Joanne Jacobs

Howdy, folks! Hope y’all had a great Mother’s Day! The vice president of ACT has a few words of wisdom for you moms out there with middle-school age kids but no college plans.

In Dade and Broward counties (FL), FCAT writing test scores improved, while the results for the state overall look similar to last year. Here’s a link to sample writing items of the type that 10th-graders are required to complete (although the score counts only towards the school’s grade, and is not high-stakes for the students). The multiple-choice items seem…pretty simple. Are some 10th-graders really still missing basic questions on capitalization and punctuation?

A South Carolina senator wants to scrap the PACT and get more education experts involved in a new test.

You’d think higher test scores would be cause for unqualified celebration. In New Orleans, it’s never that simple. Some schools taken over by the state are showing improvement, which some interpret to mean that now is not the time for Governor Jindal’s voucher plan.

The Tennessean has a three-part series on the topic of saving Nashville’s public schools. Part One describes a system where good numbers (graduation rates, test scores, total enrollment) have decreased and bad numbers (percent of students requiring free lunches) have increased. Part Two describes the flight to the suburbs, and Part Three will contain…answers? Suggestions? Some hope that all is not lost?

I’m all for boosting morale. But does this really help students do a better job of handling the tests?

A journalistic investigation team has concluded that grade inflation and “social promotion” is rampant in Arizona middle schools. Their indicators? That more students failed the AIMS reading and math tests than did their reading and math classes. On the one hand, there’s no reason to expect the state exams to do more than rank students appropriately based on their underlying ability, and for those test scores to correlate with passage rates (meaning the tests and class grades are ranking students similarly). On the other hand,

At Naylor Middle School, for example, about 9 percent of eighth-graders failed English courses last year. Meanwhile, 59 percent failed the AIMS reading test and 40 percent failed the writing component.

That’s a pretty big difference. Something’s not matching up here. Tests are only a snapshot of how a student performs in a single day, and perhaps students are more motivated to do well in class than on the AIM. The article also mentions that perhaps grades are a better indicator of ability because teachers can factor in, “productivity, attention, effort and ability to understand the subject matter.” But those are pretty subjective measures with a lot of inherent error - much more, in fact, than you would expect from multiple-choice items - and even the most rabid testing critic would not be willing to argue that a system placing heavy weight on such intangibles is “fair.” And some would consider a high grade that goes to a student who can’t do math on the AIMs but who is very “productive” to be, well, grade inflation. This article is probably going to make a lot of people mad. I hope it also makes them think.