A lengthy exploration of IQ testing for kindergarten placement from the New York magazine’s website adds to the growing chorus of those questioning of the role of tests in our kids lives. This article’s focus is on kindergarten placement tests but also touches on issues of class, equality, corporate influence, and, offers insights into better ways to approach assessments.
The Junior Meritocracy
Should a child’s fate be sealed by an exam he takes at the age of 4? Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless, at best.Let’s start with the most basic problem: School starts in kindergarten. No matter how a child is doing at that moment, no matter where that child is in the great swoop of his or her developmental arc, that’s when parents send their kids off to school.
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There was a time, not that long ago, when few parents attempted to prep their 4-year-olds for kindergarten-admission exams. But then a few more began to do it, and then a few more after that, and then suddenly, normal-seeming people with normal-seeming values began doing it, too, and an arms-race mentality kicked in.
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As it turns out, intelligence tests miss lots of things, not just creativity. And perhaps that explains why IQs alone are not especially good predictors of excellence. In the twenties, for instance, Lewis Terman, a psychologist and deep believer in intelligence testing—it was he who revised Alfred Binet’s original test and came up with the Stanford-Binet model—started a now-famous longitudinal study of nearly 1,500 California children with extremely high IQs. He grandiosely called it “Genetic Studies of Genius,” and his hope was to show that these children, whom he called “exceptionally superior,” would one day form the backbone of the nation’s intellectual and creative elite, making crucial advances in sciences and public policy and the arts.
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One of the most compelling reasons to get rid of it, he [Nelson, head of Calhoun school] notes, isn’t because the test is intellectually pointless. It’s because it’s emotionally insidious. “When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that’s supposed to be qualitative at a young age,” he says, “no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents’ anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there’s a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it’s beginning at an age that’s criminal.”
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Given his druthers, Meisels, at Erikson Institute, says he’d try to get a more comprehensive picture of the child. “And that can only be found through watching children in classroom situations,” he says. “And looking at the products of their work. And getting to know them. And that can be done through observational assessments.”
I try to interrupt him, but he anticipates my objection. “It’s not very practical, I know,” he says. “It means teaching teachers how to do it. It’d be more expensive.
In reading through this piece I found myself muttering that it is about time this picture gets painted. The head of Calhoun school is quoted as saying, “I want kids who are cynical enough at age 4 to know that there’s really something wrong with someone asking them these things and think, ‘I’m going to screw with them in the process!”
My thought is that we would all be better off if more parents were skeptical of the process of schooling for their kids.
Read the whole piece here.
Tags: assessments, entrance exams, importance of parents, IQ tests, Meritocracy, observational assessments, parents, Special Needs - Gifted, Testing
I had missed this story from back in January. It comes from Stories From School, Practice meets Policy
Several years ago my principal and I spent a lunch hour on a home visit to see one of my students. He had been absent for a week, after telling us that he was going to be homeschooled.
This boy had come to me after a previous bout of homeschooling, essentially two years behind his peers, but was just beginning to make steady progress.
We were not happy to hear that he would be homeschooled, and feared for the worse. He lived with a single mom who lacked basic parenting skills and we were legitimately concerned that with her as his teacher he could essentially become a third grade drop-out. So we set out to change her mind.
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So where does state law stand in regards to homeschooling? Well off to the side, actually. All a parent has to do is file an Intent to Homeschool and show that they’ve either taken 45 credits of college-level courses (in anything) or that they’ve taken an approved class on homeschooling. That’s it. Homeschooled kids have to take periodic tests, but they don’t necessarily have to pass them. With all the recent focus on school accountability, it seems odd that the state is so loose with homeschool oversight.~~~
Now I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there who are effectively homeschooling their children for all the right reasons. But this mother was not one of them. And what would have happened ten years down the road, when he was eighteen years old with a third grade education?I can’t imagine, but I’d sure like to see someone in Olympia take a long, critical look at our state’s homeschool law.
The author wrote that he and his boss “had the strong feeling that the mom was just plain lonely. She wasn’t working at the time, seemed depressed and wanted her son around to keep her company.” I will have to take his word that this was a sad situation – I wasn’t there and didn’t see.
Our family was involved in lobbying for the WA state law and these concerns were indeed aired – that was 1985. Schools continue to struggle, it is tough times for families. What’s new is “all the recent focus on school accountability”.
Do we put an entire group of families under suspicion because of one, or even a few bad situations? It is a poor idea for many reasons but hard cases make bad law.
Read the piece Dim View piece here. More thoughts on this issue here and here.
Tags: educational accountability, Family Matters, homeschool law, homeschooling, Washington homeschool law
From Lancaster And Morecambe Citizen we learn about the controversial Government proposals to monitor home educators:
If the bill is passed, home educators will be forced to join a register, and Cumbria County Council children’s services will have the right to enter their home to ensure they are providing quality education. Parents may also have to submit their curriculum plans for the year.
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Jayne Richardson, of Gran-ge-over-Sands, who educates her three children aged nine, 12 and 15, has been heavily involved in a campaign to get the bill thrown out of parliament.“A lot of us feel the proposed changes are not about benefiting the child but about control.” she said.
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A spokesman for Cumbria County Council said: “The local authority wants to ensure all young people in Cumbria are able to reach their potential.“We work in partnership with home educators to support children.
“While we have a monitoring duty, this is completed through developing good working relationships with parents and children.
Odd way to build trust to be sure. Read the entire piece here.
Tags: home visits, homeschooling, homeschooling freedoms, homeschooling in England, Regulations
Homeschoolers have assumed the responsibility for this decision for years:
The requirements for a diploma have varied over time. What has not changed, however, is the public need to feel confident that graduation from high school represents a real achievement.
But what that achievement encompasses and when students are ready to graduate remain contentious questions. Does graduation represent minimal competency or the mastery of school subject knowledge? Do high school graduates gain the knowledge and skills necessary to lead successful lives, or only those necessary for postsecondary education? These seem like important issues, but two questions most concern me today: When are students ready to graduate, and who should decide?
In response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, many states have given over to test-makers considerable power to decide these questions.
The real bottom line question is, whose vested interest should be respected? A corporation’s vested interest in their product, a school system in its institution, or parents’ vested interest in their children?
Read the entire piece here.
Tags: high school diploma, high school graduation, postsecondary education, SG Grant
TIME picks up the Romeike asylum case:
The ruling is sure to ignite passions on both sides of the debate — and may spur other parents around the world to follow the Romeikes’ lead. If this happens, the U.S. could see a flood of a new type of refugees —educational asylum seekers.
This is a tough call for me. I do wish the Romeike family the best and in no way begrudge the better life they appear to have made for themselves.
My reservation is that I have seen, studied and published too much on HSLDA’s activism over the years for a full throated ‘Hurray’. We will see much more of this.
o
Read the TIME piece here.
Tags: German homeschooling, homeschooling, HSLDA, Romeike family
