Educational Reform in California.

                                                                                         

Educational Reform in California.
There is a lot of talking about educational reform in California recently. Both politicians and parents are talking about this reform, but each of them wants to reform educational system in a different way.
There is an organization called CalCARE (or California Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education) that unites parents and teachers in their criticism. Main reason of this organization is to educate politicians, educators and parents of the current trends in Californian educational system. Recently too many tests appeared in Californian schools: High Stakes Tests, Exit Exams, STAR, SAT9, SABE, and California Standards Test. A lot of major issues, like holding back students, Academic Performance Index, transfer of principals and reconstitution of schools are based on STAR/SAT9 scores alone.
In order to “raise the bar” for student expectations two thousand one hundred sixty five standards were introduced to Californian schools. Having standards is great, but having standards that are impossible to reach, or having too many standards is not that great. 2165 standards mean that student will have to master approximately 1 new standard every day! And these standards are not that easy to master. Look at these examples of standards for instance:
History, grade 8 standard: “Students analyze the political principles underlying the U.S. Constitution and compare the enumerated and implied powers of the federal government, in terms of the political philosophy underpinning the U.S. Constitution as specified in The Federalist (authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay) and the role of such leaders as James Madison, George Washington, Roger Sherman, Governor Morris, and James Wilson in the writing and ratification of the Constitution.”
Science, grade 4 standard: “Electricity and magnetism are related effects that have many useful applications in everyday life. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know how to design and build simple series and parallel circuits using components such as wires, batteries, and bulbs.”
Mathematics, grade 12 standard: “Students understand improper integrals as limits of definite integrals.”
Language arts, grade 4 standard: “Students write clear, coherent sentences and paragraphs that develop a central idea. Their writing shows they consider the audience and purpose. Students progress through the stages of the writing process (e.g., prewriting, drafting, revising, editing successive versions).” (Moore, 2005)
Not all adults have yet mastered all these standards and students are expected to master 2165 of them during school.
Why is the reform needed? Because schools are in crisis. Politicians believe that it is a crisis of achievement. In 1983 when nation suffered some economic problems, government declared that it was because of the poor job that schools were doing. But even after economic situation became better, schools were still criticized for poor job. But schools are not doing a poor job, because there is a steady growth in SAT test results over a long period of time. Moreover USA is the leading country in the world by the percentage of students going to university after finishing high school, which also proves that there is no problem in achievements.
Big problem in Californian education is the following: in December of 1996 California adopted set of Content Standards, which means that from that point any student in the state would learn pretty much the same material. After adopting the set of Content Standards government officials were supposed to develop a test that would reflect these standards. Instead of doing that the California Board of Education decided to adopt one of the existing tests and they chose SAT-9. SAT-9 existed long before the new Standards and therefore did not follow the new curriculum. (Clark, 2003)
This is a reason why teachers try to cover material from the test, not from the new Content Standards. Test that covers the Content Standards is High School Exit Exam. This sounds absurd, but now student has to choose whether he/she wants to perform well on High School Exit Exam or SAT-9. It happens because it is almost impossible for a teacher and for a student to cover material for both tests.
There could be no problem with studying for the test, instead of studying as required by the curriculum, if studying for the test was of the same quality, but it is not. Here are several examples from the book called "Teaching Test-Taking Skills": (Scruggs, 1992)
- Remember, multiple choice test questions do not require that students produce the correct knowledge--only that the student accurately identifies an option as more likely correct than alternatives.
- Encourage students to guess whenever they feel unsure of an answer.
- The more time spent directly engaged in learning about or practicing the particular test-taking strategy, the better students will learn and perform that strategy.
In result teachers teach strategy instead of material itself, and students get knowledge of how to pass tests, instead of the information that will be useful for them in future.
In a state like California everyone is worried only about results of the test, since these results are very important for a student, they will determine in which university he/she will go or whether he/she will receive scholarship or not. It makes students to prepare very good for tests, but does it mean that if scores for tests gradually rise, the level of achievement also rises?
The research was done by Peter Sacks in his book "Standardized Minds". There were a number of findings in his research:
- In states, where high value was attached to a test, 11% of students were above the national average in their science proficiency, 33% were at the national average, and 56% were below the national average. In math, 17% were above, 17% were at the average, and 67% were below the national average.
- In states, where low or moderate value was attached to a test, 64% were above the national average in science, 29% were at the average, and only 7% were below average. In math, 64% were above, 14% at the average, and 21% below average.
- States with no testing programs were all above the national average in both science and math.
This leads to an idea that when students just study, without worrying about tests, they get a better level of achievement and there knowledge, therefore, is more valuable.
Instead of lowering the importance of tests, in the state of California SAT-9 test is used almost for everything: it screen students for promotion/retention decisions, ranks schools by the level of achievement statewide, ranks groups of students, etc. Even though test was not designed for these purposes, it is very extensively used.
Another issue is that in California there are a lot of people not yet fluent in English and SAT-9 was not designed for people not yet fluent in English, but it is still used to assess their level of achievement too.
