The thing about McCain that I love is how virulently the "conservative" wing of the Republican party hates him.
The extreme right has held too much sway over the GOP for too long, just as the extreme left has had too much influence over Democratic policy. The extreme polarization has given us elections where we have to choose between extremes, with nobody representing the moderate, centrist values held by a majority of Americans.
John McCain might lose the votes of the extreme conservatives, but he also has a chance of pulling a lot of independents and even moderate Democrats (like me), who may feel uncomfortable with some of the far left leanings of the eventual nominee (if it's Obama, forget about it... I'm voting for Obama!).
This puts pressure on the Democrats to compete for those votes by fielding less polarizing, less far-left leaning candidates and positions. Heck, they might even be able to snag some moderate Republican votes that aren't satisfied with the radical-right-wing candidates that have been fielded.
McCain is good for the country because it's pressure away from the extremes and back toward the center for both parties. I don't know if I'd vote for Hillary over McCain if she's the nominee. That's something for the rest of my party to think about next time around, because I know I'm not alone.
- "'Well, I didn't vote for you.' 'You don't vote for kings!'"
Monday, February 11, 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
"They broke the law. They're criminals."
An interesting comment that comes up often when debating the issues surrounding undocumented aliens (or "illegal immigrants," if you prefer) is something to the effect of "they broke the law" or "these criminals." A lot of the time it's used in defense of plans that require them to "wait in line" for citizenship or legal residency behind their countrymen (or women) who "played by the rules" or "did it the right way."
I'm disappointed that this comment is usually left unchallenged. Here's what I would say if that came up in a debate I was having:
"Interesting that you seem to put so much weight on them having broken the law. Let me ask you: have you ever driven faster than the posted speed limit? Have you ever crossed the street in the middle of the block or against the red? Have you ever failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign? You broke the law. You are a criminal. Do I have the right to demand that you be deported from this country? If you get caught, sure, there needs to be a penalty, but a penalty that is proportional to the damage or danger your behavior posed to the public. The mere fact that a law was broken is not sufficient reason to defend deportation.
"That's all assuming that the law is just. I don't think it is. In the 1850's, it was illegal for a slave to cross the "border" between a slave state and a free state without permission. That slave couldn't claim to be free just because they'd made it to a place where slavery was illegal. The fugitive slave law said that that person would be returned to a state of slavery if they were caught pursuing a better life north of the border. Anyone who helped them escape knowingly was also considered a criminal, even though slavery was illegal in their state.
"Does this law sound familiar? We're trying to pass those laws now! Would you label a fugitive slave a "criminal" and do everything in your power to return them to slavery? Would you insist that they "wait in line" behind the other slaves who were "doing it the right way" and "following the rules" by pursuing the option that some masters held out to their slaves of allowing them to "buy" their own freedom by taking on extra work over the course of decades... only to leave their families and children behind because they were still property? Would you lambast those citizens of the free states who hired former slaves and provided housing for them as "part of the problem"? I hope that in this day and age, the answer to these rhetorical questions is obvious.
"Do you understand that the desperation that drives people to leave behind family and community and risk their lives to travel hundreds and thousands of miles and be treated like a fugitive is the same kind of desperation that drove slaves to flee to the freedom of the north? Do you understand that it is not the lowlife criminals of these poverty-stricken nations that try to make it to the USA, but the most motivated, disciplined, hard-working and inspired citizens?"
I doubt I'd actually be able to make that argument without being shouted down, but it's what I'd want to say. If a law is immoral, then persons of conscience have a moral obligation to fight against it and defy it. The laws that try to drive hard-working immigrants from our nation by treating them worse than we treat our pets and livestock are immoral, and I applaud those immigrants who put their lives on the line and endure the brand of "criminal" to work for a better life for their family. We need more citizens with this relentless drive to wrest a living from their own sweat, blood and tears.
- "A lousy hundred bucks? Is that all my blood and sweat is worth?"
I'm disappointed that this comment is usually left unchallenged. Here's what I would say if that came up in a debate I was having:
"Interesting that you seem to put so much weight on them having broken the law. Let me ask you: have you ever driven faster than the posted speed limit? Have you ever crossed the street in the middle of the block or against the red? Have you ever failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign? You broke the law. You are a criminal. Do I have the right to demand that you be deported from this country? If you get caught, sure, there needs to be a penalty, but a penalty that is proportional to the damage or danger your behavior posed to the public. The mere fact that a law was broken is not sufficient reason to defend deportation.
"That's all assuming that the law is just. I don't think it is. In the 1850's, it was illegal for a slave to cross the "border" between a slave state and a free state without permission. That slave couldn't claim to be free just because they'd made it to a place where slavery was illegal. The fugitive slave law said that that person would be returned to a state of slavery if they were caught pursuing a better life north of the border. Anyone who helped them escape knowingly was also considered a criminal, even though slavery was illegal in their state.
"Does this law sound familiar? We're trying to pass those laws now! Would you label a fugitive slave a "criminal" and do everything in your power to return them to slavery? Would you insist that they "wait in line" behind the other slaves who were "doing it the right way" and "following the rules" by pursuing the option that some masters held out to their slaves of allowing them to "buy" their own freedom by taking on extra work over the course of decades... only to leave their families and children behind because they were still property? Would you lambast those citizens of the free states who hired former slaves and provided housing for them as "part of the problem"? I hope that in this day and age, the answer to these rhetorical questions is obvious.
"Do you understand that the desperation that drives people to leave behind family and community and risk their lives to travel hundreds and thousands of miles and be treated like a fugitive is the same kind of desperation that drove slaves to flee to the freedom of the north? Do you understand that it is not the lowlife criminals of these poverty-stricken nations that try to make it to the USA, but the most motivated, disciplined, hard-working and inspired citizens?"
I doubt I'd actually be able to make that argument without being shouted down, but it's what I'd want to say. If a law is immoral, then persons of conscience have a moral obligation to fight against it and defy it. The laws that try to drive hard-working immigrants from our nation by treating them worse than we treat our pets and livestock are immoral, and I applaud those immigrants who put their lives on the line and endure the brand of "criminal" to work for a better life for their family. We need more citizens with this relentless drive to wrest a living from their own sweat, blood and tears.
- "A lousy hundred bucks? Is that all my blood and sweat is worth?"
Thursday, January 24, 2008
George Bush hates poor people like I hate leprechauns.
Remember when Kanye made that statement at an awards show about our President not liking black people? I have a different theory: George Bush doesn't believe in poor people. Whenever he gets a question at a press conference about the flailing economy, he responds by claiming that the economy is actually doing well and growing and how great things actually are.
At first, I thought he was just stupid. Now, I think he's just insulated. He doesn't know any poor (or even middle class) people. Their very existence is kind of theoretical to him, and his self-imposed isolation from all forms of media cuts him off from the stories and opinions of anyone he doesn't actually encounter in his day-to-day activities.
So when he makes these sweeping tax cuts that bankrupt programs intended to help the poor and instead puts the money in his rich friends pockets, of course everyone he thinks is worth paying attention to is telling him that the tax cuts are a roaring success. From their perspective, the economy is doing great! Then these writers-of-fiction called journalists come at him with a different story: people are hurting, getting laid off, losing their homes... who's he going to believe? The rather self-satisfied air with which he touts his avoidance of newspapers and television media (with the possible exception of Fox news, one assumes) is all the answer we need.
It's not surprising, then, that he's able to dismiss the plight of the poor so easily: they're not real! He would have the same reaction to someone complaining that cell phones mess up the TV reception in the aliens space-station on the moon.
To be fair, I think that Bush is suffering an extreme form of a condition that's pandemic to the halls of political power. Politics is isolating, and the ability to remember what's real and what's important is gradually diminished and replaced by what's politically expedient and achievable. "Seasoned" politicians are in constant danger of believing that political victories that mostly re-label things and create photo-ops are actually changing the quality of people's lives. Give me a candidate that's long on idealism and short on pragmatism. I'd rather support someone in a losing fight for a real solution than a winning fight for nicer deck chairs on the Titanic.
- "Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal."
At first, I thought he was just stupid. Now, I think he's just insulated. He doesn't know any poor (or even middle class) people. Their very existence is kind of theoretical to him, and his self-imposed isolation from all forms of media cuts him off from the stories and opinions of anyone he doesn't actually encounter in his day-to-day activities.
So when he makes these sweeping tax cuts that bankrupt programs intended to help the poor and instead puts the money in his rich friends pockets, of course everyone he thinks is worth paying attention to is telling him that the tax cuts are a roaring success. From their perspective, the economy is doing great! Then these writers-of-fiction called journalists come at him with a different story: people are hurting, getting laid off, losing their homes... who's he going to believe? The rather self-satisfied air with which he touts his avoidance of newspapers and television media (with the possible exception of Fox news, one assumes) is all the answer we need.
It's not surprising, then, that he's able to dismiss the plight of the poor so easily: they're not real! He would have the same reaction to someone complaining that cell phones mess up the TV reception in the aliens space-station on the moon.
To be fair, I think that Bush is suffering an extreme form of a condition that's pandemic to the halls of political power. Politics is isolating, and the ability to remember what's real and what's important is gradually diminished and replaced by what's politically expedient and achievable. "Seasoned" politicians are in constant danger of believing that political victories that mostly re-label things and create photo-ops are actually changing the quality of people's lives. Give me a candidate that's long on idealism and short on pragmatism. I'd rather support someone in a losing fight for a real solution than a winning fight for nicer deck chairs on the Titanic.
- "Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal."
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The Four Loves (not about standardized tests, Carla!)
Apparently, my 1,200 word, alphabetical breakdown of my take on political issues wasn't "touchy-feely" enough, even though it was a departure from my extended, multi-part, standardized testing rant. So, here's some thoughts about love for your New Year's reading (Very little of this is my original thought, it's a synthesis of really wise stuff I've heard or read (especially The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis) that makes sense to me based on my life experience).
In Greek there are four words for love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. It's interesting to look at the four of them and see how they help us understand what love is all about by seeing the ways that they are different.. but the same, somehow.
Storge could perhaps be translated as "affection." It's a love that is based largely on familiarity: a good example would be the love that young children have for their parents. You may have known a family where you cringe at every poor parenting decision the parents make, yet their kids still smile when they see them and run to them. They still cry for their mother when they need to be comforted, even if their mother isn't particularly comforting. A small child may recoil in fear from the friendliest stranger yet reach up to be held by the grumpy uncle that they see all the time. Think of a dog that is neglected and ill treated by its owner yet still runs to the door with tail wagging when they hear the key turning in the door. This is affection: it's not earned by being particularly loving or lovely, it's earned by merely being familiar.
The second greek word for love is philia. We're used to hearing it translated as "brotherly love" (like in Philadelphia), but love between brothers is probably more like storge. A better translation might be "friendship." It's a love that's built on common interests and common passions: you find someone else who knows all the words to Les Miserables and sings it in the car, you discover that your classmate spends his nights playing the same internet game as you, you catch someone reading your favorite book that nobody else seems to have even heard of. Philia finds people side-by-side in common pursuits rather than face-to-face. Those experiencing philia are not so much interested in each other primarily; it's that they're both interested in the same thing, and this binds them together.
The third is eros, the root word of "erotic," and this is the love that our culture seems to think is the only one that really counts. Eros has sometimes been defined as "lust" but "romantic love" is a better definition. Lust doesn't really want the other person; it wants a physical experience for which the other person is a necessary component. Eros really does want the other person, and not just sexually. It's not that eros takes lovers to the bed and then philia finds them laughing together later in a coffee shop. Eros is at work here, too. Eros is the love that lets you be happy doing anything, as long as the other person is with you. In this way it is very different from philia: where philia finds us side-by-side, eros finds us face-to-face, oblivious to the world around us.
In our culture with only one word for love, it is easy for us to confuse storge, philia, and eros as different stages in the same journey: we start with affection (storge), move to friendship (philia), and finally to the deepest love of romance (eros). A little thought, aided by our wider vocabulary from the Greek, exposes this as ridiculous. The love a young man has for his sweetheart is not the same as his love for his mother, only stronger. At the beginning of the courtship, one would expect that it's actually much weaker than his love for his mother. The fact that his storge for his mother is strong, however, doesn't mean that he in any way desires eros with her. To the contrary, the stronger the storge, the more repugnant the idea probably seems to him. Freud's Oedipal complex falls apart when one realizes that Freud is assuming that the father and the son both love their mother with eros, as if this were the only kind of love there was. Storge allows a son to love his mother without a tinge of jeaulousy toward his father; he'd be much more likely to be jealous of his siblings, which we do see happen all the time. It is, of course, possible for different types of loves to overlap, espiecially with philia. Eros is only stregthened if it's accompanied by philia, and storge and philia combine to make you love all your cousins, but especially the one who's also a die-hard Cubs fan, or to have a special affinity for the sibling who re-enacts commercials with you when you're supposed to be asleep.
So far I've only mentioned three Greek words for love. The fourth is agape, and it's the most difficult word to understand. It's a perfect, unconditional, all-giving love. Storge leads us to make breakfast in bed for our mom on mother's day, but it's agape that's required to sit up in bed with her all night as she wastes away from cancer and retches from chemotherapy. Philia may lead us to take a good friend out to a ball game, but it takes agape to let him have your kidney when he needs a transplant. Eros will inspire us to make fools of ourselves in by singing love songs to our beloved in public. Only agape, however, inspires us to forgive them and take them back when they confess to being unfaithful. Agape is a strange animal. It is, in some way, a deeper, truer love than the others.
Here's an analogy that may be helpful: think of a relationship as a car. You need an engine to drive a car anywhere, and the engine has to be pretty powerful since a car is big and has a lot of inertia. The problem is, an engine that powerful has a lot of inertia itself and isn't the easiest thing to get going. You need a smaller motor, the "starter" to get the engine going. Once the engine is going, the starter is done and you don't need it again until the engine is stopped and needs to be started again. Agape is like the engine of a car. It's strong and can drive a difficult relationship through rough patches, but it needs help getting started. That's what the other loves are for. Storge, philia and eros are like starters for the large engine of agape. They get the engine of agape going, and help start it up again when it's stalled. If you try to drive a car using only the starter engine, you find you can't get above 1 or 2 mph and you burn out the starter pretty quickly. It's not because the starter is bad, it's just not designed to drive the car.
In the same way, relationships that try to drive on pure storge, philia, or eros tend to be pleasant enough for a time but don't last when the road gets tough. Only if agape is engaged will these relationships get through the patches where there aren't the familiar meals and comforts of home that nurture storge; or the shared pleasures of books, music, sports or even gossip that are the breeding ground for philia; or the intimate, candlelit meals or romantic bed-and-breakfasts where eros finds its full strength.
So let the loves do their jobs in your relationships. Let storge, philia, and eros inspire you to love someone, but then don't be surprised when the emotion wanes and the hard work of agape is necessary. Agape requires us to sacrifice, work, and really give of ourselves for the sake of those we love. Storge, philia, and eros may be nouns, but agape is more like a verb: you don't just feel it, you have to decide to do it. Anyone who's ever taken a risk and chosen to give themselves to this kind of love knows that there's no guarantee that you won't be hurt, in fact, it's almost certain that you will be hurt at times. Anyone who's ever taken the risk, though, will tell you that without opening yourself up to pain, you lose the chance at really experiencing any joy, either. We've learned to negotiate our lives so that we avoid the possibility of pain, but we've ended up cutting ourselves off from joy, too. We were created to love and to be loved, and giving that up gives up what makes us human. Embrace your humanity! Love recklessly and generously. Be vulnerable, get hurt, forgive, and repeat. The joy you'll experience won't erase the hurt you experience along the way; rather, love takes that hurt and somehow uses it to create the joy that makes life worth living. Life is dangerous, so love dangerously.
- "Life is a suicide mission." (I cheated, this one's from a book.)
In Greek there are four words for love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. It's interesting to look at the four of them and see how they help us understand what love is all about by seeing the ways that they are different.. but the same, somehow.
Storge could perhaps be translated as "affection." It's a love that is based largely on familiarity: a good example would be the love that young children have for their parents. You may have known a family where you cringe at every poor parenting decision the parents make, yet their kids still smile when they see them and run to them. They still cry for their mother when they need to be comforted, even if their mother isn't particularly comforting. A small child may recoil in fear from the friendliest stranger yet reach up to be held by the grumpy uncle that they see all the time. Think of a dog that is neglected and ill treated by its owner yet still runs to the door with tail wagging when they hear the key turning in the door. This is affection: it's not earned by being particularly loving or lovely, it's earned by merely being familiar.
The second greek word for love is philia. We're used to hearing it translated as "brotherly love" (like in Philadelphia), but love between brothers is probably more like storge. A better translation might be "friendship." It's a love that's built on common interests and common passions: you find someone else who knows all the words to Les Miserables and sings it in the car, you discover that your classmate spends his nights playing the same internet game as you, you catch someone reading your favorite book that nobody else seems to have even heard of. Philia finds people side-by-side in common pursuits rather than face-to-face. Those experiencing philia are not so much interested in each other primarily; it's that they're both interested in the same thing, and this binds them together.
The third is eros, the root word of "erotic," and this is the love that our culture seems to think is the only one that really counts. Eros has sometimes been defined as "lust" but "romantic love" is a better definition. Lust doesn't really want the other person; it wants a physical experience for which the other person is a necessary component. Eros really does want the other person, and not just sexually. It's not that eros takes lovers to the bed and then philia finds them laughing together later in a coffee shop. Eros is at work here, too. Eros is the love that lets you be happy doing anything, as long as the other person is with you. In this way it is very different from philia: where philia finds us side-by-side, eros finds us face-to-face, oblivious to the world around us.
In our culture with only one word for love, it is easy for us to confuse storge, philia, and eros as different stages in the same journey: we start with affection (storge), move to friendship (philia), and finally to the deepest love of romance (eros). A little thought, aided by our wider vocabulary from the Greek, exposes this as ridiculous. The love a young man has for his sweetheart is not the same as his love for his mother, only stronger. At the beginning of the courtship, one would expect that it's actually much weaker than his love for his mother. The fact that his storge for his mother is strong, however, doesn't mean that he in any way desires eros with her. To the contrary, the stronger the storge, the more repugnant the idea probably seems to him. Freud's Oedipal complex falls apart when one realizes that Freud is assuming that the father and the son both love their mother with eros, as if this were the only kind of love there was. Storge allows a son to love his mother without a tinge of jeaulousy toward his father; he'd be much more likely to be jealous of his siblings, which we do see happen all the time. It is, of course, possible for different types of loves to overlap, espiecially with philia. Eros is only stregthened if it's accompanied by philia, and storge and philia combine to make you love all your cousins, but especially the one who's also a die-hard Cubs fan, or to have a special affinity for the sibling who re-enacts commercials with you when you're supposed to be asleep.
