Knowing the score

New from the "Merciful Heavens, Please Tell Me We're Not Fighting This Nonsense Again" department, officials at the New York State Department of Education are proposing using student scores on AP exams and the SAT test as a means for evaluating teachers and administrators.

How many times does it need to be said?  Standardized test scores are not a measure of teacher effectiveness.  Okay, if I was completely incompetent, my AP Biology students would probably all tank the exam.  But beyond that, my students' scores are far more indicative of their ability to comprehend technical material, their curiosity, and their work ethic than it is of anything I happen to be doing.  I have had years where every single student in my class has gotten a score of 3 or above (usually sufficient to obtain college credit).  Other years, I have not had a single 5 (the highest score) and a commensurately high number of 1s and 2s.  What happened?  Was I competent one year and completely ineffective the next?

Add to that the fact that the College Board, in their infinite wisdom, completely restructured the exam four years ago, and I don't think the scores actually mean much of anything from the standpoint of what I am doing in class.

The SATs are even worse.  I used to teach SAT math prep courses in the evening until I became so frustrated by the "learn how to game the test" approach of most of the curricula we used that I decided to make extra pocket money a different way.  My considered opinion is that your SAT exam score tells you exactly one thing -- how well you did on the SAT test.  A study two years ago found little correlation between SAT score and success in college.  More troubling still is the fact that the one of the strongest correlations of SAT exam scores is with parental income; on average, students from the wealthiest families outperformed the students from the poorest families...

... by 400 points.

So is the idea here to further penalize teachers and administrators who work in schools in high-poverty areas?  Because that's sure as hell what it sounds like.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

New York State education officials are either unaware of these problems or else are ignoring them.  Ira Schwartz, Assistant Commissioner of Education, said in a memo, "The proposed changes would recognize efforts to encourage student participation and success in college preparation courses."

And unfairly penalize schools and teachers where other factors interfere with student success in these measures.  So Schwartz and Mary Ellen Elia, the State Commissioner, are either being disingenuous or else are once again proposing using standardized test scores as a way of instituting a top-down micromanagement approach that stifles creativity, destroys morale, and virtually eliminates local control.

"In December, the state’s education policymaking body suspended the use of those tests in teacher evaluations for the next four years," wrote Monica Disare in Chalkbeat New York.  "The moratorium is meant to give the education department time to redo the evaluation system.  This announcement, especially the references to SAT, AP, and other exams, offer early signs of how state officials will sort out that task and which new metrics they are exploring."

Also some early signs that what we're looking at is more of the same.  Evidently the Test 'Em Till They Can't See Straight approach, both here and in other states, has not been diminished despite objections from educators and the increasingly powerful opt-out movement.  You have to wonder what would make a difference.  Perhaps when they realize that they're driving experienced teachers from the profession, and discouraging college students from pursuing education as a career.

Or maybe that will just give them the impetus to gut the public school system completely, and replace it with corporate-run for-profit schools designed on the factory model.  Which is increasingly seeming like what they want.

America über alles

A recurring question in ethics is how good (or at least average) people could have participated in the Nazi atrocities.  Didn't they recognize that what they were doing was wrong?  Because it is clear that many of the people who were caught up in the Nazi fervor were from quite commonplace origins.  They were not, by nature, violent monsters who were out looking for evil things to do.

But they did swallow the horrific ideology.  They accepted the rhetoric that the Jews were inherently inferior, the myth of German exceptionalism, the fear-message that if the enemies of the Thousand-Year Reich weren't stopped, Germany would be overrun by people bent on its annihilation.

And it worked.  A few people recognized what was happening as it was happening, but far more capitulated, either standing by silent while the horrors were occurring or else actively helping the Nazi leaders.

Key to Hitler's ideology was the creation of the "Hitler Youth."  The idea -- and it was as perceptive as it was evil -- was to catch young people early, drill them with the message that Germany was (1) superior and (2) threatened.  Teach them that their first duty was to the Fatherland, that this came before anything, and that anyone criticizing Germany was wrong, trying to subvert the cause for his or her own wicked ends.

[image courtesy of the German Federal Archives and the Wikimedia Commons]

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:

Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God’s handiwork to be debased... Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures [i.e. Germans] would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise. 

Which brings me directly to what is happening right now in Oklahoma.

You may not have heard about this; certainly the people responsible are not eager to have it become public knowledge.  But a committee in the Oklahoma legislature, led by Representative Dan Fisher, is looking toward eliminating AP (Advanced Placement) classes from Oklahoma high schools, saying that it is a violation of the state constitution to have a "mandated national curriculum."

