Testing will continue until morale improves

The Virginia Department of Education (DOE) has finally figured out how to get students better prepared for college and the work force—harder SOL Testing.  This improvement is not just the run-of-the-mill competency style testing. Nope, this is the raise-the-standard-to-increase-student-knowledge type of improvement.

So what are the results?

Well, if you want to quantify how effective raising the Math standard was, it’s pretty easy. Statewide math scores dropped a robust 19 percent.  Last year, said math scores scorched the statistics at 87 percent passing; this year the number dwindled to 68 percent.

Good job, Virginia DOE! The net result of their tinkering with the test to improve the education of Virginia’s math students failed by pretty much any practical standard you may want to employ.

And, even the lowest scoring student could have seen that one coming. How in the world did they expect raising the standard would better prepare students for college or the work force?  Whose brain child was that, and what are they doing in education?

It seems incredibly short-sighted that making something harder would net positive results, without providing assistance to help the other side. You can look at it as if it were a teeter-totter; you know what some people call a see-saw.

You put a certain amount of a load on one side, and then on the other you put another load. If you’re lucky the two offset and find some sort of balance.  For the old SOL test, the balancing point was 87 percent, which meant that the weight of the SOL was already greater than the weight of the students by 13 percent. So now, to improve student scores, the DOE has a brilliant idea:  put more weight on the SOL side while doing nothing to shore up the student side.  Guess what happens?  Yup, the students go flying up in the air and who knows when they might come down to earth.

Raising a standard does not improve scores. It just doesn’t follow. If you want to improve scores, you have to start with the students. Why not try to get the old standard to reach 90 percent instead of dunning 19 percent more students as failures? I am sure there are those at the State who say, “Well the students are just not trying.” But that’s junk.

What is really happening is that we end up testing the bejesus out of the students we have. It seems like they spend more time learning how to take a multiple choice test, or taking a pre-SOL test, or a post-SOL test, or a practice SOL-test or any one of a myriad of other placement exams. Or the Stanford Nine or some other crock that is supposed to evaluate a student’s knowledge or their ability to learn or whether they even really care anymore.

Is it any wonder why some students simply blow off the tests and randomly dot the score sheet to create a pointillist copy of the Mona Lisa? It’s amazing to think that we haven’t put one iota of logic behind this testing scenario.

Now, I am not saying that the DOE supports all this testing. But, due to how the accreditation process is implemented and what the ramifications of failing can mean to the school districts, they DOE can certainly make the school systems’ jump out of their boots. What do they expect the schools to do? Nothing?

The schools are going to work the students and try to prepare them for this high-pressure exam. They will make sure they know to use a No. 2 pencil, and to fully erase any wrong marks they may make when changing an answer. They will beat them with practice test after practice test. And the students are destined to continue not meeting the standard set by the DOE. Heck, they failed to meet the old standard to the tune of a low B or high C average.

It would be different, I suppose, if the results of the old test were consistently in the upper 90s. Then it would make sense to up the ante, so to speak, by increasing the degree of difficulty. But the only people who benefit from the current DOE approach are those who sit around after the fact, polish their respective sheriff’s badge, and profess what a great job they have done to improve education throughout Virginia.

Those knob polishers need to get down and dirty and help the kids in the classroom instead of whipping them via the SOL test. So it’s no surprise to anyone, except perhaps the DOE, that the Math scores plummeted and as a result many schools didn’t attain full SOL accreditation and in turn jeopardize state school funding. The DOE probably feels they have done such a good job on the Math portion that it’s time to turn their talent to the English portion as well. Heck, they can glean an additional negative 19 percent there and really teach those students how ill-prepared they are for college and the work force.