So far I've only mentioned three Greek words for love. The fourth is agape, and it's the most difficult word to understand. It's a perfect, unconditional, all-giving love. Storge leads us to make breakfast in bed for our mom on mother's day, but it's agape that's required to sit up in bed with her all night as she wastes away from cancer and retches from chemotherapy. Philia may lead us to take a good friend out to a ball game, but it takes agape to let him have your kidney when he needs a transplant. Eros will inspire us to make fools of ourselves in by singing love songs to our beloved in public. Only agape, however, inspires us to forgive them and take them back when they confess to being unfaithful. Agape is a strange animal. It is, in some way, a deeper, truer love than the others.
Here's an analogy that may be helpful: think of a relationship as a car. You need an engine to drive a car anywhere, and the engine has to be pretty powerful since a car is big and has a lot of inertia. The problem is, an engine that powerful has a lot of inertia itself and isn't the easiest thing to get going. You need a smaller motor, the "starter" to get the engine going. Once the engine is going, the starter is done and you don't need it again until the engine is stopped and needs to be started again. Agape is like the engine of a car. It's strong and can drive a difficult relationship through rough patches, but it needs help getting started. That's what the other loves are for. Storge, philia and eros are like starters for the large engine of agape. They get the engine of agape going, and help start it up again when it's stalled. If you try to drive a car using only the starter engine, you find you can't get above 1 or 2 mph and you burn out the starter pretty quickly. It's not because the starter is bad, it's just not designed to drive the car.
In the same way, relationships that try to drive on pure storge, philia, or eros tend to be pleasant enough for a time but don't last when the road gets tough. Only if agape is engaged will these relationships get through the patches where there aren't the familiar meals and comforts of home that nurture storge; or the shared pleasures of books, music, sports or even gossip that are the breeding ground for philia; or the intimate, candlelit meals or romantic bed-and-breakfasts where eros finds its full strength.
So let the loves do their jobs in your relationships. Let storge, philia, and eros inspire you to love someone, but then don't be surprised when the emotion wanes and the hard work of agape is necessary. Agape requires us to sacrifice, work, and really give of ourselves for the sake of those we love. Storge, philia, and eros may be nouns, but agape is more like a verb: you don't just feel it, you have to decide to do it. Anyone who's ever taken a risk and chosen to give themselves to this kind of love knows that there's no guarantee that you won't be hurt, in fact, it's almost certain that you will be hurt at times. Anyone who's ever taken the risk, though, will tell you that without opening yourself up to pain, you lose the chance at really experiencing any joy, either. We've learned to negotiate our lives so that we avoid the possibility of pain, but we've ended up cutting ourselves off from joy, too. We were created to love and to be loved, and giving that up gives up what makes us human. Embrace your humanity! Love recklessly and generously. Be vulnerable, get hurt, forgive, and repeat. The joy you'll experience won't erase the hurt you experience along the way; rather, love takes that hurt and somehow uses it to create the joy that makes life worth living. Life is dangerous, so love dangerously.
- "Life is a suicide mission." (I cheated, this one's from a book.)
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
How Standardized Testing is Killing American Education: Reason #5
6th in a series.
5) Testing shapes the curriculum. As schools are evaluated only on their performance on standardized tests, there is a nearly irresistible pressure to abandon any parts of the curriculum that will not be evaluated by those tests. If the material on the tests was representative of the most important areas of knowledge and proficiency, this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, it isn't.
Let's pretend that a math test has 100 questions, and you can rank them in order of difficulty. Assume that everyone is able to get the 40 easiest questions right, but for the next 60 questions, more and more students get them wrong as they get more difficult. Those first 40 questions didn't tell us anything about which students knew more than the others since everyone got them right. Therefore, those questions could be removed from the test, and the results would be the same.
It's cheaper to make and evaluate tests if we just eliminate those questions that aren't helpful in ranking students and schools. It also cuts down on the time necessary to take the tests, which seems like it would be a good thing for students and schools. There is a drawback to eliminating those questions, however. The questions that most students get right and are not particularly helpful in ranking students tend to be those that focus on the most basic, fundamental, useful, and necessary parts of a discipline, be it algebra, biology, literature or history. What happens, therefore, is that the tests are skewed toward the "fringes" of knowledge; they test the more esoteric, less helpful and necessary parts of a knowledge set more heavily than the basic and more useful parts. Remember when you asked you algebra teacher "when will I ever use this stuff in real life?" Guess what: there's a lot of algebra we use every day... and that's exactly the part that's been eliminated from the test.
What follows is that schools and teachers feel pressured to focus their instruction on areas that they know will be tested, which swings the focus away from the most important parts of the class to the edges. Students find themselves studying advanced topics without a solid grounding in the basics on which they rely, making it necessary for them to rely on algorithms, mnemonics and rote memorization without actual understanding of what the information they're memorizing actually means, why or how it works, and how it can be useful.
So that's reason #5: Students are being taught less basic and useful skills and information, instead being focused on obscure and specialized skill sets removed from the fundamentals of the discipline that give them meaning.
- "This is it. That moment they told us about in high school where one day, algebra would save our lives."
5) Testing shapes the curriculum. As schools are evaluated only on their performance on standardized tests, there is a nearly irresistible pressure to abandon any parts of the curriculum that will not be evaluated by those tests. If the material on the tests was representative of the most important areas of knowledge and proficiency, this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, it isn't.
Let's pretend that a math test has 100 questions, and you can rank them in order of difficulty. Assume that everyone is able to get the 40 easiest questions right, but for the next 60 questions, more and more students get them wrong as they get more difficult. Those first 40 questions didn't tell us anything about which students knew more than the others since everyone got them right. Therefore, those questions could be removed from the test, and the results would be the same.
It's cheaper to make and evaluate tests if we just eliminate those questions that aren't helpful in ranking students and schools. It also cuts down on the time necessary to take the tests, which seems like it would be a good thing for students and schools. There is a drawback to eliminating those questions, however. The questions that most students get right and are not particularly helpful in ranking students tend to be those that focus on the most basic, fundamental, useful, and necessary parts of a discipline, be it algebra, biology, literature or history. What happens, therefore, is that the tests are skewed toward the "fringes" of knowledge; they test the more esoteric, less helpful and necessary parts of a knowledge set more heavily than the basic and more useful parts. Remember when you asked you algebra teacher "when will I ever use this stuff in real life?" Guess what: there's a lot of algebra we use every day... and that's exactly the part that's been eliminated from the test.
What follows is that schools and teachers feel pressured to focus their instruction on areas that they know will be tested, which swings the focus away from the most important parts of the class to the edges. Students find themselves studying advanced topics without a solid grounding in the basics on which they rely, making it necessary for them to rely on algorithms, mnemonics and rote memorization without actual understanding of what the information they're memorizing actually means, why or how it works, and how it can be useful.
So that's reason #5: Students are being taught less basic and useful skills and information, instead being focused on obscure and specialized skill sets removed from the fundamentals of the discipline that give them meaning.
- "This is it. That moment they told us about in high school where one day, algebra would save our lives."
Thursday, December 13, 2007
I'm back... kinda... VOTE FOR ME!
I've been getting nagged from all sides (mostly in the form of merciless ridicule at the infrequency of my posts) to get back to the blog. So, here's a treat for all of you superfans... you know who you are. Take small sips, you don't want to burn your brain.
Lots of issues are back on "the public's" (i.e. the media's) lips these days, what with an election coming up and all. Pretend that I'm running for elected office and read my sound bites (okay, they’re too long to be sound bites. “ Sound snacks”, I guess) on the hot topics of the day (they're not all original ideas, but I'm going to go full-on politician mode and pretend that they're all mine!). Here they are, from A to Z:
A is for ABORTION: "From my perspective, it seems that this issue hinges on one question: Is an unborn fetus in fact a person, and therefore entitled to the same rights extended to every other person on earth, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or creed? If this is the question we are attempting to answer, let us tread very carefully, and be mindful of our nation's shameful history of answering this question "no" when it has been applied to Native Americans, Blacks, women, and others. History shows that this is not a question to be answered easily nor without a willingness to accept the harsh implications of either outcome."
B is for BARRY BONDS: "Did Barry Bonds use steroids? Probably. Should he have an asterisk next to his name in the record books? I don't think so... unless everybody else gets one. To pretend that every season, every player begins and ends the season under conditions identical to every other player since the beginning of baseball is ridiculous. Every era, every team, every ballpark has its quirks that make the experience of every player different. This isn't science; it's not a controlled experiment - it's entertainment! It's actually to the benefit of the public that baseball isn't exactly the same every single time... the fun wouldn't last very long. Barry Bonds played in an era of steroids, as the recent congressional report confirmed what everyone had long suspected. Barry was competing against teams with "enhanced" hitters, facing "enhanced" pitchers, and his experience was in this regard totally unlike anything Ruth, Aaron, Maris or Mays ever faced. Even without considering the issue of steroids, there are myriad reasons why every hitters case is different: The extensive use of middle relief and closers, the ever changing strike zone, new stadiums a mile above sea level, the wide variation of distances to the wall (and heights of the wall) from ballpark to ballpark, and more. If records can only be broken under the exact conditions under which they were set, no records could ever be broken. Was Barry wrong? Of course he was, and what's worse, he took part in a growing culture of steroid use that is spreading to college and high school athletes at an alarming rate. Barry had no excuse to abuse the position that his fame puts him in as a role model and add fuel to this growing public health crisis. Should he be in the record book, though? I think so. If Hitler and Stalin can be Time's Men of the Year, I see no reason that Bonds (or Rose, for that matter) should be kept out of the record books or the Hall of Fame. They were phenomenal ball players, who made phenomenal mistakes."
