The LA Times today (4/12/2015) reported on a USC study claiming “Majority of California's Latino voters highly
value school testing” (http://lat.ms/1CMbmaX)
Since when is a sample size of 400 statistically valid to survey a population of up to
12 million parents across an entire state as diverse as California?
By the way, according to the report's own findings, the same report’s
headline could have read: “college-educated Latinos who believe the exams help divided from those who say they hurt public education ”.
Why didn’t it?
Whose
interests are served by seeking to prove Latinos support high stakes
standardized privatized testing in public schools? What the heck is a Latino
anyways?
The University of
Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and
the Los Angeles Times, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, in conjunction
withAmerican Viewpoint survey findings can be read here: http://bit.ly/1z95rfm
The site claims,
“Voters were randomly selected from a list of registered voters statewide and
reached on a landline or cell phone depending on the number they designated on
their voter registration.”
Surveying
“1,504 registered California voters” the report claims its “study includes
an oversample of 400 known-Latino registered voters” and “33 percent of interviews among the known
Latino sample were conducted in Spanish and 67 percent in English.”
Of course, the LA
Times acknowledges that, “Latinos make up a majority of California's more than
6 million public school children. In the Los Angeles Unified School District,
the second-largest system in the country, three out of four students are
Latino.”
Interestingly, a
clear distinction between the minority white respondents and Latino are noted
but not expanded upon. “A majority of Latino voters, 55%, said mandatory exams
improve public education in the state by gauging student progress and providing
teachers with vital information. Nearly the same percentage of white voters
said such exams are harmful because they force educators to narrow instruction
and don't account for different styles of learning.” What to do these white voters know that "Latinos" still don't get?
Here, two
fundamental flaws in this limited view into Latino voter logic are apparent:
1.
Mandatory state exams measure student “progress” and
2. Mandatory state exams
provide teachers with “vital information”.
Of course, educators and researchers
at USC should already know that student performance as measured by annual exams
is stale by the time reports are produced and never provide information useful
to teachers due to the typical time it takes for reports to be published, analyzed,
and delivered in most public school systems. What can become useful in limited
instances with adequate care is the use of longitudinal data to identify
individual and group trends in performance as a result of curricular mutations
caused by the testing itself.
Ultimately, the
report and the article are both deceptive. One should wonder if there is
purpose to this deceit. Unfortunately, one of the global impacts of the testing ideology in the United States is the exportation of the intellectual maquila to countries like Mexico causing massive social protest and a clear manipulation of that country's sovereignty.
As noted in a 2005 National Indian Education Association report on the impact of NCLB on American Indian communities, “The standards and practices [of NCLB] are not sound for the teaching of Indian children. Our children see and order their world very differently from most other children, and, as a result, demonstrate their knowledge in deepening and unique ways. The current push to meet the academic standards set out in the No Child Left Behind law rejects the need to provide culturally competent instructions.” Of course the core practice of NCLB was privatized, standardized, high stakes testing to drive instruction.
A recent study by noted scholar Dr. Teresa L. McCarty also points out the most promising practices supported by her research include those which: " facilitate learners’ self-efficacy,
critical capacities, and intrinsic motivation as thinkers, readers, writers, and ethical social agents.
Promising practices support teachers’ professionalism and invest in the intellectual resources present
in local communities. Promising practices promote Indigenous self-determination. In addition,
promising practices:
1. Enable students to achieve full educational parity with their White mainstream peers, with
the long-term goal of preparing Indigenous students for full participation in their home
communities and as citizens of the world (Thomas & Collier, 1997).
2. Contribute substantively and positively to learners’ personal well being and the development
of their academic and ethnic identities.
3. Promote positive, trusting relationships between the school and the community, helping to
complete the circle of what the linguist Fred Genesee (1994) calls “the whole child, the
whole curriculum, the whole community.”
None of these practices involve improved periodic standardized assessments, common standards, or high stakes - to the contrary, the single most important commonality is the advancement of SELF-DETERMINATION or sovereignty.
To the extent that the LA Times article and USC research even marginally addresses Mexican, Central American and other indigenous peoples, not only do the results deceptively incriminate an entire market identified ethnic grouping (i.e. "Latinos") in their own colonization and deculturalization through public education, but it also promotes the very profitable testing of children by multinational private industry as the magic bullet for social equity through education.
Promoting education and social justice as indigenous peoples never involves more or better tests.
For more info on negative impacts of U.S. style testing in Mexico see:
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