BatesLine

I'm stunned by today's banner headline article on the front page of today's Whirled. Here's the headline:

Test results spike after change

The story breathlessly tells of "remarkable results":

The statistical leaps being reported by area districts in the percentage of students deemed proficient in Algebra I are staggering -- up 51 percentage points in Glenpool, more than 60 percentage points in Sapulpa and 44 percentage points in Broken Arrow.

In Tulsa Public Schools, the percentage of students deemed proficient in Algebra I at Washington High School jumped from 17 to 86 percent, and Memorial High School's numbers went from 9 to 50 percent.

What change caused these results? A return to traditional methods of instruction? Better control of classroom behavior?

Nope. They just lowered the passing grade. Instead of needing to answer 41 questions out of 55 to be deemed proficient, now students only need to answer 26 out of 55 questions. In percentages, the passing grade was dropped from 75% correct to 47% correct. A student who gets as many answers wrong as right still is deemed proficient in Algebra.

What might be motivating this change in standards?

End-of-instruction exams are given to secondary students in Oklahoma in four subject areas, but only the results for the Algebra I and English II tests are used to gauge overall student achievement under state and federal school accountability systems.

They lower the standard and more students are able to meet the lowered standard. I'm just amazed that the Whirled would think that's worth a banner headline.

UPDATE:

Retired algebra teacher Michael Phillips comments on the Whirled website about the use of competency tests:

I am a retired Tulsa Public Schools teacher, who taught mostly algebra through out my career. I dreamed of someday seeing end-of-instruction exams in my classroom. There was a time in the mid 80s when Tulsa had a version of this. We were required to give what we called Competency Tests to each student in any high school level math class. Those students who passed were given the grade the teacher believed they earned through their course work. Those who failed the Competency Test failed the course. This system worked out well for those teachers who were demanding of their students. It was disaster for those teachers who offered little or no instruction and things were even worse for the students in their classes. The Tulsa Board of Education did away with these tests after a few years because too many parents were complaining about their children, who appeared to be doing well all year long and then suddenly failed their algebra course. I was of the opinion that they should have gotten rid of the do-nothing teachers, and kept the tests.

Much easier to fudge the numbers than to fix the problems that the numbers are revealing. It's like taking your child's temperature, finding out he's running a 102° fever, and instead of taking him to the doctor, re-marking the thermometer so it reads 98.6.

TRACKBACK: Stan Geiger says it's an example of the "media leg of the political-educational complex at work."

Our great "heroes of the classroom" have moved to increase the number of passing students by lowering the bar. And one of the biggest newspapers in the state offers no criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The way this story is written and its placement on the page are worth scrutiny. While the facts that reveal the number-fudging are in the story, they aren't called to the reader's attention in the headline or lead. The skimming reader may come away with the impression that Commissar Sandy Garrett has worked an educational miracle.

Regent Preparatory School of Oklahoma, a classical Christian school in Tulsa, is holding an open house tonight beginning at 7 p.m. for parents interested in the kind of education the school offers. The evening includes a chance to tour the school, visit classrooms, meet teachers and parents, see a video presentation of special school activities, and hear a discussion of the school's philosophy and approach to education.

Regent's new campus is located at 8621 S. Memorial Drive; park and enter on the south side of the building. Call 918-663-1002 for more information.

UPDATE: Brandon Dutcher reminds me about Pat McGuigan's profile of Regent Preparatory School, which appeared in the OCPA's April 2003 newsletter:

In our conversation, I discerned ways in which this institution separates itself from some other private schools where much of the emphasis seems to lie in separation from modern culture and its problems. Regent’s leaders and teachers view the school not as a retreat from the "real world," but as a place to prepare children for that world—and for the life beyond this one.

See also Gene Veith's article from that same newsletter on the resurgence of classical education in America.

Yale University has admitted as a special student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who had been a high-ranking official in Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime. John Fund had the story in the Wall Street Journal, writing of his spring 2001 encounter with Rahmatullah:

After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban's treatment of women and said he hadn't seen any evidence that their "guest" Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn't help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

In his latest Townhall.com column, Yale alumnus Clinton W. Taylor relays a creative way for alumni and others to protest Yale's action. In honor of the Afghan women who had fingernails pulled out by the Taliban for the crime of wearing fingernail polish, Taylor calls on us to send press-on nails to the school's president and head fundraiser. Taylor helpfully provides addresses for the recipients of your nail snail mail, and suggestions for more worthy recipients of what you would have given to Yale's alumni fund this year. And he encourages you to mail these tips along with the nail tips:

Feel free to point out the hypocrisy of Yale’s decision to admit Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who supported a regime that killed homosexuals, stoned women, tortured/killed many, and destroyed Buddhas, even though Yale keeps ROTC off campus and files briefs with the Supreme Court protesting the military’s right to recruit on campus.

I'm sure Yale administrators won't appreciate it, but I appreciate it when alumni like Taylor use what leverage they have to exert pressure on our elite academic institutions counter to the prevailing forces of political correctness and Western cultural suicide.