C is for CHINA: "It's unrealistic to expect China or any other fast-growing economy to take the environment or fair trade policies into account when the biggest example of a rich, successful nation is utterly unwilling to make any concessions on any front or even to acknowledge that the concerns of 90% of the world's population should in any way influence our energy policies. If we bite the bullet and adopt and enforce stricter environmental regulations, we can set the model that the rest of the world will follow."
D is for DARFUR: "If we're not afraid to go against the world and invade Iraq, and we're not afraid to take on up-and-coming nuclear states like Iran and North Korea, what are we afraid of in Darfur? Whose permission are we waiting for to go in and save innocent lives? The lack of a military response may be justifiable to many like me who are hesitant to believe that violence is ever a solution, and who never look to it to bring about progress, but only as a last-ditch resort to slow down wholesale slaughter with no end in sight. The lack of an aggressive diplomatic push with the full weight of our economic and political influence across the world, however, is totally inexcusable. How many people do we think we're saving with our "Save Darfur" T-shirts? Is the Janjaweed susceptible to political pressure expressed only through "Genocide Sucks" bumper stickers? What in the world are we waiting for?"
E is for EDUCATION: "Half a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education, schools in the deep south are largely integrated while the enlightened coasts are more segregated than ever. In the guise of innocuous sounding programs like 'neighborhood schools,' 'vouchers,' and the closure of 'under-enrolled' schools due to a dearth of school-age children (at least, of certain ethnicities) in urban school districts, schools in the big cities of our nation are becoming monochromatic. In San Francisco, the alleged capital of progressive political ideology, a complex school-choice system ensures parents with political clout that their children will not be stuck in "under-performing" schools, and the implications of this practice can be seen when taking a tour of the cities elementary schools and being able to categorize them at a glance as "black," "Asian," "Latino," or "white" schools, with the only concession to integration being a white minority at an "Asian" school, or a school integrated with black and Latino students from similar socio-economic backgrounds."
F is for FCC: "TV producers tell us that they're just supplying the product that people want. How do people know they want that? Why do TV shows need to advertise if that's what people want anyway? The reality is that tragically, we have learned to look to TV to tell us what normal, successful people are supposed to look like. 'Reality' TV purports to show us what real life looks like, and while adults with life experience know that the reality they show is pure fantasy, children are being taught to expect life to look a certain way. All that being said, we parents need to make some hard decisions. I would love it if my child could turn on the TV and I didn't have to worry about what they might see. Since I can't do that (and probably won't be able to anytime soon), I'll take responsibility for my own child and keep the remote control on top of a high shelf, and make TV time something we do together."
G is for GUANTANAMO: "What's a worse injustice: for a criminal to go free, or for an innocent person to be locked up? Here's a better question: What's a worse injustice - for a criminal to have a trial, or for an innocent person to be locked up without a trial for 5, 6, 7 years? We're the good guys because we don't lock people up for years without a trial, because we don't attack countries we don't like without being attacked first. It makes us vulnerable, but we can't give that up without giving up our identity. What cost security? Are we willing to give up our souls to feel safe? We are taking the first steps on a road that will make us to the world what Saddam and the Republican Guard were to Iraq. Let's get off that road!"
H is for HOLLYWOOD: "Film and Television represent that rarest of things: a medium in which an artist can actually ditch their day job. Say what you will about the quality of the art being turned out, it is art, nonetheless, and the artists who create it should not be exploited by the middlemen who distribute it. The writers are the originators of a work, and if someone else is able to take that and turn it into millions of dollars, it's only because the writers themselves did not spend their time raising capital and developing distribution companies... they were too busy writing! If you make money off of what the writers wrote, pay them for it. Simple. End the strike by doing the right thing."
I is for IMMIGRATION: "Any proposal to address immigration that has any chance of implementation must address both sides of the issue: What is the cost on our society that will be alleviated by this solution, and what is the cost that will be incurred? To date, I have heard no proposals that involve voluntary or forced deportation of undocumented immigrants that incorporates a system to save the industries that will suffer collapse due to the loss of a vital workforce, most notably the hotel and restaurant industries. Nor do they address the unavoidable implication of skyrocketing produce prices leading to a collapse of American agriculture and a growing dependence on cheap food from overseas if American growers don't have the affordable workforce necessary to harvest what they have grown. It's one thing to be dependent on foreign powers for the gas we need to drive to the grocery store; it's quite another to be dependent on them for the very food we need for our survival."
J is for JOURNALISM: “Ideally, the job of a journalist is to present a forum in which both sides of an issue can be presented and verify or dispute the facts (not conclusions) as presented by both sides. When journalism becomes about reporting only what is said about an issue and doesn’t do the hard work of verifying claims made, it loses credibility. Politicians can also skirt the verification problem by making grand pronouncements about what they’re going to do in the future and then just not following through. Journalists these days aren’t great at follow-up. The media has a dual role of keeping the public informed and of keeping those in power accountable. If either of those roles is forsaken, the media becomes irrelevant.”
K is for KARMA: “You know you’re in trouble when the future of the world depends on other countries NOT following your example. We spend so much time spinning our wheels trying to get other countries to believe that they really shouldn’t try to become like us and then wonder why they don’t take us seriously. We don’t want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons, to have a strong military, to launch pre-emptive strikes on their enemies, to pass legislation aimed at forcing conformity to religious norms, to disenfranchise minority groups politically, to put supposed enemies in prison for years without access to legal counsel or a speedy trial, to pursue reckless industrial development at the expense of environmental responsibility, or to make decisions for their own benefit without taking the impact on the rest of the world into account. In other words, we don’t want them to be like us. And we wonder why they hate us.”
L is for LEGISLATING MORALITY: "Should a political candidate who self-identifies as a Christian be held to the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition by other Christians? Absolutely. Does it become an obligation on the part of that candidate to support legislation that would make it a crime against the United States for citizens who are not Christians to violate the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition? Absolutely not! Should the religious leaders of the candidates denomination threaten to refuse the sacrament of holy communion to any person, be they candidate or not, who willingly and repeatedly violates the ethical and moral standards of their religious tradition and is blatantly unrepentant? Perhaps. But should they threaten to withhold the sacrament of holy communion to politicians who do not support legislation making it a crime to violate Christian ethical and moral standards? Absolutely not! It is one thing for a Christian to commit adultery and proclaim themselves free of guilt or regret. Such a person is denying their identity as a Christian which is founded on submission to the teaching of scripture. It is quite another, however, for a Christian to choose not to pursue legislation that would make adultery a jailable offense. Should people who lie about the size of the fish they caught or use foul language when watching the game with their buddies be locked up? Do you think God would actually be pleased to have a bunch of people acting like they respect him only because they're afraid of being thrown in jail? That is not the God of Christianity."
M is for MARRIAGE: "I find it offensive that the secular government feels that I need to get their permission to marry at all. Marriage is a cultural and religious institution, and should not be moderated by the government in any way. The government is useful as a record keeper and mediator of social contracts that individuals enter into granting to each other financial and social rights that the law reserves only unto individuals, and as such, the government should continue to hold onto records of such arrangements, whether they occur in the context of traditional marriages, civil unions, or "common-law" marriages. The actual designation of a relationship as a "marriage" however, is something I think the government should have no place in. I was married to my wife under the authority of God and the church according to Christian tradition. I appreciate the government doing the paperwork that allows me to include my wife as a dependent when applying for health care, but I don't think the legitimate role of the government should extend beyond that. The government can't tell the church who they must marry. The church doesn't get to tell the government who gets to be declared as a dependent on their taxes. It's really that simple."
N is for NO-BID CONTRACTS: “Seemingly illogical actions and choices on the part of those in power can be better understood when we realize that they won’t always hold their office, and it pays to have rich friends who are grateful to you when you retire. Maybe the future of Iraq and Afghanistan are being set up for further failure, and maybe the economy of our own country is being destroyed, but these guys are making their friends rich and earning a lot of good will… so why should they care?”
O is for OIL SPILLS: "The front pages of every major newspaper in the Bay Area proclaimed the 100's of volunteers demanding to be put to work saving the aquatic wildlife being threatened by the tragic spill. 'HEARTBREAKING' exclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle on the front page, above a photo of an oil-covered seabird. It breaks my heart that 100's of volunteers don't show up to clean up the sewage soaked bedrooms of children in Hunter's Point who are awakened by the horror of the plumbing in public housing projects nearly drowning them in human waste at 2 o'clock in the morning. Where are the volunteers when the lungs of children in poor families are filled with the pollution caused by industrial waste that surrounds their neighborhoods (after successful campaigns to keep those plants out of more affluent neighborhoods), resulting in alarmingly high rates of asthma among the most vulnerable among us, most without adequate health insurance? I'm not saying we shouldn't care about the birds. I'm saying, why do we care so much for the birds, but not for the children?"
P is for POLITICIANS: “It used to be that someone could be born in a log cabin, split rails, put themselves through law school and run for President. The cost of running a successful campaign has gotten to the point that the only people capable of running for office are representative of a narrow minority of American society whose interests often run contradictory to the vast majority of the population.”
Q is for QUAIL: “If I shot somebody in the face, I would feel really bad about it, even if they were a complete stranger. If they were a good friend, I would be sure to stay with them until their family told me to get lost. One has to wonder what went wrong with the underlying humanity of a person who could shoot a purportedly good friend in the face and then get back to business as usual. If the hunting down of ‘rogue quail’ is deemed to be a sufficiently important task as to justify so easily writing-off the potentially fatal wounding of a good friend, how can we believe that the welfare of American troops personally unknown to our leaders is important in the face of the supposed threat posed by Iraqi insurgents? And if you’re an Iraqi civilian, forget about it. You can rest assured that your well-being and survival simply don’t factor into any equations.”
