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How the Other Half Learns: Reorienting an Education System That Fails Most Students
ABSTRACT
America’s education system, from kindergarten through the state university, is designed to produce college graduates. Those who stop short of at least a community-college diploma are widely regarded as failures, or at least victims of a failed system. Yet most Americans fall into this category, and current trends offer little hope for improvement. Politicians and policymakers are finally paying attention to this population—which, roughly speaking, comprises the working class—and calls for more vocational education and apprenticeships have become fashionable. But a more fundamental reordering of the nation’s misshapen educational infrastructure is necessary if alternatives to the college pipeline are to take their rightful place as coequal pathways to the workforce.
KEY FINDINGS
* Fewer than one in five students travel smoothly from high school diploma to college degree to career; most Americans fail to earn even a two-year associate’s degree. Students are as likely to drop out of high school, skip higher education, drop out of college, or earn a degree unnecessary to their subsequent jobs.
* Contrary to conventional wisdom, a college degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for reaching the middle class. The wage and salary distributions for college graduates and high school graduates overlap significantly; high-earning high school graduates in a wide variety of fields that require no college degree earn substantially more than low-earning college graduates.
* While the potential demand for a serious Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathway is huge, the federal government spent only $1 billion on CTE in 2016 but more than $70 billion subsidizing college attendance. State and local governments spent an additional $80 billion on college and almost nothing on expanding CTE pathways. Federal spending on college has more than doubled since 1990; spending on CTE has declined.
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Study: Newspaper Coverage of Teacher Strikes Favored Pro-Strike Voices 4-to-1
A study from the conservative nonprofit American Enterprise Institute found that major newspapers heavily favored pro-union quotations when reporting on the spring 2018 teacher strikes.
AEI scholars Frederick M. Hess and RJ Martin examined 59 stories from national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal to study how they covered the series of teacher strikes that broke out in states as varied as West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina.
Hess and Martin give newspapers credit for remaining "remarkably impartial" in both their headlines and their ledes. Of the stories analyzed, 56 of the 59 used neutral headlines and lede paragraphs compared to only three stories that used pro-strikes headlines, two stories that used pro-strike ledes, and one story that used an anti-strike lede.
But when it came to larger substance of the stories, the authors identified several areas in which newspapers favored pro-strike voices, particularly when it came to quotes from interested parties. Of the quotes included in the articles, 60 percent supported the strikes, while 26 percent were neutral and only 14 percent were anti-strike.
Newspapers also favored sources that were most likely to be supportive of the strikes over those most likely to be burdened by strikes. Teachers or union leaders provided 52 percent of quotes, 31 percent were from politicians or officials, while a measly 5 percent came from students or parents.
"This omission is striking because families were the largest group impacted by the walkouts— in Arizona alone, over 800,000 students were affected— a bore the brunt of the disruptions," the authors wrote. "Whatever families thought of the strikes, positive or negative, was obviously important." Even when quotes from parents and students did make it into print, 5/6 were supportive of the strikes."
AEI also faulted newspapers for failing to accurately report on the nature of teacher compensation. While every single story discussed teacher salaries, "less than half the articles mentioned healthcare benefits, and barely a third mentioned pensions. Just three percent of stories even obliquely referenced the value of teacher pensions, and not a single one mentioned teacher vacation time or the length of the teacher work year."
The scholars also complained the information given in most articles was not enough to allow readers to form an informed opinion. "Half the stories did not even include the pertinent average teacher salary," they noted. "Meanwhile, just 2 percent of articles compared teacher pay to the state’s median household income."
SOURCE
Australia: National educational testing under attack because it exposes the truth
The latest skirmish in the never-ending war against NAPLAN is being fought on the grounds of "comparability". According to American consultants commissioned by the NSW Teachers’ Federation, this year’s NAPLAN results “should be discarded” because around 20 per cent of students completed NAPLAN online while the rest used paper and pencil. The consultants claim that “enormous” differences between the two test formats make any comparison between them misleading.
The latest NAPLAN battle is over whether the results of the online test can be compared with those of the traditional written test.
The latest NAPLAN battle is over whether the results of the online test can be compared with those of the traditional written test.
Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
Curiously, the offshore consultants reached their conclusion without any reference to the 2018 NAPLAN results. Instead, they relied on a few studies of other tests, including some 30-year-old ones — what sort of computers were around then? — their own opinions, and some gratuitous comments about the incompetence of Australian statisticians.
The consultants’ report is riddled with errors. Despite the report’s claims to the contrary, students sitting the online test can in fact go back to review and change answers to previous questions. More importantly, there are numerous examples of large-scale assessments like NAPLAN that have been able to draw valid comparisons between online and paper results. These include the Program for International Assessment, or PISA, and the Trends in International and Science Study, or TIMMS.
ACARA has now released this year’s results and they clearly show that the online and paper and pencil tests are indeed comparable.
This does not mean that the paper and pencil and the online test are identical — they are different — but they are comparable because both measure the same underlying skills: numeracy and literacy. Comparing NAPLAN scores across testing modes — or across years, for that matter — is like comparing length using centimetres and inches. They are different, but they can be compared because they both measure the same thing (length).
As it turns out, there was a difference between the paper and pencil and the online version of NAPLAN, but it was not one that the union’s consultants predicted. Based on a 1992 study, the consultants claimed that typewritten essays receive lower marks than handwritten ones. The year 9 NAPLAN results showed just the opposite — students who completed their writing tests online scored higher on the average than those who wrote by hand. This result reflects older students’ experience with writing on computers and the ease with which computer writing can be reviewed and edited.
The ability to write clearly is a vital skill; it is essential to success in practically all lines of work, yet this year’s NAPLAN results show that writing scores are at their lowest level since NAPLAN testing began. Because students are more likely to review and edit their work when writing on a computer, online writing has the potential to improve both instruction and assessment. Instead of criticising word processing and online writing, we should be harnessing this technology to improve writing skills.
The online version of NAPLAN offers numerous benefits. Results will be available much earlier in the school year to facilitate earlier intervention, and they will also be more precise. In contrast to the present one-size-fits-all paper test, NAPLAN online is tailored to the abilities of each student. Teachers receive a more precise picture of each student’s strengths and weaknesses. Also, for the first time, NAPLAN will be able to be tailored to the individual needs of students with disabilities.
Like the legendary Rorschach inkblots used by psychiatrists, NAPLAN elicits radically divergent responses from different observers. Depending on whom you ask, the tests are too short, too long, too soft, too difficult, too narrow, too broad, too frequent or too rare. And now we are told that they cannot be compared. None of this is true.
NAPLAN exposes the truth. This year it exposed a persistent lack of improvement in writing in the 10 years since the assessment started, with one in five Year 9 students failing to achieve the minimum benchmark. Without NAPLAN we would be in the dark about these parlous education outcomes, which risks seeing our students continue to fail.
NAPLAN holds teachers, principals, schools and governments accountable. And it ensures the transparency of education results — allowing parents to be well informed. Many people find this uncomfortable, so they attack the assessment using every argument that they can mount.
It is time for parents, policymakers, and community leaders to make their voices heard. This battle will likely not be the last skirmish in the war on NAPLAN. But if the battalions that are attacking NAPLAN win, it is our students who will lose.
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