Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/why-poor-schools-can-t-win-at-standardized-testing/374287/


A Philadelphia third-grader reviews math exercises in preparation for the PSSA.

***SNIP


Philadelphia is the eighth-largest school district in the country, and its public students are overwhelmingly poor: 79 percent of them are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The high-school graduation rate is only 64 percent and fewer than half of students managed to score proficient or above on the 2013 PSSA.

When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books. The School District of Philadelphia recently tweeted a photo of Mayor Michael Nutter handing out 200,000 donated books to K-3 students. Unfortunately, introducing children to classic works of literature won’t raise their abysmal test scores.

This is because standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. As I learned in the course of my investigation, they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers.

All of this has to do with the economics of testing. Across the nation, standardized tests come from one of three companies: CTB McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or Pearson. These corporations write the tests, grade the tests, and publish the books that students use to prepare for the tests. Houghton Mifflin has a 38 percent market share, according to its press materials. In 2013, the company brought in $1.38 billion in revenue.

[abelenkpe]

1. Set up to fail

So they can justify handing over each campus to a charter.

[Cresent City Kid]

2. We can standardize testing but we can't seem to standardize funding

Local funding is the mechanism for keeping our economic stratification in place. We should pool all tax dollars dedicated to education and distribute it evenly, every American kid with the exact same education funding.

[Travis_0004]

5. I dont think funding is the only problem.

Cincinnat public schools receives more in funding that almost all the surrounding schools and has worse ratings than many schools which receive thousands less per student.

[Cresent City Kid]

6. Not the only problem, agreed, but it is a built in inequity.

I just think it's crazy to expect uniform output with such uneven input. I would remove the funding issue and move on to the other issues. I know that in New Orleans where I am from there is a culture of dysfunction around public education that also needs more than money to fix.

[G_j]

3. K&R

[highmindedhavi]

4. Always believed it was a parenting issue

Went to school in East Los Angeles. My siblings(5) and I did well, AP courses, Honor Roll, MESA, etc. My friends, wife, brother-in law rarely took their books home, ditched class, didn't seem to ever care. I asked about their parents getting upset, they said their parents either didn't know english or they told them "just graduate". The asian kids in my AP classes and I all had they same issue, parents. They were involved in our school life and we knew it.