On Testing (and what else has been on my mind)

I'm taking classes on American healthcare policy and urban poverty this semester and, as is often the case, you can reasonably expect that thinking a lot about these topics is going to color the direction of my blog a bit as ideas knock around in my head.  Be warned.

However, today what I want to talk about focuses a lot on education policy.  Specifically, test scores.  Obviously, with the GRE coming up, this topic has been floating around in my head for a while -- and finding out that several schools in the poorer areas of Richmond have been shut down or are in danger of being shut down for failure to meet standardized testing requirements definitely drove me to think about it some more.

I never really understood all the opposition to standardized testing.  I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I typically test well and, as such, never saw any harm in it.  Having family enter the teaching field, though, and watching teachers and professors struggle with standardized testing has made me think a lot about what can be measured by standardized testing.

It's always been a pet peeve of mine that SAT and other test-prep classes all seem to focus on "teaching the test" instead of teaching the material.  These classes consist largely of keywords and tricks to avoid actually knowing the materials being tested and instead to know what kind of people the test-writers are.  But that's the class you've signed up for.

However, and I see it in students I work with from time, when this becomes the role of teachers in the typical school setting, things slip through the cracks.  Instead of teaching the material and doing well on, say, the math section of the SAT because you know how to do the math, the job of math educators becomes teaching students to look for cues that an answer is wrong, many of which have nothing to do with the math itself.  And that gets to be dangerous.  It also de-legitimizes the testing process, because instead of quantifying how well something has been taught or learned, it quantifies how well you can game the system.

When did that become the point?

Qualitatively yours,
Rachel Leigh

On Yoga Pants and Rape Culture

As someone with "legs for days" (to quote some of my best friends), I always struggled to find shorts that did not violate the school dress code growing up.  I think this may have played into my insistence on wearing jeans year-round...I got used to being told my legs needed to be covered.

In the wake of a rash of yoga pants-bans in high schools, I really got to thinking about school dress codes.*  And in the wake of a subreddit that asked rapists for "their side of the story," I got to thinking about rape culture and victim blaming.**  And thinking about the two together got me...angry.

Let me preface this by saying that there is nothing wrong with telling your son or daughter what they can and cannot wear, especially when they are children.  Determining what is and is not appropriate clothing to wear to school, work, or outside the home is a conversation that parents should absolutely have with their children, and is a decision that should be reached based on a child's age, comfort level, body type, economic status, etc.  There is nothing wrong with this.

There is also nothing inherently wrong with having a dress code in place which defines what is and is not allowed to be worn on school grounds.  Offensive clothing, clothing that violates public decency laws, clothing that is dangerous (I actually totally support flip flop bans) are absolutely a problem in schools.  However, the problem comes in when it comes to how these issues are approached, explained to students, and justified in the code of conduct.

Yoga pants or my shorts do not violate a dress code because they are dangerous.  They are written into the rules because they are "distracting" and you "don't know how they'll affect the boys."  And this is where the problem comes in.  Because a society that starts out by telling a twelve-year-old that she cannot wear a particular kind of sweatpants because the shape of her butt is going to force the boys to stop paying attention doesn't stop there.

It becomes the same culture that tells a girl in Steubenville, Ohio that the fact that she was repeatedly raped by two young men was her fault because she should have known that getting drunk around boys was going to put her in a bad situation.  It builds into a culture where what she's wearing and the fact that she's drinking mean she's a "whore" who was "asking for it" and should have been charged for underage drinking.***

There is nothing wrong with having a discussion with your kids about what is age-appropriate or appropriate for certain settings when it comes to clothing.  But the second you start to contextualize that discussion in the realm of "how will it affect the others," you play into a culture that normalizes sexual assault.  Someone's inability to control their own actions is their fault and their problem, no one else's.

Yours,
Rachel Leigh

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/leggings-ban-kenilworth-junior-high-california_n_3046043.html
**http://jezebel.com/5929544/rapists-explain-themselves-on-reddit-and-we-should-listen
***http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/23-people-who-think-the-steubenville-rape-victim-is-to-blame

On Ranking Season

It’s that time of year again.  The annual college rankings are starting pour in (ranking every aspect of college life from the biggest party schools to the most sober schools, overall happiness, attractiveness of both campus and students…), in anticipation of the next round of applicants for whom this is the time to really narrow down the list of schools they’ll be applying to over the next couple months.

If you’re in college and pretending you haven’t been stalking where your school falls on these lists, you’re lying to yourself.

Love it or hate it, everybody has something to say about where their school ranked.  In my case it’s something along the lines of “who forgot to tell The Daily Beast that the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia are not the same school?”*

There are a lot of reasons to be curious – gloating rights, for one.  Plus, high rankings in certain areas mean prestige for the school, a more competitive incoming class, and donor money.  All typically good things.  But being ranked too high or too low on the party school rankings is probably not a good thing.

Case in point, last year’s top-rated party school (according to the Princeton Review, although Playboy also does a ranking) was WVU, which saw a crackdown this past year on campus drinking, drug use, and partying in an attempt to clean up its image. Make it all shiny and new for the incoming class of parents who may not want their kids at the top-ranking party school.  But let’s face it, if your academics can even reasonably match your social scene, and you make it on that list, you’re going to see a rise in applicants.  People spend most of their young-adult lives being told that college will be the best four years of their lives, and they look to these kinds of rankings as a way to ensure they’re not wasted.

Are they always accurate?  Not really.  The Princeton Review, for example, generates their entire list based on self-reported student surveys about campus life, which means scores can be artificially inflated or deflated, and that the standards aren’t exactly what you’d call objective.

But it’s still pretty interesting to check out.

#45th Happily Yours,

Rachel Leigh

*http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2010/04/11/the-100-happiest-colleges.html#slide45

**http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/princeton-reviews-top-par_n_1817322.html