School Technical Ideas

The state has flagged more than 400 students’ FCAT test scores in Palm Beach County for irregularities that could point to the possibility of cheating, according to data the district released Thursday.

That total included both students who took the FCAT this spring as well as students who did not pass the standardized tests last year and had to retake them again during this past school year.

Palm Beach County also was one of 14 districts the state said had schools with suspicious patterns of wrong-to-right erasure marks on tests.

Only one school in Palm Beach County was flagged for erasure marks, said Marc Baron, chief of performance accountability. Baron did not specify the school. The state cited confidentiality until investigations have been concluded.

However, state Department of Education spokesman Tom Butler said a total of 21 schools in the 14 districts were flagged under this analysis.

The state has asked the 14 districts to investigate the matter.

This year, the state contracted with Utah-based Caveon Test Security to do two systematic analyses of FCAT test results. This year, the test security firm looked two issues – an unusual number of erased answers and for exam answers that were nearly identical from students at the same school.

Out of more than 4 million tests, Caveon flagged 6,967 test results for similarity and another 864 for erasures. It was unclear Thursday whether these totals included those students who did not pass the FCAT last year and who had to take it again this year.

This is considerably higher than in past years, “but expected, due to the use of a more systematic and sophisticated analysis,” Butler said in an email.

In spring 2010, only 90 tests of more than 4 million were invalidated by the department.

Of course, last year, test results were delivered late by the test contractor Pearson. Butler noted that not much time was given for cheating analyses.

Still, in spring 2009, 227 tests were invalidated, and in spring 2008, that number was 445.

Florida and Caveon Test Security officials have said the goal is not only to catch instances of cheating, but also to prevent cheating by students and teachers and school administrators.

Here’s an interesting statistic from this week’s release of Michigan Merit Exam data: Thirty-two percent of Michigan’s private-school juniors who took the ACT in March tested as fully college-ready compared to 17 percent of public-school juniors.

Clear proof that private schools provide a better education?

Or a misleading barometer of school quality?

There’s plenty of private-school advocates who would argue the former, and trumpet state assessment test scores as a sign of the academic superiority of private schools.

The counter argument can be explained with this analogy: It’s like looking at the death rates at South Haven Community Hospital versus those at Bronson Methodist Hospital, a comparison made utterly meaningless because one is a facility that deals with routine medical matters and the other is a regional treatment center for critically ill and injured patients. It tells us nothing about whether either South Haven or Bronson are good, mediocre or poor at what they do.

So it is with public and private schools: They are institutions with very different missions, serving very different clientele.

The strength of public schools is their willingness to educate everybody who walks in the door — the autistic kid, sixth-grader who can’t read, the child who just moved here from Mexico, the teen ordered back to school by his probation officer. The challenge for public schools is being all things to all people, which can lead to competing agendas and a struggle to establish priorities. 

The strength of private schools is the ability to create an educational community of like-minded people around a common vision. By virtue of charging tuition, private schools attract families who buy into the school’s vision and are highly committed to their children’s education, an ideal environment for nurturing academics. But, by no means, are private schools a representative slice of the American K-12 population.

No surprise, there are stark differences between the sociodemographics of public and private schools.

Among the data released this week by the Michigan Department of Education was demographic information on Michigan’s Class of 2012. Of the 107,995 public school juniors who took the MME, 36 percent qualify for the subsidized lunch program; 24 percent are minorities, predominately African-American and Hispanic; 9 percent are classified as disabled, 2.5 percent are not proficient in English and 1 percent are classified as “homeless.”

The state did not do a collective profile on the 4,597 private-school juniors who took the MME. But I added up the data for the 16 largest schools, which together enroll more than half of the private-school test-takers.

Sixteen percent of those students are minorities, with a heavy representation of Asians. Only nine students among the 2,388 test-takers were classified as “economically disadvantaged” in the reports and only seven were classified as disabled. All of the private-school test-takers were proficient in English, according to the reports, and none were homeless. (Incidentally, it’s possible that private schools serve more poor and/or disabled kids than the numbers here reflect, but unlike the public schools, participation in the MME is voluntary and there may be students who didn’t take the tests.)

Decades of research indicate that, far more than school quality, raw test scores reflect student sociodemographics — in the same way that a medical patient’s prognosis is more dependent on his or her condition than his or her doctor.

If a school served a high-poverty population and has a number of student who can’t speak English, those test scores are inevitably lower than scores for an affluent school that serves middle-class white kids. (While there are a few high-profile exceptions to this in elementary, there’s really no notable exceptions among American high schools.) It’s no coincidence that the top-performing schools in this region, and elsewhere throughout the country, serve the most affluent communities.

And even affluent suburban schools are at a disadvantage compared to private schools in terms of state assessment tests. As indicated by the statistics cited here, private schools test the cream: Affluent and middle-class white and Asian able-bodied students with highly motivated parents. As testing pools go, you can’t get better than that.

Meanwhile, even the most affluent public school has some at-risk students.

Let’s look at Kalamazoo County as an example. Almost 200 private school students took the MME. All but nine were white and all but two were middle-class. There were no disabled students or students who were not proficient in English.