R is for REALITY: “Politicians are becoming afraid to present realistic options for the tough problems facing our nation and our world in part because they’re afraid to admit that things are really so bad. Many of the press conferences we’re subjected to seem to be devoted to convincing us that things are going great. Numbers are flung at us to prove that no matter how miserable we feel, the economy is strong and everyone’s doing well. It’s a hard sell when we live every moment in the reality they’re denying, and it’s hard to see them as relevant to our lives when they seem so totally disconnected from our experience.”
S is for SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “I imagine that if the troops were asked if they felt supported by the stop-loss or the extended tours, they would politely decline to answer. I can’t imagine that policies that mean more time away from their homes and families over and over again feel incredibly supportive. I can think of two ways to support the troops: devise a strategy for quick and decisive victory and then implement it, or concede that we’ve done the best we can and bring them home. I have yet to hear anyone bring forth a viable option for the former. I suspect that this is because it would have to involve more troops than are currently interested in being supported, and instituting a draft would disturb the veil that has thus far shielded the eyes and hearts of most Americans from the harsh realities and costs of this war.”
T is for TAXES: "Unless you want to build your own road from your house to your work place, or hire some guys to hang around your front yard 24/7 just in case a fire breaks out, or broker your own personal peace treaty with North Korea, we need to pool our money together and get some people to take care of these things for all of us. That means government, and that means taxes. I have no problem with paying taxes, as long as I can still provide food, shelter and clothing for my family after I'm done. I have no problem with abolishing taxes for people who are struggling to do that, and I have no problem with raising taxes dramatically for those who make more money than some countries. But we don't really need to raise taxes; we just need to collect the taxes that are owed. Let's tighten the loopholes and increase enforcement of the existing tax code and we'll be doing alright. Multimillionaires (and billionaires) get away with tax dodges that cost the rest of us billions of dollars every year. I think that we can avoid raising taxes if we're able to figure out a way to get the money that's already owed us."
U is for UNINSURED: “The truth is that we end up paying for the medical care of uninsured Americans anyway. What happens is that without insurance they stay away from the doctor until they need an expensive hospital stay. Who pays for it? The taxpayers do. Sure, the patient ends up bankrupt, unemployed and a further drain on society, but then we end up paying for that, too. It’s interesting to see the level of preventive care I get from my provider when they know that they’ll either pay for preventive visits or extended hospital stays. It’s cheaper to keep people healthy than to treat sick people. The question is who will pay for that care? Right now the insurance companies are refusing to pay for the preventive care and the government ends up paying for the eventual treatment. The shareholders get rich and the government taxes us more. This is the issue that a single-payer system would address.”
V is for VICTORY: “What are we trying to accomplish in Iraq? What does ‘victory’ mean now? How will we know when we’ve won? I’m sure that the troops would be much more effective if they had concrete, measurable objectives that they were working toward, and could see a way home and out of this mess at the end of the tunnel.”
W is for WAR: "Jimmy Carter said that 'War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.' War is rapidly changing from the option of last resort to the option of first resort, or of only resort. The decision to enter a war should always be heart wrenching and fraught with sadness and regret, not jubilation. We must begin each war with the daily hope that this could be the last day. We must sacrifice every comfort we enjoy in peace time if such sacrifice might bring a speedier end to bloody conflict. War is being prosecuted today in a way to ensure that it impacts the ordinary life of average Americans as little as possible, in hopes that we will let it drift to the back of our minds and be forgotten but for the occasional shocking image on the evening news. No war is fought without cost, and if a war absolutely must be fought, then we should be working every day to bring it to a swift resolution. 'Kill them all' is an unacceptable path toward this goal."
X is for X-RAYS: "Airport security has been taken over by the federal government, and now the underpaid, overworked, poorly equipped, disgruntled workers have new uniforms. Wouldn't it make sense for some of the billions that we spend each day to fight a war 'over there' were spent to protect against our getting blown up 'over here'?"
Y is for YAHOO!: “The internet gives us more access to more information… but what information? It used to be that in order for something to be made available to the public, a publisher had to believe that the information was valuable enough to invest a lot of publishing capital in it. It wasn’t always true, but it was at least entertaining. Nowadays, misspelled bigotry is held out side by side with well-researched journalism, and we haven’t been given the tools to distinguish between the two. More information isn’t automatically a good thing. They say that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and we’re seeing the truth of that borne out.”
Z is for ZAMBIA: "AIDS is ravaging Africa. Should be good news for the pharmaceutical companies: a vast market for their antiretroviral drugs! There's no reason that we can't figure out a way to get the drugs to the people who need them and Big Pharma can make a profit. If they absolutely must make a huge, enormous profit, though, we run into problems. Africans dying of AIDS can't support the billionaire lifestyle to which Big Pharma has become accustomed. If only AIDS were ravaging New England or the Silicon Valley instead of Africa. Everyone's problems would be solved... especially the Africans!"
So there it is, my political campaign in a bottle. If there are any actual candidates that would like to license my views for their own uses, I have a wish list on Amazon...
- "It’s politics, man, politics.”
Lots of issues are back on "the public's" (i.e. the media's) lips these days, what with an election coming up and all. Pretend that I'm running for elected office and read my sound bites (okay, they’re too long to be sound bites. “ Sound snacks”, I guess) on the hot topics of the day (they're not all original ideas, but I'm going to go full-on politician mode and pretend that they're all mine!). Here they are, from A to Z:
A is for ABORTION: "From my perspective, it seems that this issue hinges on one question: Is an unborn fetus in fact a person, and therefore entitled to the same rights extended to every other person on earth, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or creed? If this is the question we are attempting to answer, let us tread very carefully, and be mindful of our nation's shameful history of answering this question "no" when it has been applied to Native Americans, Blacks, women, and others. History shows that this is not a question to be answered easily nor without a willingness to accept the harsh implications of either outcome."
B is for BARRY BONDS: "Did Barry Bonds use steroids? Probably. Should he have an asterisk next to his name in the record books? I don't think so... unless everybody else gets one. To pretend that every season, every player begins and ends the season under conditions identical to every other player since the beginning of baseball is ridiculous. Every era, every team, every ballpark has its quirks that make the experience of every player different. This isn't science; it's not a controlled experiment - it's entertainment! It's actually to the benefit of the public that baseball isn't exactly the same every single time... the fun wouldn't last very long. Barry Bonds played in an era of steroids, as the recent congressional report confirmed what everyone had long suspected. Barry was competing against teams with "enhanced" hitters, facing "enhanced" pitchers, and his experience was in this regard totally unlike anything Ruth, Aaron, Maris or Mays ever faced. Even without considering the issue of steroids, there are myriad reasons why every hitters case is different: The extensive use of middle relief and closers, the ever changing strike zone, new stadiums a mile above sea level, the wide variation of distances to the wall (and heights of the wall) from ballpark to ballpark, and more. If records can only be broken under the exact conditions under which they were set, no records could ever be broken. Was Barry wrong? Of course he was, and what's worse, he took part in a growing culture of steroid use that is spreading to college and high school athletes at an alarming rate. Barry had no excuse to abuse the position that his fame puts him in as a role model and add fuel to this growing public health crisis. Should he be in the record book, though? I think so. If Hitler and Stalin can be Time's Men of the Year, I see no reason that Bonds (or Rose, for that matter) should be kept out of the record books or the Hall of Fame. They were phenomenal ball players, who made phenomenal mistakes."
C is for CHINA: "It's unrealistic to expect China or any other fast-growing economy to take the environment or fair trade policies into account when the biggest example of a rich, successful nation is utterly unwilling to make any concessions on any front or even to acknowledge that the concerns of 90% of the world's population should in any way influence our energy policies. If we bite the bullet and adopt and enforce stricter environmental regulations, we can set the model that the rest of the world will follow."
D is for DARFUR: "If we're not afraid to go against the world and invade Iraq, and we're not afraid to take on up-and-coming nuclear states like Iran and North Korea, what are we afraid of in Darfur? Whose permission are we waiting for to go in and save innocent lives? The lack of a military response may be justifiable to many like me who are hesitant to believe that violence is ever a solution, and who never look to it to bring about progress, but only as a last-ditch resort to slow down wholesale slaughter with no end in sight. The lack of an aggressive diplomatic push with the full weight of our economic and political influence across the world, however, is totally inexcusable. How many people do we think we're saving with our "Save Darfur" T-shirts? Is the Janjaweed susceptible to political pressure expressed only through "Genocide Sucks" bumper stickers? What in the world are we waiting for?"
E is for EDUCATION: "Half a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education, schools in the deep south are largely integrated while the enlightened coasts are more segregated than ever. In the guise of innocuous sounding programs like 'neighborhood schools,' 'vouchers,' and the closure of 'under-enrolled' schools due to a dearth of school-age children (at least, of certain ethnicities) in urban school districts, schools in the big cities of our nation are becoming monochromatic. In San Francisco, the alleged capital of progressive political ideology, a complex school-choice system ensures parents with political clout that their children will not be stuck in "under-performing" schools, and the implications of this practice can be seen when taking a tour of the cities elementary schools and being able to categorize them at a glance as "black," "Asian," "Latino," or "white" schools, with the only concession to integration being a white minority at an "Asian" school, or a school integrated with black and Latino students from similar socio-economic backgrounds."
