Standardized Tests & Cabezones

I can feel the sweaty rage across the cafeteria, where I'm drinking coffee. He hasn't seen me—too busy yelling. His game face is on, and his team is losing. Coach's battle voice pollutes the air. His words slap, bruise and punch in ways you can't see, but will keep me up all night.

"You faaaaaiiiiiled!" He keeps saying it.

The former coach is blaming the students for their poor grades. Some are stupified with shame, smiling, pretending this is cool. They are too old to melt into nothingness and too young to give him the finger.

This is just a snippet from a brilliant article in the Texas Observer on The Testing Machine: or Texas's TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) the standardized test a school is preparing for. The author is Bárbara Renaud González sent from the local university to observe a local public middle school in its effort to prepare for standardized testing that will determine whether it falls into the "low performing" category, lose funding, and possibly lose jobs of teachers and administrators as a result. There are no heroes in this story.

 

I started to post quotes but you'll just have to go read it, it's that good and I'd end up linking the whole darn article. No seriously why are you still here, click the link, go read the article!

Robot Recruiters?

Despite the lagging economy and a serious lack of jobs for PhDs, even in science, there's still a push to get more people into STEM fields, especially science and engineering. Arizona State University is highlighting their FIRST Lego League as a way to use robots to hook kids on engineering at an earlier age.

 

I think this is sort of misleading. 99.9% of engineers will not get to work on robots for a living, or not the kind of robots they think. Sure you can work on your own projects in your spare time, but there's no pre-requisite you be an engineer to do so. I mean, working on robots through my engineering curriculum certainly exposed me to it but there are clubs and internet tutorials and books for motivated folks who have an interest. That is if your day job doesn't kill all the curiosity and creativity that you had for side projects. Not that I'd know anything about that.

 

Clearly these kids are too young to have seen the Terminator films and know the dangers of building robots, so I guess before they can see an R rated movie is probably a good time to trick them into trusting the machines.

 

So I don't know, is recruiting more and more people into a shrinking field unethical? Just because we as a society need more scientists, engineers and innovators does not mean we should necessarily encourage that if we don't actually support it with government funding or K-12 education or investment incentives. Getting more kids into STEM is not by itself going to keep companies from shipping more jobs overseas, professional jobs included as India and China start to catch up with a plethora of qualified engineers.

 

When I worked on my robot project in school one of my group mates asked if I could help him find a job where I work as he was still trying to feel out where he wanted to go. At the time he was working in an on campus lab making small scale electromechanical assemblies with PID controls and really enjoyed that. I had to tell him the opportunity to do such things anywhere else were severely limited. Start up companies in the '90s might have risked one time robot builds for specific applications but in general companies tend to go for the sure thing. And there's innovation, but not in a ground up building your own robot kind of way.

 

So there's two things I don't like here. One, that we let people believe that "robots" are a good storefront window display for engineering. Two, that bringing people into an industry that can't necessarily support their steady employment is premature until we fix the institutional problems at the top.

the growing divide

If you're looking for a scapegoat in public education teachers unions make a good one. Most people don't understand how they work so charges of lack of accountability or costly pensions or healthcare (paid by your tax dollars) are more likely to go unchallenged. The WSJ has an interesting article on two latino students in Oklahama City. One goes to a public high school and one a charter school. They compare how many are eligible for free lunch (95% at the charter, 96% at the public) and numbers of college bound (62 out of 71 seniors at the charter, 40 out of 147 at the public). Both students miss a month of school to go to Mexico at some point, but only one student is working two jobs. One is college bound with scholarships, the other got one scholarship but will keep working locally.

 

I question their supposed implication for who is really successful. The charter school student, not having to work, got to participate in a lot of great high school programs. He left his gang days behind and instead "took to wearing straight-leg jeans and fashionable glasses." Do clothes make the man? Does imposing a uniform set of dress that society does not associate with hoodlums actually do anything for the "reformed" youth? And when he graduates in four years with a degree in whatever liberal arts discipline interested him will he be better off than she is as she continues to work?

 

Besides teacher unions, distracted parents are also blamed for the struggles these students go through. Often it is their teachers who are encouraging them to get into college. I can't help but wonder if that isn't imposing some western ideals on families whose definition of success might be different. I do think education is a great thing and that every student should have the opportunity to go to college. But maybe sending away the community's best and brightest without clear goals of what kind of degree is necessary to succeed, having them break ties with their neighbors, and not preparing them for what a college degree is actually worth these days is selling them a rotten deal. First generation college students, or students for whom very few members of their network went to college at all, may not realize what the struggles are. And we're only preparing them to get there, not showing them how they can then use that opportunity to leap to greater success.

 

The real heroes of the story appear to me to be the community leaders. The ones who stayed, invested in scholarship programs for these students, and organize the community events that both of the students were involved in.

 

I also dislike the comparison between a charter school and a public school. Besides the obvious, a charter school not having to "deal" with unions, laws, and many state or federal mandates on how to spend their money, the article sweeps over the difference in extra funding charter schools often get. All the benefits of public funding without any of the mandates, usually a much newer school than the public (this one is nine years old) and often with significant private funding. Yes I do think charter schools are useful to try new things that might get incorporated into public schools, but a school with private funding that gets to cap its enrollment is definitely more likely to help its students succeed than an overflowing public school that may have less freedom in booting out the less academically successful students. You'd think the conservatives over at the WSJ who applaud charter schools and their innovations could move pass the obvious teacher's union strawman and realize that more money means a better school.

 

We are left feeling the public school student will be less "successful" in terms defined by a white, middle-class business-centric authorship. I hope she is happy and satisfied with her life and that she still finds opportunities and challenges that she seeks, even if they aren't the ones the authors would consider important.