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Robert Winner

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New Jersey (US) just added a test question to third graders: "What is a secret you know and why is it hard to keep" Would you support this?

What if the question exposes a felony? Could a lawyer request answers to use against the parent or others? Could this ruin reputations, cause divorces, What is the schools requirements to report to law enforcement, child protective services, etc ...

Do you support this type of question from the school? Is this the beginning of the tell on your families and neighbors in some extreme governments?

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    Krisztián Pintér 200+

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    Jun 12 2012: in the communist dictatorship, children were a good tool for the rulers to spy on parents. do you think you are safe at home? think again. whatever you discuss at home, your 6 years old will discuss in school. teachers will listen and report. all the dictator needs is one generation of fear to raise a generation that didn't learn to question and to think as a child. and it is not something you can learn later.

    this should make you think.
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    Debra Smith 200+

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    Jun 12 2012: no. I do think it was probably well intensoined though to give aid an succor to childhood victims of sexual abuse. One of the key components is usually swearing the child to secrecy.
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    Heather White 10+

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    May 14 2012: This question is testing what?

    1 A child's integrity at keeping secrets?
    2 Whether a child knows any secrets?
    3 Whether a child will make up a secret so as to answer the question?
    4 A child's ability to judge when it is appropriate to tell a secret?
    5 Which children need help?

    I do not support this type of question since it is impossible to answer without contradicting the concept of a secret. It is intrusive to a childs privicy and impossible to judge fact from fiction. Further, it is impossible to tell if a child is using this question to seek help from a real problem. It is not an approprite route to encourge a grade 3 child to seek help if help is needed. It has no value to a grade three child's learnig and thus of no value to educators.
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    Scott Armstrong 50+

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    May 12 2012: The 2nd part of the question is idiotic. The secret is hard to keep because the first half of the question badgers me to reveal it.

    All testing should be scrapped. None of it is for the betterment of the student. It's all for number-crunching which is tied to funding which is decided by bureaucrats who generally don't know what they are doing..
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      edward long 100+

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      May 12 2012: I agree Scott that testing is pretty much unilaterally beneficial. But what is an effective alternative method for determining what a student has learned, or has memorized? We need a metric to measure the effectiveness of a teacher. Some side with the the idea that if the student did not learn it is the student's fault. Others, like me, believe that if the student did not learn it can only be because the teacher did not teach.
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        Scott Armstrong 50+

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        May 13 2012: No we don't.

        The system is fundamentally flawed. It fails and will continue to fail while politicians keep trying to flatten the very bell curve they insist on building into assessment and measurement.

        Learning can't be measured. If we want kids to "absorb" the content of a curriculum, then we will have to resign ourselves to the fact that school will be boring for most.

        I'll fall back on the farming analogy. Even the best farmer can only do so much with barren soil.

        This is not to say that there is no point trying, only that, setting an expectation for corn to grow so high will only make the farm and the farmer appear to fail..
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          edward long 100+

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          May 13 2012: The system is fundamentally flawed but not by political influence. The flaw is the Teacher's. union and its self-serving membership. Teachers once taught for the love of teaching and influencing the lives of young people. There are many other less noble reasons why people choose teaching as a career today. Learning can be measured by evaluating the answers provided by the examinee. An incorrect, or incomplete answer indicates that learning has not taken place. The soil analogy does not excuse the proper treatment due to poor soil. Some soil requires adjusted growth rates and special education measures. Do you have an effective alternative method to verify the efficacy of education ? Thanks.
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          peter lindsay 30+

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          May 15 2012: Mr Long I can't speak of the US situation but in Australia the problem is definitely political. Teachers are judged by their ability to improve student results in standardised tests that occur every three years. This means that a class of gifted children is a curse to the teacher as it becomes a matter of diminishing returns. There is also much pressure to climb the ladder which generally involves moving from one school to another every year or two which I feel is detrimental to the formation of a good relationship between the school and the parents. Every election we hear about how the opposition are going to "fix" the schools. No one ever seems to consult with teachers on these matters. I guess the difference is that in AUS state schools are run by a centralised department with very little autonomy at school level. The NSW Dept. Ed.is the largest such organisation in the world I believe.
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        Scott Armstrong 50+

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        May 13 2012: The alternative is to let go of old ideas and to stop confusing the measurement of some added value in the context of student learning with administrative data collection.

        Doctors and medicine should be free and lawyers should work for brownie points. Mind you, they never have, not even once upon a time. I guess that makes the teaching profession unique in what is expected of those altruistic, noble folk that answer the call..
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          edward long 100+

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          May 13 2012: I understand fully that you advocate abandoning the current education profession paradigm. I am interested in what you would do after the old ideas are put away. Is there a Value Added in your new system Scott? If yes, what is it and how do you measure success, or failure? Thanks.
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    Fritzie Reisner 100+

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    May 12 2012: My concerns were different from yours, but I had two questions about the fact that you posed. One is, is this a question on the state's standardized tests or rather on a test the school or teacher gives and marks? Second, is this question one the student must answer, or are there choices from which a student can select this one but could choose a different one?

    Either way, I sincerely doubt the purpose of the question was to get kids "to tell on family and neighbors [as] in some extreme governments." Whoever thought up the question was probably just trying to think of a good prompt a kid might not have written on before.

    My difficulty with the question is that it could be traumatic, which is unfortunate in its own right but also is a poor context for standardized assessment of students' writing conventions, structuring of essay, clarity of argument...

    In terms of the question of legal obligations, I assume that in New Jersey as in my state, teachers are what is called "mandatory reporters." That is, a teacher must report suspected cases of child abuse to Child Protective Services. I don't know that the teacher would go to jail if she didn't report, but her license to teach would be revoked.

    The normal practice, I believe, would be to take the concern to a school counselor, who talks to the child. Then if there is reason to question further, the staff must report.

    If this is not a school test but rather a standardized test that is sent to the state for marking, the school and its staff would never even see the essay and therefore not be part of this reporting loop.

    I don't like the question because it could traumatize the student if it is required rather than optional and because I think the potential emotional weight for the student of the question makes it a bad vehicle for assessing writing.

    I say this as an educator who is not a writing teacher or a grade school teacher, so I may be missing something.
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