F is for FCC: "TV producers tell us that they're just supplying the product that people want. How do people know they want that? Why do TV shows need to advertise if that's what people want anyway? The reality is that tragically, we have learned to look to TV to tell us what normal, successful people are supposed to look like. 'Reality' TV purports to show us what real life looks like, and while adults with life experience know that the reality they show is pure fantasy, children are being taught to expect life to look a certain way. All that being said, we parents need to make some hard decisions. I would love it if my child could turn on the TV and I didn't have to worry about what they might see. Since I can't do that (and probably won't be able to anytime soon), I'll take responsibility for my own child and keep the remote control on top of a high shelf, and make TV time something we do together."
G is for GUANTANAMO: "What's a worse injustice: for a criminal to go free, or for an innocent person to be locked up? Here's a better question: What's a worse injustice - for a criminal to have a trial, or for an innocent person to be locked up without a trial for 5, 6, 7 years? We're the good guys because we don't lock people up for years without a trial, because we don't attack countries we don't like without being attacked first. It makes us vulnerable, but we can't give that up without giving up our identity. What cost security? Are we willing to give up our souls to feel safe? We are taking the first steps on a road that will make us to the world what Saddam and the Republican Guard were to Iraq. Let's get off that road!"
H is for HOLLYWOOD: "Film and Television represent that rarest of things: a medium in which an artist can actually ditch their day job. Say what you will about the quality of the art being turned out, it is art, nonetheless, and the artists who create it should not be exploited by the middlemen who distribute it. The writers are the originators of a work, and if someone else is able to take that and turn it into millions of dollars, it's only because the writers themselves did not spend their time raising capital and developing distribution companies... they were too busy writing! If you make money off of what the writers wrote, pay them for it. Simple. End the strike by doing the right thing."
I is for IMMIGRATION: "Any proposal to address immigration that has any chance of implementation must address both sides of the issue: What is the cost on our society that will be alleviated by this solution, and what is the cost that will be incurred? To date, I have heard no proposals that involve voluntary or forced deportation of undocumented immigrants that incorporates a system to save the industries that will suffer collapse due to the loss of a vital workforce, most notably the hotel and restaurant industries. Nor do they address the unavoidable implication of skyrocketing produce prices leading to a collapse of American agriculture and a growing dependence on cheap food from overseas if American growers don't have the affordable workforce necessary to harvest what they have grown. It's one thing to be dependent on foreign powers for the gas we need to drive to the grocery store; it's quite another to be dependent on them for the very food we need for our survival."
J is for JOURNALISM: “Ideally, the job of a journalist is to present a forum in which both sides of an issue can be presented and verify or dispute the facts (not conclusions) as presented by both sides. When journalism becomes about reporting only what is said about an issue and doesn’t do the hard work of verifying claims made, it loses credibility. Politicians can also skirt the verification problem by making grand pronouncements about what they’re going to do in the future and then just not following through. Journalists these days aren’t great at follow-up. The media has a dual role of keeping the public informed and of keeping those in power accountable. If either of those roles is forsaken, the media becomes irrelevant.”
K is for KARMA: “You know you’re in trouble when the future of the world depends on other countries NOT following your example. We spend so much time spinning our wheels trying to get other countries to believe that they really shouldn’t try to become like us and then wonder why they don’t take us seriously. We don’t want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons, to have a strong military, to launch pre-emptive strikes on their enemies, to pass legislation aimed at forcing conformity to religious norms, to disenfranchise minority groups politically, to put supposed enemies in prison for years without access to legal counsel or a speedy trial, to pursue reckless industrial development at the expense of environmental responsibility, or to make decisions for their own benefit without taking the impact on the rest of the world into account. In other words, we don’t want them to be like us. And we wonder why they hate us.”
L is for LEGISLATING MORALITY: "Should a political candidate who self-identifies as a Christian be held to the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition by other Christians? Absolutely. Does it become an obligation on the part of that candidate to support legislation that would make it a crime against the United States for citizens who are not Christians to violate the moral and ethical standards of the Christian religious tradition? Absolutely not! Should the religious leaders of the candidates denomination threaten to refuse the sacrament of holy communion to any person, be they candidate or not, who willingly and repeatedly violates the ethical and moral standards of their religious tradition and is blatantly unrepentant? Perhaps. But should they threaten to withhold the sacrament of holy communion to politicians who do not support legislation making it a crime to violate Christian ethical and moral standards? Absolutely not! It is one thing for a Christian to commit adultery and proclaim themselves free of guilt or regret. Such a person is denying their identity as a Christian which is founded on submission to the teaching of scripture. It is quite another, however, for a Christian to choose not to pursue legislation that would make adultery a jailable offense. Should people who lie about the size of the fish they caught or use foul language when watching the game with their buddies be locked up? Do you think God would actually be pleased to have a bunch of people acting like they respect him only because they're afraid of being thrown in jail? That is not the God of Christianity."
M is for MARRIAGE: "I find it offensive that the secular government feels that I need to get their permission to marry at all. Marriage is a cultural and religious institution, and should not be moderated by the government in any way. The government is useful as a record keeper and mediator of social contracts that individuals enter into granting to each other financial and social rights that the law reserves only unto individuals, and as such, the government should continue to hold onto records of such arrangements, whether they occur in the context of traditional marriages, civil unions, or "common-law" marriages. The actual designation of a relationship as a "marriage" however, is something I think the government should have no place in. I was married to my wife under the authority of God and the church according to Christian tradition. I appreciate the government doing the paperwork that allows me to include my wife as a dependent when applying for health care, but I don't think the legitimate role of the government should extend beyond that. The government can't tell the church who they must marry. The church doesn't get to tell the government who gets to be declared as a dependent on their taxes. It's really that simple."
N is for NO-BID CONTRACTS: “Seemingly illogical actions and choices on the part of those in power can be better understood when we realize that they won’t always hold their office, and it pays to have rich friends who are grateful to you when you retire. Maybe the future of Iraq and Afghanistan are being set up for further failure, and maybe the economy of our own country is being destroyed, but these guys are making their friends rich and earning a lot of good will… so why should they care?”
O is for OIL SPILLS: "The front pages of every major newspaper in the Bay Area proclaimed the 100's of volunteers demanding to be put to work saving the aquatic wildlife being threatened by the tragic spill. 'HEARTBREAKING' exclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle on the front page, above a photo of an oil-covered seabird. It breaks my heart that 100's of volunteers don't show up to clean up the sewage soaked bedrooms of children in Hunter's Point who are awakened by the horror of the plumbing in public housing projects nearly drowning them in human waste at 2 o'clock in the morning. Where are the volunteers when the lungs of children in poor families are filled with the pollution caused by industrial waste that surrounds their neighborhoods (after successful campaigns to keep those plants out of more affluent neighborhoods), resulting in alarmingly high rates of asthma among the most vulnerable among us, most without adequate health insurance? I'm not saying we shouldn't care about the birds. I'm saying, why do we care so much for the birds, but not for the children?"
P is for POLITICIANS: “It used to be that someone could be born in a log cabin, split rails, put themselves through law school and run for President. The cost of running a successful campaign has gotten to the point that the only people capable of running for office are representative of a narrow minority of American society whose interests often run contradictory to the vast majority of the population.”
Q is for QUAIL: “If I shot somebody in the face, I would feel really bad about it, even if they were a complete stranger. If they were a good friend, I would be sure to stay with them until their family told me to get lost. One has to wonder what went wrong with the underlying humanity of a person who could shoot a purportedly good friend in the face and then get back to business as usual. If the hunting down of ‘rogue quail’ is deemed to be a sufficiently important task as to justify so easily writing-off the potentially fatal wounding of a good friend, how can we believe that the welfare of American troops personally unknown to our leaders is important in the face of the supposed threat posed by Iraqi insurgents? And if you’re an Iraqi civilian, forget about it. You can rest assured that your well-being and survival simply don’t factor into any equations.”
R is for REALITY: “Politicians are becoming afraid to present realistic options for the tough problems facing our nation and our world in part because they’re afraid to admit that things are really so bad. Many of the press conferences we’re subjected to seem to be devoted to convincing us that things are going great. Numbers are flung at us to prove that no matter how miserable we feel, the economy is strong and everyone’s doing well. It’s a hard sell when we live every moment in the reality they’re denying, and it’s hard to see them as relevant to our lives when they seem so totally disconnected from our experience.”
S is for SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “I imagine that if the troops were asked if they felt supported by the stop-loss or the extended tours, they would politely decline to answer. I can’t imagine that policies that mean more time away from their homes and families over and over again feel incredibly supportive. I can think of two ways to support the troops: devise a strategy for quick and decisive victory and then implement it, or concede that we’ve done the best we can and bring them home. I have yet to hear anyone bring forth a viable option for the former. I suspect that this is because it would have to involve more troops than are currently interested in being supported, and instituting a draft would disturb the veil that has thus far shielded the eyes and hearts of most Americans from the harsh realities and costs of this war.”
T is for TAXES: "Unless you want to build your own road from your house to your work place, or hire some guys to hang around your front yard 24/7 just in case a fire breaks out, or broker your own personal peace treaty with North Korea, we need to pool our money together and get some people to take care of these things for all of us. That means government, and that means taxes. I have no problem with paying taxes, as long as I can still provide food, shelter and clothing for my family after I'm done. I have no problem with abolishing taxes for people who are struggling to do that, and I have no problem with raising taxes dramatically for those who make more money than some countries. But we don't really need to raise taxes; we just need to collect the taxes that are owed. Let's tighten the loopholes and increase enforcement of the existing tax code and we'll be doing alright. Multimillionaires (and billionaires) get away with tax dodges that cost the rest of us billions of dollars every year. I think that we can avoid raising taxes if we're able to figure out a way to get the money that's already owed us."
