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D.C. Schools Prepare for Nation’s First Sex-Education Standardized Testing
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New Details on the Health/Sex Test
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Quiz: Test Yourself Against Health, Sex-Education Questions Meant for Students
- Teaching to the Sex Ed Test
D.C. Schools Prepare for Nation’s First Sex-Education Standardized Testing
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 14, 2011
D.C. public and public charter schools, which annually test student progress in reading and math, will also measure what they know about human sexuality, contraception and drug use starting this spring.
The 50-question exam will be the nation’s first statewide standardized test on health and sex education, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which developed the assessment for grades 5, 8 and 10.
The District’s rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy are among the country’s highest. Periodic surveys have detailed student attitudes toward risky behavior, but officials said the annual test will fill gaps in their understanding of what young people know and why they might behave the way they do.
“It paints a fuller picture,” said Brian Pick, deputy chief of curriculum and instruction for D.C. Public Schools. “We don’t know as a system or as a city what knowledge kids have about these topics.”
A 2009 District study found that nearly half of the city’s chlamydia and gonorrhea diagnoses were among District residents 15 to 19 years old. Two-thirds of all diagnoses were among those younger than 24. Also, more than 3 percent of District residents older than 12 were living with HIV or AIDS in 2009, the report said.
The testing initiative combines two political and cultural flash points in American schools: sex education and standardized testing. Some parents said yesterday that they didn’t object to the idea out of hand but wanted to learn more about the details. One mother expressed concern about more classroom time being consumed by preparation for yet another test. It will be administered in April on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS), along with reading and math (grades 3 through 8 and 10), composition (4, 7, 10), science (grade 5) and biology (grade 10).
“Teaching to the test for health, too?” asked Nakisha Winston, head of the PTA at Langdon Education Campus in Northeast Washington.
Officials said that the test, which will also include questions on nutrition, mental health and drug use, is based on a provision of the Healthy Schools Act of 2010, which the D.C. Council passed to address health issues in the 75,000-student system.
But the legislation’s sponsor, council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), said the law requires only that the District produce an annual report describing progress on student health concerns. It does not mandate creation of another standardized test.
“I had a much-less-rigid interpretation of the reporting idea,” said Cheh, adding that she doesn’t necessarily object to the test. “Maybe they think that’s the most efficient way to do it. Maybe they think it will be taken more seriously.”
The questions have been adapted by local educators from a group of sample questions devised by the Council of Chief State School Officers to improve the rigor of health education. Some states have also started drawing on the questions assembled by the school officers’ council.
According to the organization’s Web site, South Carolina is also field testing a statewide health-education assessment.
The test items have also been aligned to health education standards approved by the D.C. State Board of Education in 2008 to guide instruction on subjects such as STDs, HIV/AIDs, conflict resolution and respectful communication.
Adam Tenner, executive director of MetroTeenAIDS, a community health organization that helps with health education in D.C. schools, applauded the new test, citing the adage that “what gets measured gets done.”
But he said the effort needs to go deeper than that.
“We are not preparing teachers or students to get good, high-quality sex and reproductive education,” Tenner said. He cited his organization’s analysis of a new state report that shows that most health education programs in schools remain seriously deficient.
“We don’t need a test to tell us we’re coming up short,” Tenner said.
Some parents said Wednesday that the District needed to proceed cautiously.
“I know it’s very touchy subject, and we have to be very careful about how to present it,” said Mark Jones, a member of the D.C. State School Board who represents Ward 5 and is a parent of two public school children. But he added: “I don’t think our children understand enough on STDs and high-risk behavior, especially in the African American community. We need to know more.”
Winston said she would be comfortable if the test hewed strictly to questions of fact and did not veer into issues of morality that are more appropriately sorted out at home.
“I can see different parents having different values on different things,” she said.
New Details on the Health/Sex Test
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 15, 2011
The state superintendent’s office weighed in with a few additional points on this morning’s health education testing story. Some will enlighten, others are likely to prompt new questions about why the District is doing this.
For openers, the new testing on health and sex education is now being called a “pilot,” which is not a word that surfaced during my conversations and e-mails with OSSE and DCPS this week.
Individual students and teachers will not receive scores, unlike other DC CAS tests. The scores will be reported only at the school level, according to Tamara Reavis, elementary and secondary assessments chief for OSSE. There will be no passing “cut” score.
That also means that results will not be broken out across the usual spectrum of advanced, proficient, basic and below-basic, or among demographic sub-groups, Reavis said. The results will show only the percentage of questions answered correctly.