(* I know, somebody else beat me to this headline, but I thought of it as soon as I read the e-mail alerting me to Taylor's article, before she posted it over there. Really. And if my first idea was identical to that of an award-winning headline writer, there wasn't much point in trying to come up with a better one.)

It's the golden age of the autodidact.

An increasing number of universities are making course materials available online for free. The materials can't be used for course credit, but they are available for one's personal enlightenment and enrichment. Two institutions where I gained some higher learning offer online course material.

First, there's the MIT OpenCourseware program.

For example, the Urban Studies and Planning department offers materials from well over 50 undergraduate and graduate courses, with syllabi, reading lists, lecture notes, and assignments. Their introductory course, 11.001J, looks like an excellent, well, introduction, to the history, terminology, and trends of urban planning.

The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department offers everything I took in my undergraduate program, including the four foundational courses taken by all Course VI undergrads (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Circuits and Electronics, Signals and Systems, Computation Structures); Artificial Intelligence; Automata, Computability, and Complexity. They even have Strobe Lab, including the required lab experiments (student must supply own stroboscope, rifle, ammunition, and target objects).

Back in the early '90s, our church offered extension courses from Covenant Theological Seminary, and I took about a half-dozen until our church dropped out of the program. Covenant, in St. Louis, was founded in 1956 as the seminary of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), a denomination which, through a couple of mergers, became part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which denomination the seminary now serves. (There's a newer EPC, founded in the 1980s, which has no connection with the earlier denomination.)

Anyway, Covenant Worldwide offers materials from the 20 courses that would constitute the Master of Arts in Theological Studies program if you were taking the courses on campus. For each course there is lecture audio in MP3 format, plus lecture notes in PDF format, and a list of recommended reading materials.

I can highly recommend Ancient and Medieval Church History and Reformation and Modern Church History, both taught by Prof. David Calhoun. One of my fond memories about his lectures is that he always began with a prayer written in the age he is covering in the lecture.

The Francis Schaeffer course is interesting, too -- not only because it's about the background, life, and work of the renowned evangelical writer, but because the milestones of his life were the milestones that shaped modern evangelicalism, from the fundamentalist/modernist controversy in the '20s, through the break between separation-minded fundamentalists and evangelicals in the '50s, to the beginnings of Christian political activism in the late '70s.

I've never heard his lectures on theology, but Robert Peterson served as pulpit supply at our church during two periods when we were between pastors, and he's a wonderful teacher. His course, Humanity, Christ, and Redemption is online.

Many thanks to TulipGirl for the tip.

Sarah Beth has some sensible things to say (here and here) about higher education: Let's stop pretending that most college students are getting a broad, liberal education and recognize that for most students, even in the finest universities, college is little more than vo-tech, except that it takes longer and costs more.

Just now learned about this website, Operation: Information, which has a voter's guide for today's school board election in the Union school district. The site belongs to a group called Oklahomans for School Accountability.

After my entry last week about Tulsa Tech Board member Jim Baker's reelection campaign, and after mentioning him again this morning on KFAQ, I've heard from some friends who have positive things to say about Baker's challenger, O. M. "Bud" Sanders, Jr. I'm told that he's anti-recall, which is good, and that he would be the first board member in a very long time to be first elected to office, instead of getting on the board by appointment.

I haven't received any info by e-mail from him yet, but would be happy to post it when it comes in. In the meantime, he can be reached at 446-5194 or on his cell phone at 633-5032 if you have questions for him. His e-mail address is ombudsand@aol.com.

UPDATE: Here's Sanders' website from his previous campaign for State House. My wife spoke to him and said that he was concerned that there hasn't been an election for this seat in over 15 years, as board members have been appointed to fill vacancies but haven't faced opposition at election time. He also feels that it is wrong that Tulsa Technology Center is getting away from serving high schoolers (the original purpose of the Vocational-Technical education system) and trying to be more of a community college on a padded budget.

Greg and Susan Hill have put together a comprehensive guide to Tuesday's school board elections around the Tulsa area, complete with the names and phone numbers of all the candidates, and the precincts voting in the Tulsa County school board districts. (I converted their Word document to HTML -- unfortunately, the conversion made the tabs come out funny. Sorry.)

The Hills urge voters to call candidates and ask them their positions on the issues. School board elections are traditionally low turnout, and if enough reform-minded voters turned out to vote for a reform-minded candidate, some positive changes could be accomplished.

As I promised -- if Tulsa-area school board candidates will send me their contact information and something about their candidacy, I'll post it, in advance of next Tuesday's school board elections. Here's the first and only candidate who's taken me up on the offer so far.

Dr. Jim Baker is the incumbent member of the Tulsa Technology Center Board of Education for Office 7.

First, here is Dr. Baker's contact information: Phone number 918-299-3491, e-mail is jim.baker@att.net

You'll find his bio after the jump.

I received the information from Jonathan Goodwin, someone I met when I was helping to make get-out-the-vote effort at Tulsa County Republican HQ. Jonathan is now working with Dr. Baker's campaign, and he tells me that Baker, a two-term incumbent, is the conservative candidate in the race. He pointed out that Baker's opponent, Bud Sanders, ran in 2002 as a Democrat in State House district 68 against Chris Benge, the Republican incumbent. In that race, Sanders supported a general tax increase and was endorsed by the unions and the Tulsa Whirled.

