FOCUS DC News Wire 10/1/13

 

 

A tougher grading scale on the District’s 2013 standardized tests would have yielded lower-than-reported math proficiency rates for many schools, with stark differences at the middle-school level, according to data released Monday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

 

But reading proficiency rates at most D.C. schools would have been higher than reported had city officials used the alternative grading scale, which educators recommended to judge students’ proficiency on more rigorous tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards. City officials instead discarded the alternative scoring and went with a model they said allowed them to compare scores across years, a decision that resulted in gains in math and reading.

 

Citywide, the alternative grading scale would have yielded math proficiency rates that were 3.6 points lower than in 2012, and it would have shown reading proficiency rates that were 6.6 points higher. But the OSSE emphasized that the results are unofficial and — because they emerge from a different grading scale — cannot be compared with proficiency rates reported in prior years.

 

“These unofficial proficiency percentages should in no way be compared to results from previous years, but should be considered the creation of a new baseline or measure that stands alone,” wrote Emily Durso, the interim state superintendent of education, in an e-mail to school leaders Friday.

 

The OSSE released the recalculated test results in the wake of a Washington Post report that revealed city officials’ decision to reject the alternative grading scale after seeing how it would affect results. Agency officials said their choice was meant to avoid wreaking havoc on charter-school rankings and other accountability systems.

 

The OSSE’s failure to publicly explain that decision led to fierce criticism and accusations of cheating from David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee.

 

“I’m delighted that these scores have been released,” he said Monday. “Now our students and teachers and parents and other professionals can look at the numbers honestly and evaluate how the students did on this tougher test.”

 

OSSE officials maintained that the test gains announced at a celebratory July news conference are the best measure of progress.

 

The alternative results offer a glimpse of the challenge awaiting schools in 2015, when the city is slated to administer a new and more difficult test aligned to the Common Core, new national standards for K-12 education. Scores are expected to drop.

 

D.C. middle schools appear to face the largest leap in math, according to the results. At Kelly Miller Middle School, for example — where Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) announced the city’s test score gains this summer — 53 percent of students were deemed proficient in math, according to the grading scale the OSSE used. But only 37 percent of students were proficient under the rejected scale. Many middle schools saw similar discrepancies.

 

“As a district, we have many ways to measure how our students are performing,” Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson wrote in an open letter to the community Monday. “All of these measures tell us the same thing. We have made a ton of progress and we have lots of work left to do.”

 

Under the rejected grading scale, 42.9 percent of the public school system’s students would have been deemed proficient in math, lower than the 49.5 percent reported in July. Meanwhile, 49.5 percent would have been proficient in reading, higher than the 47.4 percent previously reported.

 

Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, pointed out that some schools — including Eagle Academy, E.L. Haynes and D.C. Preparatory Academy — scored higher under the alternative grading scale. Those results show that “some schools are already using instructional strategies and math curricula that maximizes the higher-order thinking skills required for students to truly master” the new Common Core standards, DeVeaux said in a statement.

 

 

I spent some tedious time early this morning comparing the math and reading DC CAS proficiency rates for all the D.C. Public Charter School Board's Performance Management Framework Tier 1 schools using the data that was released yesterday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education and the results from July of this year. Too bad I didn't stay in bed.

 

I definitely see the pattern that Emma Brown writes about today. In general the math scores decrease and the reading proficiency rates increase. There are some anomalies to this finding but I'm far from an expert in what these outliers mean so I'm not going to bother to specifically call them out.

 

As a service to you, the reader, I'm going to summarize the whole controversy over which of the two different grading scales OSSE could have utilized to score the DC CAS in one sentence. We have much more important things to worry about regarding public education in the nation's capital.

 

The big loser in all of this is of course D.C. Council education committee chairman David Catania. To state that OSSE was cheating, or to explicitly claim that there was an effort to manipulate the findings to inflate student academic improvement for political reasons, is absurd. If he was out to destroy his credibility then at least now he has one victory under his belt.

 

DCPS chancellor Kaya Henderson provides a great conclusion to this matter, as quoted by Ms. Brown. "“All of these measures tell us the same thing. We have made a ton of progress and we have lots of work left to do.”

 

I'm going to try and get some more sleep.

 

 

LOS ANGELES — AS children return to school this fall and sign up for a new year’s worth of extracurricular activities, parents should keep one question in mind. Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the program organizers this: “Which kids get awards?” If the answer is, “Everybody gets a trophy,” find another program.

 

Trophies were once rare things — sterling silver loving cups bought from jewelry stores for truly special occasions. But in the 1960s, they began to be mass-produced, marketed in catalogs to teachers and coaches, and sold in sporting-goods stores.

 

Today, participation trophies and prizes are almost a given, as children are constantly assured that they are winners. One Maryland summer program gives awards every day — and the “day” is one hour long. In Southern California, a regional branch of the American Youth Soccer Organization hands out roughly 3,500 awards each season — each player gets one, while around a third get two. Nationally, A.Y.S.O. local branches typically spend as much as 12 percent of their yearly budgets on trophies.

 

It adds up: trophy and award sales are now an estimated $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada.

 

Po Bronson and I have spent years reporting on the effects of praise and rewards on kids. The science is clear. Awards can be powerful motivators, but nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve.

 

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found that kids respond positively to praise; they enjoy hearing that they’re talented, smart and so on. But after such praise of their innate abilities, they collapse at the first experience of difficulty. Demoralized by their failure, they say they’d rather cheat than risk failing again.

 

In recent eye-tracking experiments by the researchers Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall, kids were asked to draw pictures. Those who heard praise suggesting they had an innate talent were then twice as fixated on mistakes they’d made in their pictures.

 

By age 4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.

 

It turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and uncertainty of real competition may become the activity’s very appeal.

 

If children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never obstacles to begin with?

 

If I were a baseball coach, I would announce at the first meeting that there would be only three awards: Best Overall, Most Improved and Best Sportsmanship. Then I’d hand the kids a list of things they’d have to do to earn one of those trophies. They would know from the get-go that excellence, improvement, character and persistence were valued.

 

It’s accepted that, before punishing children, we must consider their individual levels of cognitive and emotional development. Then we monitor them, changing our approach if there’s a negative outcome. However, when it comes to rewards, people argue that kids must be treated identically: everyone must always win. That is misguided. And there are negative outcomes. Not just for specific children, but for society as a whole.

 

In June, an Oklahoma Little League canceled participation trophies because of a budget shortfall. A furious parent complained to a local reporter, “My children look forward to their trophy as much as playing the game.” That’s exactly the problem, says Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me.”

 

Having studied recent increases in narcissism and entitlement among college students, she warns that when living rooms are filled with participation trophies, it’s part of a larger cultural message: to succeed, you just have to show up. In college, those who’ve grown up receiving endless awards do the requisite work, but don’t see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that attendance is all it takes to get a promotion.

 

In life, “you’re going to lose more often than you win, even if you’re good at something,” Ms. Twenge told me. “You’ve got to get used to that to keep going.”

 

When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin destined for landfills. We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children’s lives.

 

This school year, let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose.