the California High School Exit Exam — unless that kid believes that passing the exam is about one's level of integration into the economic and cultural "norms" and not about one's individual ability to work hard at something.

MT said...

"Why did those kids win?"

Perhaps because more children of immigrants are likely to be interested and assume something admirable about the government of the United States, and because fewer of them will receive much exposure from peers telling them it's uncool. If the essay were on reality TV or the Web or cell phones, you might see a different demography among the winners. How many boys would you get if the topic were the separation of powers between Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen?

Anonymous said...

Exactly. So why do we collectively buy the rationale that kids need money thrown at them in the form of school funding before they'll be able to compete intellectually?