Donald Luskin posts a message from reader Jameson Campaigne about corruption in textbook purchasing decisions. Some excerpts:

At a meeting of the nuns who chose elementary reading texts for the diocese schools in Chicago some decades ago, the head honcho nun praised a look-say basal reading series that nearly destroyed American literacy, and a voice from the back of the room quipped, "C'mon Sister, we know they buy you a new car every year!" ...

The cartel even conspires to prevent competition by lobbying through state laws which say, roughly, no state money can be spent on a textbook series with a copyright older than "X" years. In other words, a tried-and-true textbook series which really teaches kids how to read -- like that of the small firm Open Court, which consequently was forced to sell its superb program to McGraw Hill -- has to be scrapped or completely revised every "X" years, at the cost of $20+ million, an amount only the giants can afford.

The reasonable desire for every child to have his own textbook, combined with a belief that newer is better, provides fertile ground for textbook profiteers. Campaigne makes the point that centralized purchasing decisions make a publisher's job easier: Instead of having to convince someone in every school district to buy its books, it can target its marketing campaign (and possibly bribery) on a handful of individuals in each state. He advocates eliminating federal involvement in education and reducing the state role to administering tests and providing funds in the form of vouchers, so that parents can reward the schools that perform best. Campaigne quotes Wheeler's Law: "The way to get rid of corruption in high places is to get rid of the high places."

Textbook publishers don't make any money if schools are content with the books they have. It becomes essential for the publisher's bottom line to encourage new research revealing that their previous edition is inadequate and must be replaced. Universities are happy to receive funding to conduct such studies and to reach the conclusions desired by their sponsors. The mainstream media turns a blind eye to all this because many media conglomerates include a textbook publishing division.

Parents and children just want something that works.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades, who linked to that article, commenting on President Bush's failure to communicate clearly on this issue:

But Bush has this tendency to speak in shorthand, and it gets him into trouble. This person actually supported Bush's call to return to older, more effective ways of teaching children to read, but because he didn't make a very strong effort to explain what phonics was, this person thought he was calling for some newfangled and untested pedagogy. When in fact he was doing the opposite: calling for a rejection of the newfangled pedagogy, now tested and found wanting, and calling for a return to the old ways of teaching reading, the exact methods she favored.

Bush is the Great Miscommunicator, alas.

For speaking in shorthand, no one could beat Bob Dole, who chose to deliver all his 1996 campaign speeches in Senatese. It's easy to forget that not everyone is working from the same frame of reference.

A search for "slimy" and "Rhodes Scholar" turned up this item. Baldilocks tells the story of an educated and successful young black man who wanted to give back to his community and applied to teach in the metro Atlanta area. He was turned down -- here's part of the rejection letter:

"Though your qualifications are quite impressive, I regret to inform you that we have selected another candidate. It was felt that your demeanor and therefore presence in the classroom would serve as an unrealistic expectation as to what high school students could strive to achieve or become. However, it is highly recommended that you seek employment at the collegiate level; there your intellectual comportment would be greatly appreciated. Good luck."

Appalling -- read the whole thing.

(Oh, there was just an incidental Rhodes Scholar reference in the comments.)

Brian Micklethwait reports on Samizdata that the British free-market think-tank Civitas is nurturing the development of a chain of local and affordable private primary schools, called the New Model Schools.

A look at their curriculum reveals that their approach is similar to that of the classical Christian school movement in the US. They will be drawing on proven techniques for teaching basic skills, using direct instruction rather than the "child-centred discovery approach" favored in state schools. Storytime will draw on the best of Western culture -- "Bible stories, classic myths and legends, and other traditional tales" -- to build cultural literacy, including a basic knowledge of history and geography. Discipline will be grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics:

The New Model School has no problem with the idea that there are immutable moral laws and that, even with well-behaved children, there will always be a need for sensible rules....

The New Model School will be Christian in ethos, and will treat Judaeo-Christian ethics as an authoritative set of principles to be aspired to, rather than simply as one lifestyle choice among others.

During "reception year" -- for six-year-olds apparently -- the children will be in school three hours a day. By the end of the year, they will have learned phonics and high frequency sight words, and will be able to read a complex sentence. They will also be able to add and subtract two-digit numbers.

Their approach to education means you don't need extensive and expensive facilities like a pool or a computer lab or a campus. Local school organizers will be responsible to find an affordable place to hold classes. The aim is to keep the cost per pupil for reception year below £1000 (about $1800) a year.

The only thing I see missing is a hands-on component, something Regent Preparatory School (my son's school) provides through nature studies and art and music classes. This aspect of learning is emphasized in classical Christian schools influenced by the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason.

It is wonderful to see a think-tank going beyond simply making recommendations for government action and instead stimulating and guiding private action to fill a glaring societal need. As these schools are established and prove their worth, they should create pressure for public schools to drop the educational fads they've been embracing. In the meantime, British society needs the kind of educated citizens that these schools should produce if it is to have any capable civic leadership in the future.