Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for May 8, 2006 STEPFORD CHILDREN...NOT!

As the article indicates...Well, Duh!

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer...

Exam proves what teachers know
Affluent districts, ready kindergartners

Scott Stephens
Plain Dealer Reporter

Teachers have said for years that while all children can learn, the skills they begin school with vary widely.

Now, they have the numbers to back up that claim.

The just-released results of Ohio's new kindergarten readiness exam show that children just beginning school posted scores closely tied to the wealth of the community they lived in.

Kindergartners entering school in affluent suburban communities, for example, posted substantially higher scores than children living in high-poverty urban and rural areas.

Those results are hardly a revelation to educators.

Still, the test is being closely watched in education circles for several reasons. First, it represents Ohio's first attempt to quantify the challenges that schools face in trying to educate poor children.

Also, the data undercut arguments for states offering merit pay for teachers because they don't operate on a level playing field.

"It really shows what we've been trying to get people to see all along - kids from lower socioeconomic conditions need more help, and it really takes more work to bring them to speed," said Debbie Tully, professional issues director for the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

Generally, the kindergarten scores reflect trends that continue through high school.

Girls score higher than boys, white students score higher than black and Latino students, and students entering excelling districts score higher than students entering struggling districts.

But the test results contain at least one surprise. Children entering charter schools - the vast majority of whom live in high-poverty big cities - posted relatively high scores. That result appears to be at odds with the often-repeated belief that charter schools receive the children most difficult to educate.

All students entering public school kindergarten last fall were required to take the new annual exam, either in the summer before classes began or up to six weeks in to the school year.

The teacher gives each child the test individually, a process that takes about 10 to 15 minutes. The test assesses skills such as answering questions, sentence repetition, recognizing rhyming words, letter identification and identifying words that have the same sound.

Not doing well on the test will not keep a child out of kindergarten. Nor will it block children from being promoted to first grade. Instead, the exam is designed to diagnose strengths and weaknesses so the student can receive the help he or she needs, teachers say.

"The benefits were well worth the time," said Susann Sparks, a national board-certified kindergarten teacher in the Hilliard schools near Columbus. "I would like to see the test administered again at the end of the year in order to more clearly see the progress achieved by each student."

The kindergarten test was a product of the state's struggle over its school funding system. The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled the system is unconstitutional four times because its dependence on local property taxes created wide disparities between low- and high-wealth districts.

Sen. C.J. Prentiss of Cleveland pushed fellow lawmakers to commission a study to gauge poverty's impact on student performance and determine how much money was needed to enable all students to reach the state's new academic standards. Prentiss never got the study, but lawmakers did agree to the readiness exam.

"My hope was really to get a truer picture of what districts had to deal with when kids entered kindergarten not ready," said Prentiss, now the Senate minority leader. "I wanted to know what it meant in terms of allocation of resources. You hear some of my colleagues say that it's not about money, but bringing kids the resources they need does cost money."

Parents such as Michele Krampitz appreciate knowing where their children stand. Krampitz, whose son took the test before beginning kindergarten last fall in the Rocky River schools, said the test is especially beneficial to children who skipped preschool.

"Preschool is where some problems would first have been identified," she said. "For children who have not been to preschool, this test might be the first time they hear about it."

But some worry that testing tots so early might result in labeling - at times inaccurately - children as successes or failures before their academic careers even begin.

"Part of this is the fixation on testing as a cure for every imaginable education ill," said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing in Cambridge, Mass. "Good teachers don't need to test like that to identify a kid who needs help."