The easiest way for a high school to raise its test scores is to transfer low-scoring students to an alternative school that reports scores separately. These alternative schools sprang up when California started ranking schools by student performance on the state exam. A new state law will require that test scores of alternative students be counted in the original school’s Academic Performance Index ranking, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The law won’t go into effect for four years.
In addition, dropout rates rates for eighth- and ninth-graders will be factored into API.
The state’s new data system should be able to track individual students, in theory. These systems usually have huge problems in the early years.
Nearly 15 percent of California’s high school students attend an alternative school. Sometimes these are so small that scores don’t have to be reported. When performance is tracked, it tends to be very poor. If schools are held responsible for all their students’ performance, I predict they’ll bring the alternative programs back into the school for closer monitoring.
Maybe “alternative school” means something different in California. In Texas, or at least in Houston, it’s where they send the kids who present a danger to the “normal” students. You know, the ones who bring knives and guns to school, or threaten to rob/rape/assault their classmates.
Well, okay, and sometimes the pregnant students and those who would be better suited with “life skills” classes.
Schools for bad kids used to be “continuation” schools. I think they’re now “alternative” too, but the huge growth has been in separate programs for kids “at risk” of dropping out; some have behavior issues too, but they don’t have to be bad kids as long as they’re bad students.
On my only cop ride along, with the truancy patrol, we picked up a boy ambling along at 10:30 am. The police officer and I were startled when the boy said he’d been expelled from continuation school. He’d been assigned to a regular high school; it wasn’t clear the school, which is gigantic, knew he was supposed to be attending.
Why should scores include students who aren’t attending that school?
Perhaps schools should require private school students in their district to take the tests and include *their* scores, too.
Why should scores include students who aren’t attending that school?
Because otherwise schools can game the system by throwing out students whose only offense is that they would score poorly on the standardized tests and bring down the school’s average. The point of NCLB is to find the low achievers and bring them up to grade level, not to find the low achievers and toss them over to some other school.
Well, charter schools do this all the time, kicking kids that are dangerous out and back into public schools. The brand new Harmony charter in my town, open only six weeks, has already kicked out a couple students. Requiring public schools to include those students who cannot be part of the student body is definitely a blow against them that should not be weighed that way.
“Because otherwise schools can game the system by throwing out students whose only offense is that they would score poorly on the standardized tests and bring down the school’s average.”
Whoa. No kidding.
Now, go beyond the obvious, shall we? As in, I knew your reason. It’s the reason in Joanne’s post. Anyone with an IQ struggling out of the double digits would know that.
So answer the question as if you had to really give a reason, rather than recite a platitude. I know this is hard to believe, but some people know the platitudes and find them wanting.
sadly, one likely goes from platitude to reason by removing the word “can” from Cardinal Fang’s answer.
Mollo, charters can and do remove students … as do district schools: I presided over an expulsion hearing tonight. We found a way to keep the student in school and on track to graduation and college — with lesson learned.
What a horrible effect that would be on a student’s self-esteem to be sent to the “alternative school” because he wasn’t making the grade. You would end up with a school of students that feel less than others–major inferiority complex. That is not a school that I would want to teach in…how ’bout you? I would never allow my child or other children to be sent there due to them not meeting the mark on a standardized test.
I’m sorry. I don’t get your point, Cal. You seem to be saying that we ought to be testing students in public school and imposing penalties on schools if student scores aren’t going up enough, and also that it’s fine if schools achieve this improvement merely by removing the lowest scorers, without improving instruction in any way. But that doesn’t make sense, so there’s clearly something I’m missing. Perhaps you’re against the testing in the first place?
Fang, In the first place, NCLB is unrealistic in that there are a few kids that are never going to come up to grade level. For that matter, there are physically fit adults that are never going to learn to dress themselves or get out of diapers, but schools have the additional problem of kids that might be able to learn but certainly don’t want to.
Those kids might be turned around with parental support + great teaching and discipline, but sometimes the only parental support in evidence is a threat to sue if the school tries to supply the discipline that is obviously lacking at home. If you try to keep them in a regular classroom, they don’t learn anything, and the teacher doesn’t get much chance to teach the rest of the class.
So, kicking them out of school so they don’t lower the scores sucks. Keeping them in school sucks worse. The problem isn’t that the schools should be keeping them, it’s that we’ve so twisted up the laws and policies concerning public education that, “You’re wasting your own time, the teacher’s time, and the rest of the class’s chance at an education” isn’t a sufficient reason to kick the brats out of the system entirely.
Of course, it is hard to tell if that’s the case with all the kids transferred to “alternative” schools, or if they’re just hiding the ones they failed to teach…
I’m not talking about forcing schools to keep teaching the arsonists. I’m not arguing against special placement, or even expulsion, for some students. I’m arguing against “hiding the ones they failed to teach.” If 15% of students are in alternative placements, that looks to me like the schools are hiding the students they failed to teach.
