I’m going to let Ms. Frizzle’s words connect the dots here, because I’m still writing the briefing book for Friday’s Curriculum Summit…. but I couldn’t let this pass.

The other day, Ms. Frizzle made a call for accountability for standardized test makers. You should read the entire post, but the short version is that she creates the principals of accountability for high-stakes tests:

• Tests must be error-free.
• Test results must be available to students, parents, teachers, and administrators within two months, maximum.
• No one should score standardized tests unless they are paid extra to do so.
• The testing schedule should be based on the most appropriate timeframe for judging student learning, not on the needs of the companies and governments administering it.
• Tests must be the highest-quality assessments available, no matter what.
• Money for testing shall not be taken out of existing education budgets.

And she closes with this:

Taxpayers, how can you expect less?

Problems with tests ought to be highly publicized, like the lists of failing schools. Don’t provide any details; just list the name of the testing companies, the names of the responsible departments within the city and state government, and list ’em under the headline: Failing. And then – do schools and teachers and students get to transfer out, to find alternative ways to assess?

Spread the word!

I thought it was a brilliant post — a call to arms, if you will. And my overwhelming thought was that if we ever held the test-makers to this standard, the days of high-stakes standardized tests as a movement in this country would be over. And then, today’s NY Times exposes major problems with the 7th grade ELA:

The roughly 65,000 seventh graders in New York City who took the statewide English test yesterday might have anticipated a challenging question or two. What they did not expect was to be stumped by the answer sheet.

But for five questions, the letters labeling the answers on the multiple-choice test did not correspond to those on the answer form. In some cases, the exam booklet directed students to choose F, G, H or J as possible answers, while the answer sheet offered only A, B, C and D as options. In other cases, the reverse was true.

And yet, the results will stand. When I’ve screwed up an assessment in my own classroom, I didn’t let my mistakes affect the kids. One year, I realized that most of the kids in a class really misinterpreted what a writing prompt was about for an in-class writing assignment. I looked at the way I phrased it, and I realized that it was an easy mistake to make, so I adjusted the scores accordingly. It was the only fair thing to do. But it was also the kind of thing a teacher can do in a classroom, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that a large bureacratic organization will have a hard time doing.

These tests will determine if students are promoted or not. Don’t we owe it to them to at least get the answer sheet right?

(Or better yet, stop relying on standardized tests to determine promotion… but hey, I’m talking crazy again.)

Someone pointed me to Creating Passionate Users, and all I can say is — Wow. If you aren’t reading it, blogroll it now.

And there is something interesting (haven’t we been saying that a lot lately) that one of the most interesting "education" blogs I’ve come across lately isn’t about schools at all. It’s almost silly of me to throw this idea out when I don’t have the time to explore it, but there have been a number of "loose tooth" ideas that I can’t seem to stop twisting and turning, even though they aren’t ready to come out yet. This is one of them… if information is the new commodity, and no one expects that their career will follow a direct path, then our ability to learn, adapt, create and produce becomes more and more important. Yesterday’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s also-ran, and the way we did things yesterday probably won’t be the way we do them tomorrow.

This means that the cliche of "creating life-long learners" isn’t just a nice idea, it’s essential. If we can’t teach people how to learn and how to change, we’ve done them a disservice. Blogs like Creating Passionate Users get it — they are trying to stimulate adult learning. But we in the "traditional educational" field need to adapt to these ideas too. We have to find better ways to engage our students, help them learn what we’re teaching — and what we are teaching must include learning how to learn for themselves.

None of this is new or earth-shattering, and it really does only scratch the surface of what has been roiling around in my head lately. And what’s strange, as I’m writing is that I’m realizing that the very post that I was so enamored by when I started this blog doesn’t quite get to where I want our students to be — or maybe I’m just not sure it does. I honestly don’t know.

The post on Passionate Users was A Crash Course in Learning Theory by Kathy Sierra and it is an unquestionably amazing piece of writing on how to engage learners. It’s mandatory reading for teachers, as far as I’m concerned. And in reading it, I really thought about how often my "good lessons" reflected the kind of ideas in the post. (And how often I violated at least one of the rules in a major way when my classes bombed.)

So let me first say an emphatic "YES!" to the post… we should all find ways to engage the brain in the ways Sierra described… but let me now ask the question that has been bothering me throughout this post — does everything that Sierra describes in her post move us closer to getting students to become self-directed learners outside the classroom? My instincts tell me yes, if only because if our classes are as engaging as this kind of teaching can be, then students will love learning and feel confident that they can learn on their own.

But is that enough?

Or do we take the next step passed these ideas and figure out how the motivation and engagement can come internally even more? Does Sierra’s methodology in many respects still put too much on the teacher and not enough on the learner? It’s better than most of the teaching we see, and certainly a school where every teacher could engage the students on these levels would absolutely crackle with energy and learning, but is that enough? Will it be enough to teach the kids how to adapt once they graduate?

I don’t know. And I’m not sure what the "better" answer would be, either.

Michael Winerip’s piece in the Times today highlights why NCLB is a truly flawed law.

IN the right kind of world, Public School 48 in the South Bronx would be getting all kinds of awards. Though the school serves some of the city’s poorest minority children (75 per cent Hispanic, 25 per cent black and all eligible for free lunches), P.S. 48’s test scores have soared in the last few years. In 2005, 86 per cent of fourth graders scored proficient in math, and 68.5 per cent in English, placing P.S. 48 near the top of the Bronx’s 130 elementary schools.

The principal, John Hughes, has mixed feelings about all the testing that goes on these days, but professionally, he has put that all aside. "The profit margin in this business is test scores," he said. "That’s all they measure you by now."

Test prep? "Are you kidding?" he said. "We start in September and we don’t stop until the tests are over," in March.

"I can’t afford not to do test prep," he said. "Otherwise my kids don’t have a chance. It’s all by the test numbers. If they score 3’s or 4’s, they have marketability for getting into one of the city’s good middle schools." With low scores of 2 or 1, out of a maximum of 4, they are stuck in a bad neighborhood school.

In 2004, Chancellor Joel I. Klein attended graduation, praising the test scores and wearing a T-shirt with the P.S. 48 slogan, "Best School in the Universe."

But the universe P.S. 48 gets evaluated in has little to do with the real world. P.S. 48 is measured in the federal No Child Left Behind world, and in that universe, it has been labeled failing.

Read the whole article to see why P.S. 48 was labelled failing — it was because of erroneous student data. But the article highlights why NCLB is such a problem. We can’t judge schools by a single score on a test. Real data-driven decision making is much more costly and time-consuming than what we as a society are currently willing to do. Joel Klein went to P.S. 48 — he knew the school was working. He knew those kids were learning.

Why do we continue to think that a test score can tell us anywhere near a complete story of a student or a school?