U is for UNINSURED: “The truth is that we end up paying for the medical care of uninsured Americans anyway. What happens is that without insurance they stay away from the doctor until they need an expensive hospital stay. Who pays for it? The taxpayers do. Sure, the patient ends up bankrupt, unemployed and a further drain on society, but then we end up paying for that, too. It’s interesting to see the level of preventive care I get from my provider when they know that they’ll either pay for preventive visits or extended hospital stays. It’s cheaper to keep people healthy than to treat sick people. The question is who will pay for that care? Right now the insurance companies are refusing to pay for the preventive care and the government ends up paying for the eventual treatment. The shareholders get rich and the government taxes us more. This is the issue that a single-payer system would address.”
V is for VICTORY: “What are we trying to accomplish in Iraq? What does ‘victory’ mean now? How will we know when we’ve won? I’m sure that the troops would be much more effective if they had concrete, measurable objectives that they were working toward, and could see a way home and out of this mess at the end of the tunnel.”
W is for WAR: "Jimmy Carter said that 'War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.' War is rapidly changing from the option of last resort to the option of first resort, or of only resort. The decision to enter a war should always be heart wrenching and fraught with sadness and regret, not jubilation. We must begin each war with the daily hope that this could be the last day. We must sacrifice every comfort we enjoy in peace time if such sacrifice might bring a speedier end to bloody conflict. War is being prosecuted today in a way to ensure that it impacts the ordinary life of average Americans as little as possible, in hopes that we will let it drift to the back of our minds and be forgotten but for the occasional shocking image on the evening news. No war is fought without cost, and if a war absolutely must be fought, then we should be working every day to bring it to a swift resolution. 'Kill them all' is an unacceptable path toward this goal."
X is for X-RAYS: "Airport security has been taken over by the federal government, and now the underpaid, overworked, poorly equipped, disgruntled workers have new uniforms. Wouldn't it make sense for some of the billions that we spend each day to fight a war 'over there' were spent to protect against our getting blown up 'over here'?"
Y is for YAHOO!: “The internet gives us more access to more information… but what information? It used to be that in order for something to be made available to the public, a publisher had to believe that the information was valuable enough to invest a lot of publishing capital in it. It wasn’t always true, but it was at least entertaining. Nowadays, misspelled bigotry is held out side by side with well-researched journalism, and we haven’t been given the tools to distinguish between the two. More information isn’t automatically a good thing. They say that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and we’re seeing the truth of that borne out.”
Z is for ZAMBIA: "AIDS is ravaging Africa. Should be good news for the pharmaceutical companies: a vast market for their antiretroviral drugs! There's no reason that we can't figure out a way to get the drugs to the people who need them and Big Pharma can make a profit. If they absolutely must make a huge, enormous profit, though, we run into problems. Africans dying of AIDS can't support the billionaire lifestyle to which Big Pharma has become accustomed. If only AIDS were ravaging New England or the Silicon Valley instead of Africa. Everyone's problems would be solved... especially the Africans!"
So there it is, my political campaign in a bottle. If there are any actual candidates that would like to license my views for their own uses, I have a wish list on Amazon...
- "It’s politics, man, politics.”
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
I'm super cool, and now there's circumstancial evidence.
One of my students has referenced me in her blog. Take that, Jaime Escalante!
- "You burros are too smart for that."
- "You burros are too smart for that."
Thursday, March 29, 2007
How Standardized Testing is Killing American Education: Reason #6
5th in a series.
6) Ranked scoring doesn't tell you anything about learning: If every student in the state dramatically improved their learning and scored much higher on the test, would you expect the average scores to go up? Likewise, if every student in the state was accidentaly given the test in Arabic instead of English, would you expect the average scores to go down? Guess what? They wouldn't! Not in either case. In both cases, the average score would be "600" no matter how many more questions were answered correctly (or incorrectly) or even if the test was an incomprehensible graduate level neuroscience test given to 3rd graders.
How can this be? Well, the "scores" that students get are not directly based on the number of answers they get right. The highest possible score is "1000", but that doesn't mean that a "600" score denotes 60% of the questions answered correctly. A student with a score of 600 may have gotten 10%, or 50%, or even 90% of the questions correct. The scores that are published for these tests are "scaled scores." Scaled scores are given based on how many students you scored better than on the test, not how many questions you got correct.
Imagine that there are 100 9th graders in California. After taking the test, the students are lined up in order based on the number of questions they answered correctly. The person at the beginning of the line might have answered 2%, or 20% (which is what you'd expect a student randomly guessing to get), or even 80% of the questions correct. Similarly, the students at the end of the line might have answered 50%, or 75%, or 98% of the questions correctly. It doesn't matter: they're just lined up in order. After they are in order, they are divided into 5 equal groups. The first 20% of the students (20 students in our example) all receive a score of "200". The next 20 students all receive a score of "400", then "600" for the next 20, "800" for the next 20, and "1000" for the 20 students with the most questions answered correctly.
A school's API (Academic Performance Index) score is the average of these "quintile" scores from all of its students. So what's the problem?
Well, let's look at our imagninary 100 9th graders. Student #3 could have answered 4% of the questions correctly, and student #18 could have answered 43% of the questions correctly, but they both get the same score: 200. Likewise, student #20 could have answered 42% of the questions correctly and student #21 could have answered 43% of the questions correctly, but student #20 will get a score of 200 while student #21 will get a score of 400... twice as many points! Can you see how these numbers can be misleading?
Another problem: schools receive a score of 1-10 based on their ranking, similar to the students. The bottom 10% get a "1", the top 10% get a "10" and so on. But the number of students that would need to move up one quintile for a school to move from a "1" to a "2" is significantly higher than the number of students that would have to move up one quintile from a "4" to a "5". The schools in the middle are bunched together very closely, and movement between the rankings doesn't necessarily indicate a large number of students scoring differently. Movement at the bottom (and at the top) on the other hand require large numbers of students to improve their scores, and the improvement in learning that moving from a "1" to a "2" is significantly greater than that of a school that moves from a "5" to a "6"... yet the numerical value given to this score is the same.
Most importantly, the only way for a student to move up in the rankings is for them to improve disproportionately more than a student that previously scored higher than they did. There will always be 20% of the students in the bottom quintile: that's how the system works. If a student moves up, another student has to move down. Therefore, we are requiring schools with low scores to teach their students more than schools with high scores. The system is basically competitive: you don't have to improve you students' learning necessarily. Rather, you need to hope for some other school to do a worse job than your school does. This puts educators (and students and parents, for that matter) in a position of hoping for other schools to educate their students poorly. I don't know about you, but I find that reprehensible. We should never put our children in a position where their success is measured in such a way that they are dependent on the failure of others. If our schools are training our children to engage in life as a zero-sum game where their well-being is predicated on the misfortune or failure of others, we are setting them up to take the messed up world they've inherited from us and make it all the more hellish.
- "'Welcome to Hell.' "Oh, thanks. That means a lot, coming from you.'"
6) Ranked scoring doesn't tell you anything about learning: If every student in the state dramatically improved their learning and scored much higher on the test, would you expect the average scores to go up? Likewise, if every student in the state was accidentaly given the test in Arabic instead of English, would you expect the average scores to go down? Guess what? They wouldn't! Not in either case. In both cases, the average score would be "600" no matter how many more questions were answered correctly (or incorrectly) or even if the test was an incomprehensible graduate level neuroscience test given to 3rd graders.
How can this be? Well, the "scores" that students get are not directly based on the number of answers they get right. The highest possible score is "1000", but that doesn't mean that a "600" score denotes 60% of the questions answered correctly. A student with a score of 600 may have gotten 10%, or 50%, or even 90% of the questions correct. The scores that are published for these tests are "scaled scores." Scaled scores are given based on how many students you scored better than on the test, not how many questions you got correct.
Imagine that there are 100 9th graders in California. After taking the test, the students are lined up in order based on the number of questions they answered correctly. The person at the beginning of the line might have answered 2%, or 20% (which is what you'd expect a student randomly guessing to get), or even 80% of the questions correct. Similarly, the students at the end of the line might have answered 50%, or 75%, or 98% of the questions correctly. It doesn't matter: they're just lined up in order. After they are in order, they are divided into 5 equal groups. The first 20% of the students (20 students in our example) all receive a score of "200". The next 20 students all receive a score of "400", then "600" for the next 20, "800" for the next 20, and "1000" for the 20 students with the most questions answered correctly.
A school's API (Academic Performance Index) score is the average of these "quintile" scores from all of its students. So what's the problem?
Well, let's look at our imagninary 100 9th graders. Student #3 could have answered 4% of the questions correctly, and student #18 could have answered 43% of the questions correctly, but they both get the same score: 200. Likewise, student #20 could have answered 42% of the questions correctly and student #21 could have answered 43% of the questions correctly, but student #20 will get a score of 200 while student #21 will get a score of 400... twice as many points! Can you see how these numbers can be misleading?
Another problem: schools receive a score of 1-10 based on their ranking, similar to the students. The bottom 10% get a "1", the top 10% get a "10" and so on. But the number of students that would need to move up one quintile for a school to move from a "1" to a "2" is significantly higher than the number of students that would have to move up one quintile from a "4" to a "5". The schools in the middle are bunched together very closely, and movement between the rankings doesn't necessarily indicate a large number of students scoring differently. Movement at the bottom (and at the top) on the other hand require large numbers of students to improve their scores, and the improvement in learning that moving from a "1" to a "2" is significantly greater than that of a school that moves from a "5" to a "6"... yet the numerical value given to this score is the same.
