MCAS+Testing+and+Tracking+Students

= MCAS Testing and Tracking Students =

SITE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
 * 1) How might your experience at UMass be one of Testing and Tracking? Are you, as a student, in a particular track?
 * 2) If tracking could be done by choice which track would you choose for yourself?
 * 3) What are some examples of tracking done by student choice?
 * 4) How does being tracked in high school impact opportunities after high school graduation?
 * 5) What examples of testing and tracking in classrooms do you recall in elementary and high school?
 * 6) Are there opportunities to change tracks or are students confined to particular tracks?
 * 7) From your own experiences in school, were students in particular tracks isolated from or included in the classroom?

For a perspective on testing, see [|Scientifically Tested Tests] by Susan Engel, the director of the writing program at Williams College.

__//The Teaching Gap//__
Much of the current discussion about education reform focuses on the learning or achievement gaps facing students. Much less attention is paid to another gap-the focus of a book entitled **//The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas From the World’s Teachers for Improving Education//**, James Stigler and James Herbert (The Free Press, 1999).

Using data collected from an international video study of teaching practices, Stigler and Herbert compared 8th grade math teachers in Japan, Germany and the United States. **In a Japanese classroom**, “**a great deal of time is spent solving one challenging problem. And in general you would see the students doing much of the mathematical work. In the United States you would typically see many problems of the same type being practiced in one session. The teacher does most of the math work, demonstrating procedures that the students then practice**.”

The authors of //The Teaching Gap// noted that **American students “spend most of their time acquiring isolated skills through repeated practice. . . . Students in Japanese classrooms spend as much time solving challenging problems and discussing mathematical concepts as they do practicing skills**.”

Also, noted Stigler and Herbert, “**in the German and U. S. lessons, students participated mostly by giving brief responses to the teacher’s specific questions. Although the level of mathematics was higher in Germany, in both countries, the teacher did most of the mathematical work. In Japan, the reverse seemed to be true. The typical Japanese lesson invited students to do more of the mathematical work**.”

The Big Test: A Secret History of American Meritocracy

 * Useful background on the history of standardized testing in the United States can be found in // The Big Test: A Secret History of the American Meritocracy //, Nicholas Lemann (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000).** //Here are some notes from the book://

o ** The American meritocracy **, The Big Test, pp. ** 344-45 ** The American meritocracy was founded on a linked chain of presumptions, which people are not familiar with today because they weren’t stated openly at the start **.** Over time, the American meritocracy has evolved into a more general way of distributing opportunity to millions of people, fitting them into places in a highly tracked university system that leads to jobs and professions. And its assumed purpose has changed from being a way to obtain highly capable and well-trained public officials to a way of determining fairly who gets America’s material rewards.
 * 1) The system’s main task should be to select a small number of people to form a new elite.
 * 2) The means of selection should be intelligence tests, as a proxy for superior academic talent.
 * 3) The purpose for which these students are being selected is to enter into the modern version of what Thomas Jefferson called “the offices of government”-that is, administrative and scholarly service to a modern bureaucratic state.

o ** Schools and Schooling **, The Big Test, pp. ** 348 ** The present meritocracy was devised by educator-planners who couldn’t imagine any disadvantage to setting up school as the arena for determining individual destinies. . . . Their goal was to construct a competitive race that would begin in elementary school and be substantially over by the time one graduated from college or professional school. Then the main problem becomes obvious: in the bad bottom tier of public schools, the ones where students don’t even learn to read, we don’t come anywhere near to providing equal educational opportunity.
 * 1) Thus the question, “Who should go to college?” translates itself into the more compelling question “Who is going to manage the society?” (John Gardner)
 * 2) Those who think of American life as a great race should think of the race as beginning, not ending, when school has been completed. The purpose of schools should be to expand opportunity, not to determine results.

o ** Proposals for Change **, The Big Test, pp. ** 348 ** To get more people through college, we shall have to establish greater national authority over education.
 * 1) High schools should prepare their students for college by teaching them a nationally agreed-upon curriculum.
 * 2) Tests for admission to college should be on mastery of this curriculum, not the SAT or some dreamed-of better, fairer alternative test of innate abilities.
 * 3) Test-prep should consist of mastering the high-school curriculum, not learning tricks to outwit multiple-choice aptitude tests.