I have a lot of thoughts on this, including the “actionable” part. Theoretically, this breakdown should be actionable, but they are not without the educator background because districts miss that next step.
My son is in 4th and has generally has high standardized test scores. We take the MAP test 3 times a year here. Last year, mid year during 3rd grade, his reading %ile dropped 20 points. The ex-teacher in me was alarmed, but no one reached out to me. I reached out and asked for details. The math teacher who was tech savvy went into a view she had of his assessment and found that for the last part of the reading section of the MAP, he spent 1-2 seconds more on questions than what what would have prompted a guessing flag. I looked at his Lexile score on his assessment report- which no one told me to look at- and compared it to the books he was reading at home, and found they were almost 200 points lower than his recommended Lexile score. Basically, he was not getting enough experience reading texts with longer passages and was getting tired and overwhelmed when shown them. I redid his entire library at home and at the end of the year, his MAP reading %ile went up 26 points and he finished 3rd grade with a 5th grade Lexile. And now I watch what he reads like a hawk as well as specific technology programs they use at school for skill improvement.
While schools try to break things into these smaller areas, they still give parents generic advice- read to your kid, make reading a lifelong habit, help him enjoy reading, etc. Celebrating reading and allowing my kid to read what he loves was what was kind of creating our problem! Likewise, if writing scores are low, they don’t send home an example of what writing looks like for that specific grade- you are supposed to remember it from your own school days, apparently. So the whole thing becomes an exercise in futility.
Finding books for my son at his age level is a constant challenge. I found a lot of mid grade books for boys to be about bullying and he did not care for that always. The sci fi books are pretty repetitive at that age or too long. Here is what he enjoyed in last year: the Planet Omar series, Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good series, Magnolia Wu Unfolds it All, the Sherlock Society, Chronicles of A Lizard Nobody, Duel, Stranded, Diary of an 8 Bit Warrior (well written Minecraft fan fiction). He tolerated a Year in the Life of Billy Milller, Faker and Spy School, but I know kids who liked them.
We went to see Dav Pilkey in Atlanta and it sold out in 20 minutes. He made a 6-7 joke and 1,000 boys between the ages of 7-11 lost their minds. They were rolling out of the chairs, making the hand gesture, and it is the closest I will ever get to attending a religious revival. But it was nice to go to an event that big for boys his age not focused on sports.
Good on you Tom, and for some there's even more worms in this SBG can than you expose here.
In a parent teacher conference once, a teacher quietly whispered "so you know, we've always used the standards to guide the lessons and changing grading isn't going to help students or teachers". This is River Forest district 90 - a feeder to OPRF high school that, like Evanston, also elevated social programs above academics.
When Ralph Martire and his useful idiots "lowered the ceiling" on D90 students and families in the name of helping minorities, SBG was part of hiding the impact of all new poor performing curricula and instruction. The achievement gap between low and non-low income students doubled and River Forest D90 became a national outlier for low learning rates. They hid this from residents. It's bad ideas at the state level infiltrating local. Just like inflating "proficiency."
Here, a k-4 elementary school where reading proficiency fell four points - so 44% were NOT proficient was labeled "Exemplary" and foolish parents fawn over state labels.
"Much of the defense of traditional trading systems is based on the claim that, “It’s not our fault that we use toxic grading practices, because we have to get them ready for college!” However, a growing number of colleges, including MIT and Wellesley, are substantially reforming their grading systems, to the point that they provide rich feedback, but no letter grades, to first-year students. And while some colleges and universities do have awful grading practices, terrible pedagogy, and hazing rituals by social groups, wise K-12 educators do not allow those practices in higher education to justify unacceptable practices for younger students. "
Among the academics here, the expectation was that K-12 schools will do this and everyone will follow suit. The plan is to reform the entire system starting with elementary school students. Welp!
Here in reality .. K-12 schools did this and now kids are showing up to high school and college unprepared and they're all having to invest in remediation. The downstream costs are pretty high!
I have a good friend from college that teaches economics at one of the UC schools and they have talked about how the incoming freshman have gotten more unprepared over the last 10-15 years.
I have a lot of thoughts on this, including the “actionable” part. Theoretically, this breakdown should be actionable, but they are not without the educator background because districts miss that next step.