Most importantly, the only way for a student to move up in the rankings is for them to improve disproportionately more than a student that previously scored higher than they did. There will always be 20% of the students in the bottom quintile: that's how the system works. If a student moves up, another student has to move down. Therefore, we are requiring schools with low scores to teach their students more than schools with high scores. The system is basically competitive: you don't have to improve you students' learning necessarily. Rather, you need to hope for some other school to do a worse job than your school does. This puts educators (and students and parents, for that matter) in a position of hoping for other schools to educate their students poorly. I don't know about you, but I find that reprehensible. We should never put our children in a position where their success is measured in such a way that they are dependent on the failure of others. If our schools are training our children to engage in life as a zero-sum game where their well-being is predicated on the misfortune or failure of others, we are setting them up to take the messed up world they've inherited from us and make it all the more hellish.
- "'Welcome to Hell.' "Oh, thanks. That means a lot, coming from you.'"
Friday, March 16, 2007
How Standardized Testing is Killing American Education: Reason #7
Fourth in a series.
7) English Learners unfairly penalized: One would expect someone who is learning English to score lower on a test of English proficiency than a native English speaker. Test scores bear that out, and it's not surprising or unexpected.
There is no reason to assume, however, that someone who is learning English will necessarily be less proficient in math, or science, or general social studies (apart from US History) than native English speakers. Indeed, a student who received more education in their home country before coming to the US than a native speaker would be expected to be more proficient. At the very least, we should assume that the scores in these non-English subjects should be roughly equivalent. A more realistic assumption based on international research would be that foreign-educated students might actually score better than native English speakers educated in the American public-education system.
So why do English learners consistently score lower in math than native speakers? A cursory glance at the test will reveal this immediately: the format of the questions require a level of English proficiency just to understand what the question is; a level of English proficiency that many English learners have yet to attain.
Math questions are almost all contextualized word problems. A problem given as "4+7=___" could be accessed by anyone, regardless of English proficiency. When it is given instead as "Farmer Brown has 4 chickens and 7 ducks. How many birds does he have?" we run into problems. First, vocabulary: Farmer, chicken, duck, bird... if a student doesn't know these words, the question becomes more difficult, and not because of any deficiency in mathematical skills. Add to that the problem that comes with not realizing that "chickens" and "ducks" are both subsets of the larger category "birds" (if a student has heard of chickens but not ducks, they might legitimately answer "4"), and the various conjugations of the irregular verb "to have" (you know that "has" and "have" mean the same thing in this sentence... does an English learner know that?) and a student might get the answer wrong for several reasons that have nothing to do with their level of math proficiency, and math proficiency is what this test is supposed to be assessing.
So what do we do about it? More accurate results could come by letting students use a translating dictionary for the non-English portions of the test. This would of course have to be tied to an increase in the time allowed, since looking up 3 or 4 words per questions will most likely more than double the time necessary to finish the test. Even without the dictionary, English learners need more time to read and comprehend English texts, so the time extension or even giving unlimited time would go a long way toward redressing this inequity. Unfortunately, both of these suggestions make-up the "axis of evil" for standardized test makers: the argument is that the point of the test being "standardized" is that scores can be compared fairly because every student takes the exact same test under the exact same conditions. Any variation in conditions destroys standardization by this view. I would argue that for all subjects other than English, the opposite is true, and a fair and equitable measuring stick for students proficiency in subjects other than English cannot be attained until we sacrifice these sacred cows on the altar of equal opportunity.
(Resources: 1 2)
-"Medium-Head Boy!.... You see, he doesn't know!"
7) English Learners unfairly penalized: One would expect someone who is learning English to score lower on a test of English proficiency than a native English speaker. Test scores bear that out, and it's not surprising or unexpected.
There is no reason to assume, however, that someone who is learning English will necessarily be less proficient in math, or science, or general social studies (apart from US History) than native English speakers. Indeed, a student who received more education in their home country before coming to the US than a native speaker would be expected to be more proficient. At the very least, we should assume that the scores in these non-English subjects should be roughly equivalent. A more realistic assumption based on international research would be that foreign-educated students might actually score better than native English speakers educated in the American public-education system.
So why do English learners consistently score lower in math than native speakers? A cursory glance at the test will reveal this immediately: the format of the questions require a level of English proficiency just to understand what the question is; a level of English proficiency that many English learners have yet to attain.
Math questions are almost all contextualized word problems. A problem given as "4+7=___" could be accessed by anyone, regardless of English proficiency. When it is given instead as "Farmer Brown has 4 chickens and 7 ducks. How many birds does he have?" we run into problems. First, vocabulary: Farmer, chicken, duck, bird... if a student doesn't know these words, the question becomes more difficult, and not because of any deficiency in mathematical skills. Add to that the problem that comes with not realizing that "chickens" and "ducks" are both subsets of the larger category "birds" (if a student has heard of chickens but not ducks, they might legitimately answer "4"), and the various conjugations of the irregular verb "to have" (you know that "has" and "have" mean the same thing in this sentence... does an English learner know that?) and a student might get the answer wrong for several reasons that have nothing to do with their level of math proficiency, and math proficiency is what this test is supposed to be assessing.
So what do we do about it? More accurate results could come by letting students use a translating dictionary for the non-English portions of the test. This would of course have to be tied to an increase in the time allowed, since looking up 3 or 4 words per questions will most likely more than double the time necessary to finish the test. Even without the dictionary, English learners need more time to read and comprehend English texts, so the time extension or even giving unlimited time would go a long way toward redressing this inequity. Unfortunately, both of these suggestions make-up the "axis of evil" for standardized test makers: the argument is that the point of the test being "standardized" is that scores can be compared fairly because every student takes the exact same test under the exact same conditions. Any variation in conditions destroys standardization by this view. I would argue that for all subjects other than English, the opposite is true, and a fair and equitable measuring stick for students proficiency in subjects other than English cannot be attained until we sacrifice these sacred cows on the altar of equal opportunity.
(Resources: 1 2)
-"Medium-Head Boy!.... You see, he doesn't know!"
How Standardized Testing is Killing American Education: Reason #8
Third in a series.
8) "Scaled scores" don't tell you anything about student learning: Standardized tests scores are given as "scaled scores." This means that your score is not based directly on how many questions you got right: a student who answered 25% of the questions correctly would not receive a score half that of a student who answered 50% of the questions correctly. Rather, the scores tell you how many other students that took the test scored worse than you did. A student who scores in the 35th percentile did not necessarily get 35% of the questions correct. What happened is that 35% of the students who took the same test got less questions correct than that student did. It's possible that they got 35% of the questions correct, but it's just as possible that they got 5% of the questions correct, or 75%, or even 90%. A scaled score doesn't tell us anything about the number of questions answered correctly.
Likewise, improvement on a scaled score doesn't necessarily indicate improvement in learning. A student could answer 45% of the questions correctly one year and 55% the next year. Their scaled score could improve, or drop, or stay the same, depending on whether other students improved similarly or not. Ideally, we want all students to improve, don't we? Well, if that happens at the same rate, our scaled scores will not change at all, and will give no indication that the outcome we most desire is actually taking place!
Scaled scores are deceptive on several counts. First of all, it is not uncommon for someone to think that someone with a scaled score under 50% has mastered less than 50% of the material. That is not true. Someone with a scaled score of 50% scored higher than 50% of the students who took the same test. In other words, this is a totally average student. Right in the middle. Typical of American students in general. This students actual score could tell us a lot about the state of American education: if an average student has an actual score of 20%, we would be disappointed; likewise, an "average" actual score of 85% would be very encouraging. Unfortunately, the only score we're ever exposed to is the scaled score, which doesn't tell us a lot about what (or whether) students are actually learning.
(Resources: 1 2)
-"USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population."
8) "Scaled scores" don't tell you anything about student learning: Standardized tests scores are given as "scaled scores." This means that your score is not based directly on how many questions you got right: a student who answered 25% of the questions correctly would not receive a score half that of a student who answered 50% of the questions correctly. Rather, the scores tell you how many other students that took the test scored worse than you did. A student who scores in the 35th percentile did not necessarily get 35% of the questions correct. What happened is that 35% of the students who took the same test got less questions correct than that student did. It's possible that they got 35% of the questions correct, but it's just as possible that they got 5% of the questions correct, or 75%, or even 90%. A scaled score doesn't tell us anything about the number of questions answered correctly.
Likewise, improvement on a scaled score doesn't necessarily indicate improvement in learning. A student could answer 45% of the questions correctly one year and 55% the next year. Their scaled score could improve, or drop, or stay the same, depending on whether other students improved similarly or not. Ideally, we want all students to improve, don't we? Well, if that happens at the same rate, our scaled scores will not change at all, and will give no indication that the outcome we most desire is actually taking place!
Scaled scores are deceptive on several counts. First of all, it is not uncommon for someone to think that someone with a scaled score under 50% has mastered less than 50% of the material. That is not true. Someone with a scaled score of 50% scored higher than 50% of the students who took the same test. In other words, this is a totally average student. Right in the middle. Typical of American students in general. This students actual score could tell us a lot about the state of American education: if an average student has an actual score of 20%, we would be disappointed; likewise, an "average" actual score of 85% would be very encouraging. Unfortunately, the only score we're ever exposed to is the scaled score, which doesn't tell us a lot about what (or whether) students are actually learning.
(Resources: 1 2)
-"USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population."
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