About the alleged misbehaving teacher at Lazear: it takes a firm, formal, legal letter by early October to be able to properly reprimand or remove any teacher by June…This is rare because it takes so much time of documentation. Once documentation has begun, a principal also has to document the like behaviors of behaving teacher to show that there is no preferential or disparaging effort on the part of the principal to just pick on any teacher…You are talking about 20 hours of documentation per week to stay legal.

The people on the receiving end of this process don’t like it and love to complain that a particular question/factor isn’t “fair” no matter how strongly it correlates to the uptimate question. Race is relevant in many (all?) instances of behavior prediction. If you drop Race as a factor it still gets in by proxy factors for race. Ditto Gender. It does little good to tiptoe around it.

NCLB includes the largest data collection in history of academic performance and race. The only thing I could compare it to is the US Military’s 100 year collection of IQ testing and race. You can’t assemble all that data and expect everyone not to use it.

This thread is part of the constant complaint that some people don’t like a test question or factor because it displeases them. No one cares how people feel when they are designing a test that accurately sorts people into the desired group. Any factor that selects winners from losers is going to get used. While I don’t know is that question was cross validated on test groups to see if it has any predictive validity – that kind of work is the business of the test designers. They can screw up, people do occasionally. But in the long term these tests mean something if they are professionally assembled.

Now we have DMV testing, Military induction and classification testing, employment testing, occupational licensing testing, college admission testing, etc. And in each case poor blacks/browns have big problems. What to do? What to do??

Knowledge is power. I would hope that the public schools teach early and often what is coming and why. The students I’ve seen from the urban schools are so clueless about reality and how life it going to be they are impaired. The schools appear to want to shelter them – coddle them actually. Bind thier feet more likely. Above all the schools want to tell them they have a “right” to be they way they are and they way they (and their families?) want to be (low class). That needs to end. Because it’s getting harder and harder to have any social/economic mobility once you adopt lower class mores in school. Thus my concern that deportment is not being taught in public school. You don’t read much in a blackboard jungle.

In their reading, they should come across a wide variety of experiences, some which may be familiar and many which may not be familiar. This is one way that background knowledge on a topic may be built without having the student experience something first hand. If a classroom is rich with vocabulary and students have the opportunity to read extensively, they should do fine on these types of questions, which in my opinion, do not present any sort of cultural bias.

Here’s the point. If the “students” in question read books or studied they would in the course of such study have routinely come across that word and learned it. These standardized tests are set to the level of Ken and Barbie. That’s the point. They are deselecting people who don’t read and don’t study. Which is why studious immigrants are outscoring Otis and Latifa.

Perhaps the critics will next say that Ken and Barbie don’t have to study very hard if the tests cover their casual experiences. Well, duhhh. I have friends who take their children on tours of various world capitals every year. Maybe their kids don’t have to study geography to the extent Otis and Latifa should. Isn’t money grand?

When these tests are constructed questions are assembled that (typically) select or deselect for the liklihood of success in higher ed. Ken and Barbie have higher likelihood of that and Otis and Latifa don’t. There will be no questions easy for O & L because those would be worthless.

Oakland Teacher: I agree with you 100%. I am now wondering if the actual CST is made by the same publisher of this prep book. I was not able to find an answer but I did find past Qs from the 4th grade CST that are similar to the ones in the test booklet (retrieved from http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqela4.pdf).

All three questions pertain to the Standard “4RW1.4 Vocabulary and Concept Development: Know common roots and affixes derived from Greek and Latin and use this knowledge to analyze the meaning of complex words (e.g., international).”

Here they are:

41. The root word in subterranean is terra, which in Latin means “earth” or “ground.” Subterranean must be something
A made out of dirt or soil.
B planted in the ground.
C under the earth or ground.
D on a beach or riverbank.

56. Mom inspected my room after I cleaned it. The word inspected contains the Latin root spect. What does spect mean?
A use
B look
C take
D need

58. Read this sentence. The construction of the house will be completed next month.
The Latin root “struct” in the word construction means:
A measure.
B build.
C study.
D shape.

I ran through these questions with my daughter before she climbed into bed and she answered all of them correctly…#41 because she knew what “sub” means, and #56 & #58 because she knew what these words in and of themselves meant.

What do you think of these questions? Do you think they reflect good measures of 4RW1.4? Personally, I find these questions strange. Take #41. It directs the student to the root word terra but what the student really needed to know in order to answer the question is that the prefix “sub” means “under”.

In fact, the real CST questions can be that obscure for a student with less background knowledge related to these words.

6RW1.3 Vocabulary and Concept Development: Recognize the origins and meanings of frequently used foreign words in English and use these words accurately in speaking and writing.

Here is state-released test question found online:

53 Read this sentence. At dinnertime Abuelita said, “It’s time to put the horses back into the __________.” Which Spanish word meaning “enclosure” can be used to complete the sentence?
A bronco
B corral
C rodeo
D lasso

“horses” does provide some context, but ALL of the answers have some connection to horses, so it really comes down to whether or not you know what a corral is. No skill, just background knowledge.

I don’t know of any Latin/Greek root word or affix that would help them (or me) correctly answer this question. That is why I modeled how I would figure it out: using my wide range of experience along with growing up eating casseroles to help “guess” the right answer. I would not expect my students to have the same background.

Questions like these make me feel that many students are being shortchanged with the current questions and the constant testing. They make me feel as though my students would be far better served by having more time for word study and for enrichment through increased exposure to the outside world, e.g. museums, cooking, art classes, foreign language instruction, or even music! It is also a good point about the student who went to the Peralta Hacienda, but what about the students at schools who rarely take field trips? Just hearing the word “adobe” read during a California history lesson does not have the same impression on students.

The standard isn’t about Latin/Greek roots in this case (6th grade); to paraphrase, the standard basically says that students need to know words in the English language that come from a different language: Hebrew, French, Latin, Italian, Spanish.

It is a total crapshoot about which words to “teach” (i.e. encourage students to memorize)

Luckily there is usually only 1 or 2 questions, so as someone said before, they don’t make a huge difference.