A school can always raise average scores by throwing out the lowest scorers. We don’t want schools to look over at Luis who is still learning English, or Anna who has moved a lot and missed out on some math instruction, and say “That kid is going to bring down our scores this year. Throw the kid out!” Every public school has some able and some less able students. Educating the above-average students and throwing everyone else out is not the mission of a public school.
“I’m not talking about forcing schools to keep teaching the arsonists. I’m not arguing against special placement, or even expulsion, for some students. I’m arguing against “hiding the ones they failed to teach.””
There’s no distinction between them in the scores, though. The school will be forced to keep the arsonist scores as well as the expelled student.
I very much doubt that any school is punting a perfectly ordinary kid with low test scores. More likely, it’s making a difference in borderline cases.
One thing that will happen more and more, I think, is what is happening in LA. The suburbs will become ever more demanding about creating districts with no poor kids.
There are valid reasons for creating alternative programs for students who’ve done poorly in school. The problem I see is that California schools made their alternative programs into separate “schools” — often located in a trailer in the large school’s parking lot — only when the state started to rank schools by test scores.
Typically, students who endanger others are sent to continuation schools or put on independent study. The newly created alternative schools (”opportunity schools” is the local euphemism) are designed for students at risk of dropping out because of poor performance and/or truancy, not for violent students. Every public high school in San Jose Unified has created its own “opportunity school” that reports scores separately, if it has enough students to meet the threshold for reporting.
Downtown College Prep, the charter school I wrote about in “Our School,” welcomes students who want to escape “opportunity schools” or other alternative placements and also takes students who’ve been expelled from their old high school. DCP students are not transferred out for poor performance unless they fail the same grade two years in a row. All California charters (and charters in most states) must take all applicants, if there’s space. If the school has too many applicants, it must use a lottery to decide who gets in.
Chris: Exactly. The public school would use an alternative school or some other program to help the kid while a charter school just kicks them out totally. That is why I think the law is bad and cannot be applied evenly across the private and public school systems.
Fang: I’ve seen an actual arsonist that the law apparently did not allow the school to kick out because he had been diagnosed with various mental and physical handicaps… And (although I’ve never been in one), it sounds like there are neighborhoods where it isn’t 15% but over 50% of the kids that really don’t belong in any school - not unless it’s a boarding school that removes them from their home environments and supervises them so closely that they can’t keep discouraging each other from demonstrating any academic ability. Yes, it would be nice if the schools could do something for these kids, but the present situation is that not only do typical public schools fail to help them, but in leaving them in the classroom they ensure that no one else gets an education either.
It’s all about the accounting. Public schools are doing the exact same thing that Enron did when it created off-balance-sheet entities for hiding losses.
One wonders if there will be an equivalent to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) for reporting test scores…
Joanne, Thank you for bringing this important topic to light. The practice of moving students whose only crime is they may bring down the overall test scores at a school is widespread, and disgraceful. It doesn’t just involve moving them to different schools. In our state which uses high school exit exams in key subjects, districts pushed to introduce new courses into the curriculum ostensibly to prepare at-risk students for the tested courses. In practice they became were new versions of the old tracking practice, diverting the students the system has failed most out of any hope of attending college, or in some cases, for even completing high school.
Not to be too negative, but you people are living in a fantasy world if you think that standardized testing is actually going to improve anything in education.
Think I’m wrong?
Then show me one study, one research paper, one country’s educational experience that demonstrates how standardized testing was used to improve the performance of students and teachers alike.
Guess what?
You won’t be able to find one. There aren’t any. So, you are in essence arguing for a system of accountability which is itself unaccountable. In this case, unaccountable to facts, research or reality.
Here’s something all of you “heavy thinkers” about education should know by now: “grade level” is a term derived from norm referenced exams and includes all students between the 30th and 70th percentile who took that instrument. The exam was created precisely to spread students out along a normal curve. That is, psychometricians choose each question based on the number of kids who get it right versus the number who get it wrong.
I hope this isn’t too much of a leap but what that means is that it is statistically impossible for every student to fall between 30% and 70% on a norm referenced exam, and thus, not we, not China, not anyone will ever be able to get “all” students to grade level at the same time on the same test.
I hope this doesn’t burst your altruistic bubble about how much your advocacy for standardized testing is really making a difference in the lives of children.
Do you even ever talk to them?
I suggest Karin Chenoweth’s book, “It’s Being Done,” for examples of schools that have used standardized test scores to improve instruction and achievement.
Students who take a standardized test today are compared to students who took the test at some point in the past. Tests are “renormed” infrequently. It is possible for all 2007 students to perform above the 30th percentile set by students in the past.