about who you include in the "progressive" circle or not. And as an aside strangely uncomfortable with that old standby "liberal", which I personally happily accept as a self-description.

Regardless of how you draw your Venn circles, 61% of Philadelphia Democrats voted for either Nutter or "I run pictures of Ed Rendell in my TV commercials" Tom Knox. Whether you call them "progressive" or not, together that 61% represent the plurality of Democratic voters in Philadelphia. And since the testing policy is basically Ed Rendell's that means according to your definition, 61% of Philadelphia Democrats are "anti-progressive" in their education policy, per your drawing of the lines.

Fundamentally, neither Nutter nor any future mayor of Philadelphia will ever, ever, ever have anything to do with setting policy for state-wide exams while they are mayor. Unless they follow Rendell's lead and get elected governor.

The governor sets state testing policy and one of our current governor's closest allies, Joe Torsella, is explicitly the proponent of this policy. If "accountability", rather than poorly conceived sour grapes over overwhelming results of the 2007 mayoral primary, is your aim, why not aim your ire at Rendell whose tax policies as mayor were every bit (if not a bit more) "corporatist" than Nutter and more to the point - actually is directly responsible for the education policy in question. So again why the rants about Nutter when it would make so much more sense to rant about Rendell in this circumstance?

Let's review:
1.) under terms of the state takeover of schools, the mayor (any mayor of Philadelphia) is extremely limited in how much influence they have on what the School Reform Commission does

2.) the testing policy is explicitly a state-wide policy, proposed to apply to every PA school district, so it would take precedence over local school policy - even if we did regain local control

3.) The testing is the governor's baby and we are electing a new governor next year and not voting for a new mayor until 2011. And the mayor's position on this (as stated above) doesn't really matter all that much. And the current mayor is very unlikely to be challenged in 2011 - even if his input even remotely mattered which it doesn't - while the 2010 governor's race is wide open.

Why would any rational person turn this into a diatribe against Nutter and fail to even mention the Governor, the main proponent of the policy? Why would any rational person, if they were concerned about a state education policy, and facing a hotly contested governor's race and a not-contested-at-all mayoral's race the year after that, even mention the mayor?

Wouldn't the "accountability" issue relate to the current governor, the guy actually supporting the proposal? Wouldn't Dan Onorato and Joe Hoeffel and Jack Wagner and now gubernatorial candidate's Tom Knox's view on testing be just a tad more apropos than views of a mayor who a.) can't effect the policy even if he wanted to and b.) is virtually guaranteed to be reelected in 2011?
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

with Korean-Americans educated here - with parents educated in Korea (as your comment suggests), or with Koreans who went to elementary and high school and perhaps undergraduate school in Korea, and come here for college and/or graduate school? If you didn't actually work with those people who were educated in their early years in Korea, how do you know what their characteristics as students were, how do you know what kinds of adjustments/changes they had to make to adapt to higher-level education in the States, and do you have any idea whether they were exceptional students or more representative of a typical student educated in a Korean system largely geared to standardized testing?

You seem to think that I'm making some kind of a statement about intrinsic qualities of Koreans. I'm not. I'm talking about students, who just happen to be Korean, and who more to the point are the product of an educational system which is heavily focused on performance on standardized testing. Yes, Korean-American students tend to do relatively well in American schools and standardized testing here (again, a broad generalization about the "model-minority" which obscures some real problems in many Korean-American communities). That is because as a group, Koreans highly value educational attainment, and families sacrifice much for the education of kids.

But I have worked for years in American schools with undergraduate and graduate students whose earlier education took place in Korea and other countries where much of their prior education was focused on testing and the kinds of memorization skills which enable students to do well on standardized tests, but don't prepare them well for educational activities which stress independent thinking and the application of concepts across different domains. I can assure you that almost anyone who works in those settings with international students, and in particular those who come from countries where standardized testing is heavily prioritized, will attest to the kinds of adjustment difficulties I described earlier - which cannot simply be attributed to language differences, but which involve a much deeper difference in the conceptual approach to learning and education. That's not to say that those students don't bring strengths to the table. They do. There are reasons why so many of the graduate students in math-intensive areas of study such as chemistry and biology at top-level American universities are foreign-born. But I would argue that those strengths are decidedly not the result of a focus on standardized testing as opposed to other attributes of their countries' educational/cultural context, and that their strengths are inextricably linked to a set of weaknesses which are, in fact, largely attributable to educational systems which prioritize standardized testing.

Further, if you research the topic you will find out about how the side-effects from such heavy emphasis on testing is creating a well-documented phenomenon of stressed out kids in countries that are heavily focused on college entrance exams. Research the problem of "shut-in" kids in Japan, and you will learn why spokespeople from the Japanese Ministry of Education speak about the need to convert to an American style education model because they feel we are better at teaching our students how to act and think. In Japan they identify a phenomenon, "examination hell," (shiken jigoku), which studies have shown to significantly increase suicide rates.