The new test will also not have any role in teacher evaluations “at this point,” according to Reavis.
So, just to review: No data for parents. No accountability for teachers. Why is this a meaningful tool?
“At this point the purpose of the assessment per the Healthy Schools Act is to measure if schools are providing a quality health education to students,” Reavis said “After the pilot year, other types of reporting may be considered.”
Reavis later explained that she was using the word pilot interchangeably with “base” or “initial” — not something speculative or experimental.
Quiz: Test Yourself Against Health, Sex-Education Questions Meant for Students
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
September 14, 2011
Teaching to the Sex Ed Test
The Washington City Paper
By Shani Hilton
September 15, 2011
District of Columbia Public Schools will be testing students on sex ed and physical and emotional wellbeing in the spring, reports the Post:
The 50-question exam will be the nation’s first statewide standardized test on health and sex education, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which developed the assessment for grades 5, 8 and 10.
The District’s rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy are among the country’s highest. Periodic surveys have detailed student attitudes toward risky behavior, but officials said the annual test will fill gaps in their understanding of what young people know and why they might behave the way they do.
I checked out the Post's sample quiz, which has nine questions—three for elementary students, three for middle school students, and three for high schoolers. The sample questions lean toward the kind of common or gut-level knowledge that people typically pick up as they grow older, and may or may not learn in gym class. One question for elementary kids:
Tomorrow morning Beth wants to go on the fifth-grade mile run. To be at her best, Beth should:
eat very little for lunch and dinner the day before the run.
relax the night before the run and go to bed early.
run an extra mile for practice the day before the run.
have a big breakfast the morning of the run.
Aside from the first answer, which would put Beth on the path to an eating disorder, lots of people might do any or all of the last three options to prepare for a mile run. The correct answer, however, is the second one: "relax the night before the run and go to bed early."
One question for high schoolers is about healthy relationships:
Jeffrey and Maria, seniors in high school, have been going together for two years. During the Thanksgiving holiday Maria suddenly breaks up with Jeffrey. What would be the most healthful way for a friend to help Jeffrey?
Tell him that Maria isn't worth it, so forget about her.
Suggest activities that he and Jeffrey can do together.
Find out from Maria why she broke up with Jeffrey.
Suggest that he quickly find another girlfriend.
If this were a sitcom, Jeffrey's friends would probably do all four things, but in real life, students are supposed to select the second choice, "Suggest activities that he and Jeffrey can do together."
There are more concrete questions that gather how much students know about the transmission of HIV (people who have other STDs are more at risk) or which food is better for getting calcium (yogurt, not corn), but some of the squishier ones make me wonder how useful this test will actually be.
Obviously there is a problem in how DCPS students—who are 79 percent black, and part of the demographic most at risk for STDs, obesity, and health issues—are being taught about health. But this test can only be the first step in fixing that problem.
Hispanic Performance Improves Among Sliding SAT Scores
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
September 15, 2011
Hispanic students in Montgomery County improved their performance on the SAT, bucking a national and regional trend of dropping scores.
The 8-point rise to 1,477 out of 2,400 stands out in a year when scores dropped 10 points across Montgomery, 6 points in Maryland and 9 points nationally. White, Asian and black students in Montgomery lost ground, as did Hispanic students on the state and national levels.
Frank Stetson, chief school performance officer for MCPS, credited an increasing focus on rigorous courses for all students, and noted SAT committees in each high school that make sure kids get the test prep they need.
Montgomery's demographic breakdown (see article)
"We have a lot of test-takers where they might be the first test-taker in their family, so we want to get them used to the format of the test," Stetson said. "The length of time can be a shocker if you're not prepared for it."
Twenty-five percent of Montgomery County Public Schools students are Hispanic, a population that has more than tripled to 36,417 since 1993.
The achievement gap between Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers has been a strong focus for the school system, and remains enormous: Hispanic students' average score of 1,477 is 268 points less than white students and 282 points less than Asian students.
But the improvement is a step toward trimming that gap in Montgomery; Hispanic students' composite score across Maryland dropped 11 points.
Joy Burdin, the most recent head of the county PTA's subcommittee on English-language learners, said the schools have made changes that help Hispanic parents engage in their children's education. She was particularly impressed with translators who had been coming to parent meetings.
"I think these families really feel that they want their kids to do better than they've done," Burdin said. "It's one thing to just say it, but another thing to become a participant in success, and I see that slowly happening."