WHY DON’T THEY LISTEN?

In December of 2009 the National Center for Child Poverty reported that fourteen million children in America lived in poverty. Fourteen million constitute nineteen percent of all American children. What constitutes poverty? The U.S. government defines poverty as a family of four living on $22,050.00 or less per year. Low income is defined as $44,000.00 for a family of four, 41% of American children live in low income families. 83% of children, whose parents have less than a high school education, live in poverty.

A higher percentage of minority children live in poverty and low income families than do white children. 60% of African-American children, 60% of Latino children, 57% of American Indian children live in low income families. Eleven million white children live in low income families.

The N.C.F.C.P. concluded, “Low income families impede a child’s cognitive development and their ability to learn”. Children of low income families “Often have behavioral, social, and emotional problems”.

This leads one to speculate why President Obama wants to evaluate teachers on the basis of standardized test scores. We know that low income and poverty level children are concentrated in “poverty schools” all over the United States. Evaluating teachers in these poverty schools on the basis of standardizes test scores is absurd!

The following is an article that Harriet Perl and I wrote on the subject of test scores and poverty in November 2002.

DON’T BLAME TEACHERS FOR THE RAVEGES OF POVERTY
Standardized testing has spun out of control. Large numbers of children are not prepared to take these tests due to their poverty stricken backgrounds and limited English language skills.

“Poor children are much more likely (than middle class children) to suffer developmental delay or damage”, says Ruby Payne in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Policy Analysis for California Education agrees. In 1999 it reported, “Poor children are two or three years behind their more affluent peers on several measures long before their first year of school”. In 2000, poverty was defined by Julian Palmer at Columbia University as a family of four earning $17,524.00 a year, ($22,050.00 in 2009).

According to 1998 figures from Columbia, the United States leads the industrialized world in child poverty. Twenty-five percent of children under 18 and 33% of Latino children live in poverty, and EdSource reports that 42% of California’s 6.4 million students are Latino. “Well-off white kids continue to outperform their disadvantaged or minority peers, often by a sizable margin”, says a January 2002 article in U.S. News and World Report.

California’s Star program test scores reveal this sad reality and little else. Scores reflect almost perfectly the socioeconomic status of the children who are tested. Despite this knowledge, teachers are being pushed to their limit to raise test scores. It has become the political and administrative mantra in California: Teachers, raise those test scores!
We are given no assistance to help the 40 to 45 percent of our children whose families are low income or are living below the poverty line. In California last year, we tested 4.5 million kids in grades 2 through 11. Their test results were published in every newspaper in the state. The state then used the Academic Performance Index (API) to rank every school from the bottom 10 percent to the top 10 percent. Guess who was at the top and who was at the bottom.
Two years ago, CTA had the API scores analyzed. We were shocked to find that in the bottom 10 percent of the API schools, 86% of the students were poor while in the top 10% of schools only 7% came from impoverished backgrounds. In the bottom 10% of schools, 46% of the students were English language learners whereas in the top 10%, only 2.6% had to over come language difficulties.
In April 2001, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 60% of American’s fourth-graders from poverty families read “below basic” on its fourth grade reading test. Simply put, they can’t read. Again, there’s no special help for an identified group of children who aren’t making it despite the best efforts of their under funded schools and over worked teachers.
Now let’s take a look at the reality of testing and what it is doing to our schools.
The SAT-9 test, the major component of the STAR test, is a norm-referenced test. That means no matter how the 4.5 million kids score, there will be a top 50% and the bottom 50%. Half the kids and half the teachers lose no matter what! Absurdly, this test is not aligned with some of the more than 400 academic standards. Experts on testing tell me that setting 30 academic standards would be good, but 400 is a joke. One referred to them as California’s “wish list” of academic standards.

The test is not aligned to what we do in the classroom. That’s bad enough, but then we make 25% of the kids take a test in a language they don’t understand, English, and people are appalled that these kids score poorly. We make another 10% of students—those with learning disabilities—take the test with no accommodations. That’s 35% of the kids taking the test who are virtually assured they will not do well. Guess who is going to be in the bottom 50% of test scores.
A series of news articles by Sarah Tully Tapia, Keith Sharon and Ronald Campbell in the Orange County Register, citing research by Richard Hill, David Rogosa and others, reported that API scores have a 20 point margin of error. Despite this, schools have been put of the list of underperforming schools on the basis of one point. You certainly wouldn’t trust an opinion poll with a margin of error of 20 points. Why would you drive an entire educational system on the basis of a test with such a huge margin of error?
The reporters also wrote “Students, who traditionally score lower, African American and special education students are excluded (from the API results at their school) at a higher rate than white and Asian students”. James Fleming, superintendent of Capistrano Unified School district, excluded 1259 of the districts 3,201 special education students from his district’s API scores.
One year a school in San Bernardino county raised its test scores by 102 points and won bonus awards. The next year its scores dropped by 105 points. This is not uncommon.
As the Public Policy Institute of California revealed in 2000, “Much of the variation in (STAR) test scores among urban, suburban, and rural schools that appear in raw data can be accounted for by the variation in students’ socioeconomic status and school resources”. One of the major problems in California and the U.S. is that the perception of the public schools is based on these tests. A strong case can be made that these STAR Test results are totally invalid, yet they are driving public education in California. Despite the fact that 50% of all students will always score in the bottom half of test takers, teachers are then threatened with repercussions if they don’t raise the test scores when it is virtually impossible to do so. In the testing system, the rule is if someone goes up, someone must go down. We already know who will be at the bottom.
We must stop holding teachers accountable for these bogus test results. We must stop demanding that teachers raise scores on these unreliable tests. We must stop rating teachers on the students test scores when we know in advance what the test scores will be no matter who the teachers are!”