So again, my answer to your question is that no, I don't believe that simply because in other countries they rely heavily on standardized testing, that means that in this country we should rely more heavily than we already do on standardized testing. Instead, we should examine the outcomes and effects of standardized testing and decide accordingly. Please point me to studies which quantify the benefits of a focus on standardized testing. Although I can find many, many studies which quantify the detriments of standardized testing, and although I can find many non-experts and non-educators who talk about the benefits of standardized testing, I have not seen much of anything that supports standardized testing in a scientific manner.

Standardized testing can be used as a means to aggregate student performance - which might tell us something about a school or a class as a whole, but only gives us information about an individual student as measured against other students. It tells us nothing of intrinsic value about the individual. It doesn't tell us what conceptual misunderstandings underlie the testing performance. It provides us a way to sort students by categories, to create dividing lines between one student and another (say, so we can select which student among a group of roughly equivalent students we can reject because we have more applicants than openings in a freshman class), but doesn't help to focus resources on mitigating problems students might be having. If you want to help a particular student, give her a criterion referenced test to see where the gaps in her knowledge are and create curriculum accordingly. Telling me that one student scored a 78th percentile on a standardized test is meaningless from an instructional standpoint.

There is some purpose for standardized testing in that it can give us some useful information about a particular class or a particular school. But it is only one variable among many, and the problem is when people misunderstand the limits of that information and think that it is somehow more important than the measurements of other, more important variables.

Here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine you gave a standardized test to a 6th grade class in Philly and found out that on the whole, they scored in the 30% percentile.

Now imagine that you interviewed the students in that class and found out that they many came from single-parent backgrounds, many of them spoke English as a second language, few of them had breakfast before they came to school that day, few of their parents had ever graduate high school, they had had three teachers in that class already in only 1/2 of a school year, none had computers at home, they had no textbooks to study with, and there were 60 students in the class.

Which of those variables would be the most meaningful for you if you wanted to figure out how to improve the educational environment of that classroom? Their scores on the standardized test? I think not.

And suppose one of those students scored in the 60th percentile. What does that tell you? Does it tell you what that student knew that the other students didn't know? Does it tell you whether or not that student came from a more stable background where her education was highly valued? Does it tell you anything intrinsic about that student?

And then imagine comparing that class's test scores to a same-grade class in Lower Merion, a class of 20 students, that scored in the 80th percentile. Of what value would that be? And imagine one student in that class scored in the 60th percentile. What does that tell you? Does it tell you why that student scored lower than the other students? Is it because of something about her background? Is it because of some conceptual difficulty that student was having?

What, that you didn't already know, would you learn about the comparative educational environments of the kids from Philly and those from Lower Merion, respectively?

Maybe all that money that went for testing would be better spent paying for educational professionals who could actually get to know the students and find out what variables were affecting their academic life, and create curriculum that responds to the individual needs of particular students? What do you think?

Look, there's a huge difference between comparing a national test that gains you entry into a magnet high school or college with 10 state exams that threaten to fail your class and deny you graduation.

The issue that's at question here is the emphasis on high stakes testing, significant amounts of testing, a testing industry that breeds a testing culture run amok in education, and the impact on marginalized communities and low-income communities in an inequitable system of American education. There's no need to go overboard about standardized tests. They have their place. That's not the issue.

The Keystone exams will cost hundreds of millions of dollars in educational investment in the next decade. That's a questionable use of limited dollars in a serious situation for the Commonwealth. State exams are notoriously erratic, don't improve public school investment, take up inordinate amounts of classroom time, and in many cases have led to higher drop-out rates until states lower the cut off scores. In PA's case in particular there are also more questionable practices with political relationships as well. Is the graduation test motivated truly by the desires and needs of PA's school districts, or does $200,000 in political contributions help you arrive at a sudden realization of the need?

As a Korean American with lots of young cousins in the Korean educational system, I just don't think your overhyping another nation's use of testing as proof of its educational success for a sector of successful students is applicable. There are always lessons and insights to be gainied by studying another successful country's educational approach, but I don't know anyone who would look at Korea in particular or any other nation and point to testing as the key to what makes students successful or not. It's much deeper than that.

Standardized testing doesn't offer any more or less than a tiny window into one child's educational performance on one given day. Threatening punitive damages, whether it's an individual teacher's pay or a child's graduation on test scores is a poor use of educational time and priorities.

LOL

Thanks for clarifying your role here.

when the FBI quizzes me as part of your background check. ;)
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.