But this is, at least in part, a smokescreen, because what is at the heart of this is not States' Rights issues.  It becomes obvious what the motivation is when you look at the first AP class that the committee has in its sights: AP US History.  And the argument for getting rid of AP US History is that it "eliminates the idea of American exceptionalism," focusing instead on "what is bad about America."

This demand that history courses whitewash our flaws comes from a retired history teacher and current activist and writer named Larry Krieger.  Krieger is incensed that the AP US History curriculum focuses on issues like slavery and the Japanese internment camps, instead of on areas where Americans have risen to higher ideals.  "Consider for a moment, from the beginning to President Obama’s recent declaration of why we had to wipe out ISIS, why do we send American boys and women into harm’s way to pay any price, bear any burden?" Krieger said in an interview.  "We do that because they are the defenders of liberty and freedom -- in short, our core values.  And so to scrub that out of the American narrative is a real egregious injustice.  People who call themselves liberals haven't really understood what... American exceptionalism means, and why it is so extremely important that it be taught to our kids.  Because what unites us as a people — we're not united by ethnic differences, religious differences, we're united by our core values."

Sound familiar?  It should.

Also unsurprising is the fact that it succeeded.  Yesterday the Oklahoma House Common Education Committee voted 11-4 to eliminate the teaching of AP US History in the state, "unless the College Board changes the curriculum."

Who wants to place bets on which AP course is next?  Hmmm, I wonder.  Could it be... biology?  Where students learn that humans evolved just like all other life forms on Earth, that human biological exceptionalism is a counterfactual myth?

Catch them while they're young.  Teach them that (1) they're superior, and (2) their way of life is threatened.  After that, you can accomplish whatever you want.

It's funny.  Every time I think I can't become more appalled at the direction that the oversight of public education is going, the powers-that-be outdo themselves.  They're becoming more overt about it, though; let's turn children into little factoid-spewing machines, meeting the benchmarks and rubrics and skill sets, and (above all) toeing the party line.  For heaven's sake, don't give them autonomy, values clarification, critical thinking skills.  Teach them not only what they're supposed to know, but what they're supposed to believe.  Label any push to educate students in how to perform critical analysis (even of their own country's leaders) as an "egregious injustice" designed to undermine our "core values."

Can't have people thinking America has flaws, after all.

Don't get me wrong.  When I look at the alternatives, I'm damn glad to be an American.  I would fight hard to protect what we have here.  But there's a difference between being proud of our country and thinking our country can do no wrong, believing that anyone who takes a good hard look at our past (and present) failings is trying to destroy our way of life.  What happened to the concept that clear-headed, rational analysis of history prevents us from making the same mistakes over and over again?

Better, apparently, to paint our ancestors as blameless, to spin the myth of American exceptionalism, so that any blow to the edifice, however justified, is looked upon as a dire threat.

It puts me in mind of a quote by Voltaire that I have above the whiteboard in my classroom:  "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

The new, eviscerated AP Biology exam

You would think that, after spending 26 years as an educator, I would have figured out that whenever an educational oversight group says, "We are restructuring and reconfiguring this, for sound pedagogical reasons, in order to improve it," this really means, "We are going to scramble this for no good reason whatsoever, and the result will be something far worse than what you started with."

It happened with the New York State Regents Examinations, which (for those of you who do not live in New York) are the high-school-level course exit exams.  The rallying cry was "Raising the Bar," which makes it a little hard to explain why the biological sciences Regents examination is now so easy that it can be passed by anyone who has three working brain cells.  This exam was passed by a student who, on a quiz on human anatomy, incorrectly labeled the "anus" as being on the left arm.

Oh, but there was one major outcome of the exam restructuring: they changed the name of the course from "Regents Biology" to "Regents Living Environment," which raises the bar by virtue of having more letters.

So, when the College Board decided to restructure the curriculum and examination for AP Biology -- a course I've taught for twenty years -- I should have expected the same to happen.  Here's their rationale, as per the 2011 announcement of the planned changes on the College Board website:

“The revisions were enacted to address a challenging situation in science education at a critical juncture for American competitiveness,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. “The body of scientific knowledge is constantly expanding. The revisions will help science educators ensure that their instruction is fresh and current and that students develop not just a solid knowledge of the facts but also the ability to practice science and think critically about scientific issues.”

The revised AP Biology course and exam align with the knowledge and skills that many rigorous college-level introductory biology courses now seek to nurture, emphasizing the development of scientific inquiry and reasoning skills. Lab work is a critical component of the course, requiring students to master such skills as posing questions; collecting, analyzing and evaluating data; connecting fundamental concepts; and then defending their conclusions based on experiments.

“The revised course objectives will enable teachers and students to explore key topics in depth and will help students learn to reason with the rigor and objectivity of scientists,” said Trevor Packer, vice president of the Advanced Placement Program at the College Board.

So, I dutifully resubmitted my curriculum, and had it approved by the powers-that-be at the AP Central.  "How different can the exam be?" I thought.  "Biology is what biology is; the concepts are the same.  I already teach a rigorous course, that helps students to draw connections between disparate fields of science, that has an emphasis on application, reasoning, and synthesis, and that uses a strong lab component.  I'm told every year by students returning to visit from college that my class was a good preparation for college-level science.  It will be fine."

Optimism is a losing proposition, sometimes.

My students sat for the exam on Monday.  As you are undoubtedly predicting by now, I was not only wrong, I was so far wrong that it has made me question whether I should even offer this course next year.

The New and Improved AP Biology exam -- of which I only ever get to see the free-response section, the multiple choice section is hardly ever released to teachers for analysis -- was, in my opinion, a vague, confusing muddle that left students wondering, "is that all they're looking for?"  Here are four examples, which I will describe rather than quote in their entirety, for the sake of brevity:

1) A question in which fruit flies are placed in a "choice chamber" and given the choice of flying toward a dry cotton ball or one soaked in glucose solution.  Students are asked to "predict the distribution of the flies after ten minutes, and justify your prediction."  (As a student said to me after the exam, "A central principle of the animal world is that 'some food is better than no food.'")

2)  A question showing a "simplified carbon cycle" that looked, more or less, like this (but without the words in blue):

Students had to correctly label the arrows with "photosynthesis" and "respiration," and state that an example of an organism that does both processes is "a plant."

For reference, the unsimplified carbon cycle I use in my class is shown below:

3)  A question regarding the evolution of the earliest amphibians (363 million years ago) from lobe-finned fish (observed in rocks that are 380 million years old), that asked students to predict when, in geological history, you would might find fossils of the transitional species between the two groups.

4)  A question describing an experiment in which rats are given alcohol, and it is found that their urine output increases over rats that are given water.  Students were asked to "pose one scientific question that the researchers were most likely investigating with this experiment" and then "describe the effect of ethyl alcohol on urine production."

And so on.

Understandably, my students were pretty frustrated by gearing up for an examination that turned out to have been eviscerated of virtually all of its technical content.  And when you have a bunch of students who are pissed off because an exam isn't hard enough, you know there's something wrong.

Here are some direct quotes from some of my students:

"You needed to have barely any actual knowledge of biology in order to take this exam.  A few of the terms from Regents Biology would have been enough to get by on."

"I had worked hard and prepared for this exam.  I'd read the new curriculum and course outline, and I worked hard in class.  I felt like I had this material down.  This test was an insult to all of the hard work I put in."

"The reading passages and experimental design descriptions were too long to justify the extremely simple questions we were asked about them."

"The rat pee question wasn't even at the Regents level, it was below Regents level.  We already knew alcohol is a diuretic -- we discussed it in class when we were learning about the kidney.  If I had proposed to my Regents Biology teacher to do this as a final project, she would have said, 'You can do better than that.'"

"My brother is in college, and is taking biology.  I've looked at his textbook and lab manual.  And if I'd taken a course that prepared me to be successful on this exam, that course wouldn't have prepared me to be successful in the college biology course he's taking."

"I felt like even though they were shooting for a more conceptual approach, I wasn't being asked to apply concepts at a very high level.  The carbon cycle question, in particular, was not at a college level.  We knew that amount of detail in seventh grade."

Allow me to interject at this point that this group of 29 young people ranks amongst the top three AP biology classes I've ever taught in terms of drive, curiosity, and depth of understanding.  We're not talking about a bunch of slackers, here.  They had good mastery of the material, and are ready to make the jump to college science classes.  The fact that they ended the school year this way is a crashing letdown, and will remain that regardless of what their scores turn out to be.  (And interesting, too, that one of my best and brightest, who aced damn near every quiz and test I gave her this year, when I asked her what score she thought she got, replied, "I could have gotten a one.  I could have gotten a five.  I could have gotten a three.  I really, honestly have no way to tell how successful I was on this exam.")

So, there you have it.  The College Board has fulfilled its educational goal of taking a test that was, on the whole, rigorous but fair, and turning it into a hash.  Again, I shouldn't be surprised; that's been the result of virtually every educational shift I've seen in the last twenty years.  Oh, and one other thing I'm expecting: not only do educational oversight agencies take their Great Leaps Forward by mucking things up royally, they never admit afterwards that they screwed up.  So expect to see press releases soon from the College Board about how wonderful their New and Improved exam was, and how teachers and students everywhere are singing its praises to the skies.  Look, too, for them to begin to "improve" the exams in all of the other AP courses.

I hope I'm retired by then.