One more problem with SAT-9 is that it is norm-referenced, which means that students are compared against each other, instead of comparing students against certain criterion or standard, which would be an issue in criterion-referenced test. When test is norm referenced, it does not tell us about the overall level of achievement. This test does not tell us how much a person knows, but just how many other students he/she beat.
In criterion-referenced test questions are usually the ones that were supposed to be learned in the curriculum. A criterion-referenced test assesses how much a person learned from the curriculum. In norm-referenced tests questions are not based that way. Usually questions are made up in such a way so that 40-60% of students could answer them correctly and the rest would fail. And it does not matter if the material was covered in student’s curriculum or not. Statistics is what matters.
Norm-referenced tests do not show results in percents, but in percentiles. For example, 50th percentile means that 50% of the students scored below this score and 50% scored above. When you deal with these numbers and see that, for example, last year school scored in 45th percentile and this year it scored in 52nd, one may think that school did a great job. But if think a little bit about this question, we may understand, that there is a possibility that it is not because school’s overall performance improved, maybe it is just that other schools’ overall performance decreased.
Many schools use these percentiles for important decisions, like retention of students. For example, the student scored in 34th percentile, which seems to be a not very good result. But if we assume that most of the students on that exam scored high, we would retain those students below 35th percentile, even though some of them had high scores, but not high enough to beat the rest of students. This way student that scored 35th percentile in one school could have better results than most of students in another school, where the overall performance was not that good.
Also there is a certain margin of error or deviation when reporting these results. A student scoring at the 34th percentile may have a true score of anywhere, say, from the 31st to the 37th percentile.
SAT-9 is single formatted – multiple choice. In many studies it has been shown that males usually handle multiple choice tests better than females. Alternatively, other test formats (open-ended questions, for instance) favor females over males. It would seem logical to make a mix of different formats in one test, but it was not done, maybe because of the ease of calculating results for multiple choice questions.
When all schools are ranked, a single number is used to do that. But how can one measure achievements of thousands of students with a single number? This is not profit or cost of goods sold, this is knowledge of students. In order to get high ranking schools start to focus all their attention on that magical number. As a result students are taught information needed for the test, not the one in the Content Standards.
Because of bad results on tests a lot of students lose self-esteem and believe that they will be unsuccessful on life. That is not true because these tests are not designed to measure neither level of achievement according to the required curriculum, nor success of a person in future. Therefore less value should be put into these tests.
The biggest problem is the difference in resources that low and high socioeconomic areas get. Problem is that all schools are compared on the basis of achievements and then “high” schools are rewarded and “low” schools are punished. The irony is usually that “low” performing schools are from low socioeconomic areas and by punishing them instead of helping their achievements become even worse. Gap between high and low schools becomes bigger and bigger with every year, simply because of the disparity of funding.
There is a very strong correlation between socioeconomic factors and students' scores on norm-referenced tests. One of the proposals to California Educational Reform is to abandon testing program and use state budget from testing to equal funding of all schools, without discriminating schools because of test scores of their students.
Instead of increasing funding or redistributing money, Californian government cuts back school financing every year because of overall budget shortfall. As a part of Educational Reform in California, officials propose to cut back financing by cutting back instructional programs. Officials claim that it is impossible to save money by cutting expenses on non-instructional services. That is untrue, and there is a proof: In May 2002, Philadelphia passed a $1.7 billion budget that projected a $28 million deficit by the end of that fiscal year. Next year they got a $2 million surplus. How did it happen? The answer is administrative cuts, better facilities management, and across the board cuts in programs not tied to the classroom. So it is possible to cut back funding without cutting school programs and firing teachers. (Snell, 2003)
A lot of people were concerned with abovementioned problems; as a result propositions to reform Educational system of California appeared. One of them is CBEE (California Business for Education Excellence) Reform Plan, which proposes the following: (California Business for Education Excellence, 2005)
- Hold schools accountable to ensure that students at all levels are attaining grade-level
Proficiency in reading, writing and mathematics as measured by the California Standards
Test – not just achieving “growth” meeting standards.
- Use best practices learned from high performing schools to aggressively intervene early to reduce achievement gaps in chronically low performing schools.
- Develop standardized end-of-course examinations in core high school subject areas.
Basically this reform proposal answers all the questions that both parents and teachers were asking. This reform basically proposes to give exams on the studied material and follow California Content Standards.
Looking at all these problems in Californian Educational system I am wondering what are the officials doing to change it. Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed the following in order to reform the system: (IGS Library, 2005)
- Cut of education funding that would save the state approximately $2.2 billion over 2005-06.
- Tie teacher raises to merit, instead of tenure.
- Take $362 million from different school categorical programs and use the money for professional development and teacher credentialing under one block grant.
As we see that instead of reforming testing system or teaching system, officials only agree on how to cut back funding and lower state budget deficit. Parents are worrying only about quality of education and not about how much money government will have to spend on it. Ideas and proposals of officials, parents and teachers do not meet again, as always.

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