My son is in 4th and has generally has high standardized test scores. We take the MAP test 3 times a year here. Last year, mid year during 3rd grade, his reading %ile dropped 20 points. The ex-teacher in me was alarmed, but no one reached out to me. I reached out and asked for details. The math teacher who was tech savvy went into a view she had of his assessment and found that for the last part of the reading section of the MAP, he spent 1-2 seconds more on questions than what what would have prompted a guessing flag. I looked at his Lexile score on his assessment report- which no one told me to look at- and compared it to the books he was reading at home, and found they were almost 200 points lower than his recommended Lexile score. Basically, he was not getting enough experience reading texts with longer passages and was getting tired and overwhelmed when shown them. I redid his entire library at home and at the end of the year, his MAP reading %ile went up 26 points and he finished 3rd grade with a 5th grade Lexile. And now I watch what he reads like a hawk as well as specific technology programs they use at school for skill improvement.
While schools try to break things into these smaller areas, they still give parents generic advice- read to your kid, make reading a lifelong habit, help him enjoy reading, etc. Celebrating reading and allowing my kid to read what he loves was what was kind of creating our problem! Likewise, if writing scores are low, they don’t send home an example of what writing looks like for that specific grade- you are supposed to remember it from your own school days, apparently. So the whole thing becomes an exercise in futility.
Finding books for my son at his age level is a constant challenge. I found a lot of mid grade books for boys to be about bullying and he did not care for that always. The sci fi books are pretty repetitive at that age or too long. Here is what he enjoyed in last year: the Planet Omar series, Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good series, Magnolia Wu Unfolds it All, the Sherlock Society, Chronicles of A Lizard Nobody, Duel, Stranded, Diary of an 8 Bit Warrior (well written Minecraft fan fiction). He tolerated a Year in the Life of Billy Milller, Faker and Spy School, but I know kids who liked them.
We went to see Dav Pilkey in Atlanta and it sold out in 20 minutes. He made a 6-7 joke and 1,000 boys between the ages of 7-11 lost their minds. They were rolling out of the chairs, making the hand gesture, and it is the closest I will ever get to attending a religious revival. But it was nice to go to an event that big for boys his age not focused on sports.
Do you have books you recommend? we can only do so much captain underpants
Good on you Tom, and for some there's even more worms in this SBG can than you expose here.
In a parent teacher conference once, a teacher quietly whispered "so you know, we've always used the standards to guide the lessons and changing grading isn't going to help students or teachers". This is River Forest district 90 - a feeder to OPRF high school that, like Evanston, also elevated social programs above academics.
When Ralph Martire and his useful idiots "lowered the ceiling" on D90 students and families in the name of helping minorities, SBG was part of hiding the impact of all new poor performing curricula and instruction. The achievement gap between low and non-low income students doubled and River Forest D90 became a national outlier for low learning rates. They hid this from residents. It's bad ideas at the state level infiltrating local. Just like inflating "proficiency."
Here, a k-4 elementary school where reading proficiency fell four points - so 44% were NOT proficient was labeled "Exemplary" and foolish parents fawn over state labels.
Glad you're back!
And what's even worser when they get to ETHS they're hit with A-F. D65 is doing them a MASSIVE disservice on how to understand performance.
I didn't put this in the story, but one of the academic papers they link to addresses this:
https://kappanonline.org/oconnor-jung-reeves-gearing-up-for-fast-grading-reporting/
"Much of the defense of traditional trading systems is based on the claim that, “It’s not our fault that we use toxic grading practices, because we have to get them ready for college!” However, a growing number of colleges, including MIT and Wellesley, are substantially reforming their grading systems, to the point that they provide rich feedback, but no letter grades, to first-year students. And while some colleges and universities do have awful grading practices, terrible pedagogy, and hazing rituals by social groups, wise K-12 educators do not allow those practices in higher education to justify unacceptable practices for younger students. "
Among the academics here, the expectation was that K-12 schools will do this and everyone will follow suit. The plan is to reform the entire system starting with elementary school students. Welp!
Here in reality .. K-12 schools did this and now kids are showing up to high school and college unprepared and they're all having to invest in remediation. The downstream costs are pretty high!
I have a good friend from college that teaches economics at one of the UC schools and they have talked about how the incoming freshman have gotten more unprepared over the last 10-15 years.