Lowering standards to "improve" performance is reprehensible

The surest guarantee that a child will grow into an adult with the skill set s/he needs to enjoy their life, appreciate and defend their liberty, and enable their own happiness, is a good education.

How does "good" education manifest itself?  A common measure of the effectiveness of education is testing.  We understand that if a test is given, the student's performance on the test will be an indicator of how well the student has been educated.

It is widely accepted that if a large number of students in a district, state or country perform poorly in testing; there has been a systemic failure in that district, state or country.

A systemic failure is the responsibility of those who were given public power and resources to solve a public problem and then either could not or would not.  It is in their interests to not create a record of their failure.

It is in the interests of those people, that the system looks like it is doing a good job.  It is in the interests of those people that test scores appear to be improving.

There are no longitudinal testing records to compare in order to see whether test scores in APS for example, are improving, falling  or staying the same.  You cannot compare test scores between decades.  Every few years, tests are re-normed and cannot be (easily) compared to previous and subsequent scores.   The tests are re-normed in the interests of those whose competence and conduct are reflected in falling or climbing test scores.

The NM PED has decided to conduct course end testing in order to evaluate student growth and teacher competence. The NM PED sets the level of performance for a "passing" grade.

According to the Journal, link, 

"On nine of the end-of-course exams in core subjects, only three require students to answer half or more of the questions correctly. The percentages needed to pass range from 20 percent on a math test to 68 percent on a reading test."

NM Education Secretary
Hanna Skandera has not
yet offered justification for
lowering the expectations
for "passing" grade.

The obvious answer is that
by giving more passing grades,
the system looks to be doing a
better job, though in truth
the raw scores may have even fallen.


She is yet to justify the utterly unjustifiable curve she and Governor Susana Martinez applied to the letter grading of schools, link; a curve that made them look like they were doing a good job improving schools, when in fact the schools might actually have declined if measured according to the previous rubric.

Ask a teacher, and they will tell you students should be learning to the mastery level, wikilink; master one set of skills before trying to acquire the next.

One cannot teach to mastery and at the same time teach thirty kids each in a desk in one of five rows of six desks, all in the same textbook, all on the same page, each and every day.

Individual mastery level learning cannot be measured on yearly standardized tests.

There is a ton of money to be made in publishing textbooks and standardized testing.

There very little money to be made in creating independent lifelong learners at the earliest possible opportunity.




 photos Mark Bralley