History Shortchanged

Oh, the saga of low test scores in US schools. It's hardly a news story these days. Still, The New York Times, in response to the latest results of a nationwide test, found that most fourth graders are unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War. But, really, is that all too surprising? I am not so sure that most American adults could identify China as a North Korean ally in the 1950s, let alone, a crucial partner in the Korean War.

According to The Times' Sam Dillion, history advocates blame students’ poor showing on the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers and schools no longer have time for history — No Child Left Behind Act, with its requirement that schools raise scores in math and reading but in no other subject, allow time for little else. And if you are not being taught history, it's unlikely that you'll test well.

But as this Reuters story from 1995 shows, student declines in history knowledge is far from new. In fact, the decline even predates 1995. Still, in The Times article, Linda K. Salvucci, a history professor in San Antonio and chairwoman-elect of the National Council for History Education, explains one of the big issues around teaching history.

“History is very much being shortchanged,” Salvucci explains. Many teacher-education programs, she said, also contribute to the problem by encouraging aspiring teachers to seek certification in social studies, rather than in history. “They think they’ll be more versatile, that they can teach civics, government, whatever,” she said in The Times. “But they’re not prepared to teach history.”

Source: The New York Times

Students Take the Test for Teachers

New York City education officials are developing up to 16 new standardized tests for 3rd through 12th graders. But these tests, unlike other standardized tests, will rank teachers, not students.

Costing roughly $25 million to create, these tests will be added to the battery of standardized taks that US students already take. In  The New York Times' current "Room for Debate," editors ask, What have we learned about tests as accountability tools for teacher performance? Why do school systems believe that tests are the answer to reforming education?

Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of Education at Stanford University, kicks of the debate by reminding us that there's long been a saying that "US students are the most tested, and the least examined, of any in the world." She also reminds us that top-scoring countries in student achievement, like Finland and Korea, have eliminated crowded testing schedules and improved their scores by doing so.  And the inevitable result? Not higher scores, smarter kids, or better teachers. Rather, teaching and curriculum further narrowed further, as teachers — and the surrounding system — focus more intensely on these tests.

All true, but as Michael J. Petrilli, another debater and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, point out, at least New York City is trying. Granted, as he puts it, city officials are pretty much "attacking a fly with a sledgehammer." Still, as Petrilli explains, "it’s only common sense that one element of [teacher] evaluations should be an assessment of how much students are learning under the teacher’s charge." For Petrilli, the answer isn't a move "to centralized, rules-based, bureaucratic evaluation models, as indicated by New York City’s decision to add a dozen new tests to collect more teacher performance data." Rather, the approach out to be to simply trust the principal.