By comparison, Mattawan High School– the area’s top performer among public schools on the MME — is the most affluent school in this area and has the smallest at-risk population. Still, of their 279 test-takers, 33 qualified for the subsidized lunch program, 18 were non-white, 16 were disabled and a few  met the standard for “homeless.”

And let’s look at Kalamazoo’s Loy Norrix High School: Of 240 test-takers, 139 were “economically disadvantaged”, 131 were non-white, 27 had limited English proficiency, and 29 were disabled.

Those differences are reflected in the test results: 52 percent of Kalamazoo Christian High School students tested as “fully college ready” in English, math, science and social studies compared to 36 percent of Mattawan students and 15 percent of Norrix students.

And here’s the thing: If you were to switch the K-Christian and Norrix staffs and curriculum tomorrow, it’s very unlikely those numbers would change.

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

Norrix’s overall passage rate on the MME reading test was 57 percent. But among non-disabled white students, it was 85 percent — and that’s including white students from low-income families. By comparison, the passage rate for Hackett  and Heritage Christian was 86 percent and for K-Christian, it was 89 percent. In a true sociodemographic matchup of middle-class white kids to middle-class white kids — and we’re not even factoring in the motivated-parent piece, which is huge — Norrix might well have topped the three private schools, at least in that category. 

The point is, private and public school results overlap much more than the raw results indicate and raw test scores are a terribly misleading measure of school quality, because the data is so muddied by sociodemographics. If private or public schools want a true picture of how their school is performing, they need to dig into the data and either compare their school with one that has a similar demographic profile or compare similar types of students.

There is an interesting story in the AJC about whether todays college students are overconfident and brash about their abilities or simply appear that way to an older generation that always looks askance at youth.

The story focuses on a recent study that found an increasing number of incoming college freshmen rate themselves as  above average, compared with freshmen surveyed in the 1960s. For example, 60 percent of  students today rate their intellectual self-confidence as above average, compared with 39 percent in 1966.

(Their vaulting confidence in their intellects may be due to the higher grades they earned in high school. In 1966, 19 percent of the students surveyed had A or A-minus averages. By 2009, the percentage reporting  high GPAs had risen to 48 percent.)

The story looks at the so-called entitlement mentality of todays college students. But I have to wonder about these stories considering that we also read a lot about high school students being overworked getting four hours sleep because theyre taking five AP classes, playing  sports and attending SAT prep courses to meet the higher standards of college admissions today.

So, are students today examples of overconfidence or overachieving?

Here is an excerpt from the story:

Jean Twenge, author of the book Generation Me, is in the middle of the discussion. The San Diego State University psychology professor has made a career out of finding data that she says shows that college students and others their age are more self-centered — narcissistic even — than past generations. Now shes turned up data showing that they also feel more superior about themselves than their elders did when they were young.

There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self-esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing, says Twenge. But as she sees it, theres a growing disconnect between self-perception and reality. Its not just confidence. Its overconfidence.

And that, she says, can pose problems, in relationships and the workplace — though others argue that its not so easy to generalize.

If you actually look at the data, you cant just condense it into a sound bite. Its more nuanced than that, says John Pryor, director of UCLAs Cooperative Institutional Research program, which produces an annual national survey of hundreds of thousands of college freshman, on which Twenge and her colleagues based their latest study.

Among other things, Twenge and her colleagues found that a growing percentage of incoming college freshmen rated themselves as above average in several categories, compared with college freshmen who were surveyed in the 1960s.

Statements like that can set off the generational firestorm.

Young people are quick to feel picked on — and rightly so, says Kali Trzesniewski, an associate professor of human development at the University of California, Davis.

People have been saying for generations that the next generation is crumbling the world, Trzesniewski says. There are quotes going back to Socrates that say that kids are terrible.

But in her own research, she says shes been hard-pressed to find many differences when comparing one generation to the next — and little evidence that even an increase in confidence has had a negative effect.

Many bosses and others in the workplace have long argued that recent college students often arrive with unreasonably high expectations for salary and an unwillingness to take criticism or to pay their dues.

But a lot of them have a confidence that we wished we had, says psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, a research professor in the psychology department at Clark University in Massachusetts. He studies emerging adulthood, a term that has been coined to describe the period from age 18 to 29 when many young adults are finding their footing.

Twenge has argued that the self-esteem movement — where every kid is special — has contributed to this. Others wonder if over-confidence is a byproduct of the super-pushy tiger parent syndrome, where even average parents set up music classes and sports and outside tutoring so their children can get ahead.

The Palm Beach County All-Star Marching Band Camp is in danger of closing because Riviera Beach said it won’t be able to sponsor the Academic Summer Camp this year because of budget cuts.

Without the city paying for the camp, there isn’t any money for salaries for the college-student staff. Antoine Miller, the summer camp band director, said if the camp doesn’t raise $4,600 by Friday to lease space and pay for insurance, the camp will close.

Camp staffers haven’t given up, however, and are seeking donations. A meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday at 5 p.m. at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Rivieria Beach for parents and to ask for contributions.

– Kevin D. Thompson