Absent, part-part-time, and cast-off dads matter hugely in today’s academic results. They are one of many disparate factors that get eclipsed by endless discussions of standardized test results. We don’t use those tests to make any useful recommendations related to this topic — or any topic as it applies to an individual student.
These tests are big data. They are mostly meant for government bureaucrats, not teachers, parents or students. Schools may pick up some ancillary benefit as they compare results to those of other locations, but those benefits are microscopically tiny when compared to the costs of testing. Parents may learn areas where tutoring might be useful — but they will get little information on exactly what tutoring is needed. And you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When Mack is struggling in mathematics, his parents likely don’t require multi-day tests to find that out. A quick email to his teacher will work much better, and should result in helpful information weeks or even months sooner.
Here are a few interesting stats:
Children of divorce are less likely to earn a four-year or graduate degree, according to recent research from Iowa State University. They have lower GPAs and are statistically 24% less likely to receive a high school degree. (See Link between divorce and graduate education a concern as more jobs require advanced degree • News Service • Iowa State University (iastate.edu) and 8 Ways Divorce Can Impact a Child’s Academic Pursuits – Divorce Magazine.)
Eduhonesty: I picked this issue out of a basketful of factors that are almost never addressed within our schools. Those state standardized tests are DISTRACTING us from many elements that matter in our children’s educations. They are also documenting and redocumenting facts we already know. We identified our struggling zip codes decades ago. With rare exceptions, those zip codes are still struggling. We connected low socio-economic status (SES) to low test results decades ago. Has this country done anything meaningful to address this challenge? I’d have to say that No Child Left Behind amounted to ten giant steps backwards in terms of solving that problem of low-SES skewing of test results downward. In fact, NCLB might just have been a rocket ride in the wrong direction.
Big data hasn’t helped us. Big data is hurting us, in fact, as I have documented throughout this blog. In the meantime, we are so busy sorting data and putting it into spreadsheets that the meeting about support for fatherless children or children in the middle of life-changing events such as divorce — well, that meeting probably never happens. The discussion about possibly adding another counselor or social worker? Another meeting that never happens.
Eduhonesty: I want to repeat that I am not anti-test. But every test creates opportunity costs. The most obvious cost is the material that we cannot teach because we are testing yet again. I lost about 1/5th of my last school year to testing preparation and testing before I retired. Honestly, that year’s testing schedule (2 benchmark tests times 3, added on to the year of two PARCC tests, not including “practice” tests) was close to INSANE.
But this post is intended to highlight one more underexplored cost of testing. What about the fatherless children? And that’s only a small start. We have identified many factors that affect educational success.
What about the homeless children? Homelessness has been exploding lately according to some sources. Anecdotal sources talk about growing tent cities within cities. “The nation has experienced three straight years of increases in homelessness…” according to COVID-19 and the State of Homelessness – National Alliance to End Homelessness. The article notes that, “as unemployment rapidly increases, so do predictions for homelessness, with one expert estimating that nearly 250,000 new people could join this already growing population over the course of the year.”
Missing fathers and lost homes are urgent problems that schools should be addressing. Counselors and social workers are sometimes thin on the ground, though, especially in cash-strapped districts. I don’t want to bog down in the absurdity of property-tax-based school funding. I do want to highlight critical absences — the discussions that never take place because we are too busy manipulating numbers.
One more problem with testing run amok: We end up ignoring problems that cry out for action while we dissect late-arriving tests instead. I have already pointed out in my last post that the tests almost always come back after the school year is effectively over, and sometimes well into summer or even the next fall. Then the PowerPoints start being created to share the data. (Or worse, they don’t get created and that data never informs any important decisions despite the time loss it generated.) The professional developments start being crafted to try to teach that Common Core math that didn’t work for the last few years, but maybe if we… or we… or… a lot of brainstorming happens in curriculum meetings that points directly at that test or the standards that built the test.
In the meantime, does anyone attack the problem of fathers or nonexistent housing? Some of our children might benefit enormously from extra support that never arrives because we never even start talking about their problem. Unless those students begin breaking down into tears regularly in school, no one may recognize they are facing any new or unusual challenges at all.
We only have so much time. I understand that we cannot solve the world’s problems and we must tread lightly when addressing students’ home lives. But aspects of life outside the classroom manifest in performance struggles within the classroom. Those aspects keep getting ignored as we myopically try to push test scores up by looking only at those tests themselves, usually shortly before we begin the meetings to prepare for the next test.
I believe we would benefit greatly from taking standardized tests off the table for a few years, giving ourselves time to take a good look around at what is happening in American education — at what has been happening with America’s students. Because our students should not be seen as sources of data. They are children, and a great deal has been happening in their lives lately. They absolutely do not require more stress — especially since we are unlikely to learn much of anything new from the testing that is stressing them.
I AM SO SICK OF ARTICLES THAT TELL ME — SHOCK!! — HOW POVERTY AND LOW TEST SCORES GO HAND IN HAND. Yes, and water is wet, there are too many shootings in Chicago, and our kids waste too much time on their phones. We know that already. Can we go on to the next step? That step is not another test or test-preparation session.
I strongly suspect a review of demographic and socioeconomic correlations from the year 2000 — or even 1970 — would show the same racial and economic divides we see today. See The Racist Consideration in Testing that Does Not Hit the News | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) for an example. Certainly the last decade or two has kept hitting the same nails on the head over and over again.
No Child Left Behind has failed. The Common Core is failing. Our toxic testing culture has not put a dent into the achievement gap. Maybe freeing time and funds to help individual children navigate their complicated times could help. But we will never manage to help individual children unless we can free up and commit time, energy and conversations to identifying possible solutions for the problems holding our students back.
The massive time suck from standardized testing prevents those conversations from ever taking place.
Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner