Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Tests fail the test

Someone should listen to Charles Murray.

The conservative intellectual, famous for his absurd treatise on IQ and biology, has come around to what I see as a sensible view of standardized testing: It is badly flawed and can be detrimental to students.

In today’s New York Times, he argues that recent studies “that have failed to show major improvements in test scores” for charter schools can not be “explained away.” But, he says, that does not mean that the charters are failures. Rather, he poses an interesting question:

Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.

I can’t argue. I’ve been saying for a long time that allegedly objective tests rarely are objective and that test scores offer only a very small piece of the puzzle in judging the progress of students and schools or the abilities of teachers.

Murray turned away from the standardized test several years ago for sound reasons. He calls the SAT “superfluous” and “outright bad for American education,” providing
little information about high school students not already provided by their grades and scores on so-called achievement tests, exams that are tied to specific academic subjects.

He believes “dumping the SAT would have numerous benefits:”
scuttling what he sees as a deceptive test-prep industry, undercutting the unproductive smugness that comes from thinking one’s high SAT score reflects personal glory (he views it as the luck of the genetic draw), and short-circuiting the contention that the SAT amounts to a conspiracy against low-income students.

In today’s Times, he expands on this theme, saying that “measurable differences in schools explain little about differences in test scores.”

The reason for the perpetual disappointment is simple: Schools control only a small part of what goes into test scores.

Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

And a good students has just as little room to prove the same.
He remains a supporter of charter schools — a point with which I vehemntly disagree — but he’s right on testing and one can only hope that other conservatives follow, making it more likely that the testing regime that now rules our educational establishment will fall.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

More discussion of Obama and the court

Here is a message/comment chain from my Facebook page in response to yesterday’s post on Obama and the court. I thought it was worth sharing here (w/out the names):

1. I think ost of the Warren Court decisions were just fine, but there were occasions when they did indeed overreach in the name of a greater notion of justice.

2. I think Obama is mainly still responding to the Citizen United campaign finance opinion when he warns about judicial activism. He still doesn’t have a majority on the Court, and he still does in Congress, so encouraging deference to legislative intent is still in his political self-interest. We’ll see if the rhetoric changes after mid-term … See Moreelections and the death or retirement of a conservative Justice.

I do agree with 1. that there was some overreaching judicial activism on the left. On criminal procedure for example. That being said, I’m confident Obama will nominate a liberal who he believes supports Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, and campaign finance reform.

3. Not to mention the ability of the feds to do things like the healthcare bill.

Me: I think, in the end, he will nominate a perfectly useful liberal judge in the Clinton-appointee mold. But I don’t think we should let him off the hook for using conservative rhetoric and playing to a conservative argument. It is a dangerous gambit, if it is only tactical, and much more troubling if it is philosophical.

I think we also have to be … See Morecareful about the Stevens replacement because anything other than a true liberal — someone to the left of Breyer — would push the court to the right. And let’s face it, he is not going to have a shot at replacing a conservative until his second term, if he gets one. The next justice to go will be Ginsberg, most likely, meaning he will be in a position to replace the three most liberal justices on the court on the day he was sworn in.

That makes appointing a true liberal justice imperative.

Plus, and I think this is key, the court is a co-equal branch. It is not to usurp the legislative role, but it has a responsibility to ensure that any action taken by the other two branches — or by the states — meets the guidelines set out in the Constitution and the amendments. That gives the court, I think, the responsibility to overrule the legislature when the legislature overreaches — a point that no one ever seems to talk about. If the judiciary can overreach, so can the other two branches, as we learned to the nation’s detriment during the Bush years.

As for the 60s-70s courts, I’m not sure which specific criminal procedure rulings you’re talking about. You’ll have to be more specific.

And so it goes. Any other thoughts?

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Just hanging in the backyard

We had the yard regraded and drainage installed to address a flooding problem that had been getting progressively worse since last summer.

As part of the project, we had some sod installed — which the dogs (Rosie pictured) view as a very comfortable outdoor rug.

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

So much for the great liberal hope. Again.

There are only two explanations for what Barack Obama said this week about the Supreme Court: He believes that the court — and not just the current, rightwing incarnation, but the liberal court of the ’60s and ’70s — has been too activist in its approach, or he is attempting to defang the right as he moves to replace Justice John Paul Stevens.

Here is what he said on Air Force One on Wednesday about the court (I saw this initially on Glen Greenwald’s blog, but the quote is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution):

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I mean, here’s what I will say. It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically. And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was, is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach.

What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error. And I think rather than a notion of judicial restraint we should apply both to liberals and conservative jurists, what you’re seeing is arguments about original intent and other legal theories that end up giving judges an awful lot of power; in fact, sometimes more power than duly-elected representatives.

And so I’m not looking at this particular judicial nomination through that prism alone, but I think it is important for us to understand that judicial — the concept of judicial restraint cuts both ways. And the core understanding of judicial restraint is, is that generally speaking, we should presume that the democratic processes and laws that are produced by the House and the Senate and state legislatures, et cetera, that the administrative process that goes with it is afforded some deference as long as core constitutional values are observed.

Liberals need to read these comments closely. The president appears to be endorsing a very narrow view of the judiciary’s role, though it is possible he just chose his words without the requisite care. In any case, as Greenwald points out, the president should have been asked to explain what he meant and to offer examples of the kind of overreach he seems to be criticizing.

For liberals, this is important because the decisions made by the court in the 1960s and 1970s “form the bedrock of progressive legal thought regarding the Constitution and the Supreme Court,” and his comments are consistent with other cases in which he made a “typical effort to show how fair-minded he is by attacking the Dreaded Left.”

I’ve pointed this out before. Going after one’s base is foolish, but it is tried-and-true extablishment liberalism that dates back to the Clinton years, the willingness to sacrifice political principles to maintain some sort of legislative, electoral or public relations advantage. And it is something the president has proven himself adept at doing.

The problem, of course, is that doing so undercuts the very people who helped put him in office, which only contributes to the mix of apathy and anger out there that is moving us inexorably toward a political implosion. The scales used to address the big issues have been weighed down by a conservative thumb.

But that in and of itself is not the only criteria by which I’m making selections on judges.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.