College-readiness test yet another challenge for Florida students

[Baitball Blogger]

Thousands of high-school students across Florida are having to take a new state-mandated test to gauge how ready they are for college classes regardless of whether they plan to pursue higher education.

Because of a new state law, school districts are required for the first time to give nearly all high-school juniors a college-readiness test and schedule college-remediation classes for those who don't do well.

The Department of Education says in 2010 it cost the state about $156 million to remediate nearly 150,000 students who weren't able to complete college-level work. The department also says that in 2010, about 54 percent of high-schoolers were not prepared in at least one college subject.

Florida lawmakers for years have lamented the high costs of college remediation, which is up from $129 million in 2006.

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-05-27/features/os-college-ready-florida-20120527_1_remedial-classes-college-readiness-college-math-classes

[Sarah Ibarruri]

1. Repukes keep adding tests, but refusing to solve the social ills they created and which caused

the failures in school.

[NYC_SKP]

2. The Pressure is On to Coerce Kids to Go to College and Get into Debt and Learn Not a Goddam Thing.

I'm very critical of schools and colleges....

[Baitball Blogger]

3. Education is a business.

When you begin to see the long tentacles that emerge from UCF, for example, you begin to understand why Central Florida is so stagnant. No room for innovation. Just a lot of old ideas that get recycled so the same people can continue to thrive at everyone else's expense.

[bhikkhu]

5. The primary alternative is menial labor

...which I'm not so critical of (as I do a bit of it myself), but I like to think that everyone should have options. If you get through state-funded grade school and high school and it hasn't prepared you for college, then at least the testing process allows for a state funded solution rather than an unpleasant surprise. If you talk to many college teachers, a consistent complaint is that high school students aren't learning enough, aren't learning to write well enough to communicate, aren't learning to learn, aren't prepared at all to do well in college.

[SheilaT]

4. My very first question about all of these tests is to ask

if they've actually been verified and validated. Meaning, do they actually test what they claim to test, and are the results meaningful?

I suspect that in all cases the answer is no.

We have long had good tests already in place that have been used in the past to measure student performance. New ones are unneeded.

As for testing for college readiness, what do they need besides the SAT or the ACT? Again, tests that are already out there and do a pretty good job of predicting how students will do in first year of college.

It is true that students graduating high school ill-prepared to go to college or enter the work force is a problem that has long been with us. In 1979 I worked the phone-in registration at a junior college in the Washington DC area, and I was amazed at how many kids calling in to register were registering for remedial English and math. It's not fair to pin the blame for this sort of thing on just one cause. It's not just bad teachers or bad parents, but an entire system that rewards young people for not doing well in school. For making sports far more important than academics. Even many middle class parents themselves don't seem to push academic success as much as they should, and I'm speaking from what I've observed around me. Even so, I'll be the first person to say it's nuts to think that all people need a four-year college degree. Our community colleges are possibly the very best thing about our entire school system in this country. They offer wonderful programs that lead directly to jobs, and many more people should consider them.

[Igel]

6. I don't know how they validated them.

But I know that a lot of what my kids don't know isn't on the SAT or ACT.

They don't know how to study. They can't figure out how to learn. If they hit a roadblock, there's no resilience.

They can't outline a paragraph or chapter section. They can't figure out the main points of narrative prose.

If you give them a problem in which they have all the information for picking the right equation but they have to pick from a set that includes more than 1 equation, they're stumped. If they have to manipulate an equation, they're stumped.

And don't ask them to do any "two step problem" unless you have clearly taught them each step, separately, of that particular kind of problem and taught them to put them together. They don't generalize. They don't extrapolate.

Of course this is hyperbole. Many do. But some can't or won't. The SAT IDs problems in parsing a reading passage, to be sure. But problem solving strategies? Not so much. And how to learn, how to study? The SAT tutorial sessions teach them much of what they need; they're trained for a specific task, like a chicken counting to 8 or 9 by pecking on a xylophone. Don't ask the chicken to peck out 11 unless you've spent weeks teaching her to peck to 11 (and not 10 or 12).

[SheilaT]

7. How old are your kids?

I would think problem solving strategies should be reasonably straightforward to teach. But I could be very wrong about that.

I can recall that my teachers in grades six through eight did teach such things. They'd tell us what kinds of things would be on a test and then tell us how to go about answering those kinds of questions.

We also had tests that had lots of different kinds of questions on them (I'm talking things like English, history, social studies)pretty much always including multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and short essay. If all the tests a kid ever take consists only of multiple choice, and if they're badly designed test questions at that, it would be very difficult to actually demonstrate real learning.

But I'm also old enough (63) that when I went to school, women had very few job/career options, and many of the best and brightest went into teaching. Today the same women have many other opportunities, and the best and the brightest often do something else besides teach.

This is not to disparage the genuine dedication of most teachers, but every time I get a look at the quality of teacher education I shudder.