Conrad Black was in the news again at the end of the year, this time for being one of the Big Events of 2007. Lord Black’s conviction on fraud charges in a United States court was the Big Event. It seems as though every Canadian radio and television news personality has offered an opinion on Conrad’s state of affairs and a judgement on his misdeeds. Countless comparisons have been drawn between him and other convicted fraudsters who headed major corporations and were caught misusing company funds. Every scandal from Bre-X to Enron has been dredged up repeatedly, and, if that weren’t enough the proud Lord of Crossharbour has been personally compared to not only gangsters, con men, mountebanks and extravagant ne’er-do-wells, but compared as well to the idle potentates and arrogant aristocrats of Europe and the Middle East, a Canadian born cross between Louis XV and King Farouk with a hint of Czar Nicholas thrown in.
I believe those comparisons miss the mark. Instead, I would compare Lord Black to the late Paul Desnoyers, formerly of Winfield, B.C. I wrote about Paul twenty years ago, the week he passed away, in a column for the Winfield Calander. I am not sure that Lord Black wouldn’t prefer to be compared to King Farouk than to Paul, who in the ‘70s and ‘80s was known locally as Nature Boy. Both Paul and Conrad came from wealthy, Eastern establishment families. Both were intelligent and well educated and valued the fine arts. I don’t know how well Conrad plays the piano, but I interrupted Paul late one afternoon at the keys of the old upright that stood back stage in the auditorium of the high school where I taught. He was playing Chopin dressed in his usual attire: baggy cut off khaki shorts, a tattered wool sweater, wool socks and running shoes overlaid with rubber galoshes tied on with twine. I suppose his clothing is an indication that here were a few differences between himself and Lord Black.
Like Conrad, Paul marched to his own drummer. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him; he chose to follow principles that he believed were correct; he was his own man. I admired him for that. When he died, I wrote that the world was a better place because of men like Paul who provided proof that it is possible to live a life free of the constraints of day to day life that often seem oppressive to all of us. Conrad in his own way demonstrated the same proof. Others may live lives of monotonous drudgery and repetition, but Conrad existed in world of dazzling extravagance and brilliant wit, a rarified atmosphere where the great and mighty wielded fortunes and power in an unending display of ego and will.
Now, found guilty by a jury of his peers in Chicago (unfortunately it wasn’t a jury of his Peers in London), it will be interesting to see how Conrad reacts to his incarceration. I believe it will be with the same elan as the French count at the time of the Revolution who tidied himself fastidiously as he was being carted off to the guillotine by a screaming mob. What difference, another, younger nobleman asked, did he think any of those pathetic efforts of grooming made in the face of certain death? “Ah, my friend,” he replied, “when death is all there is, how one dies makes all the difference.” Conrad will manage to serve his time like the self-made nobleman he is, barely bothering to acknowledge the rabble who trundle him off to his prison cell. He has crafted his life to his own design and will see it through to the end, just like Paul did.
When the RCMP found Paul one November morning he was wrapped up in his sleeping bag beneath his favorite grove of trees. They said he had a smile on his face. I will be curious to see if Lord Black will be able to maintain his smile.
copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Foundations Skills Assessment tests: a useless exercise
The Boundary District and British Columbia Teachers Associations’ opposition to the Fundamental Skills Assessment (FSA) scheduled to test all Grade 4 and Grade 7 students in February may seem puzzling. What, after all is wrong with testing children to determine the level of their basic literacy and numeracy skills.
The problem many teachers see with the FSA is not the test itself, but how the test results are used. The FSA is a typical standardized test, that is a test administered to a large number of students that compares their individual performances to a pre-established standard. Important information about individual students can be ascertained from such a test by comparing a particular student’s achievement to the entire target group, in this case, about 40,000 students in each of the two grades.
The FSA test results, however, are not primarily used in that way. Instead, conclusions are being drawn from those results, not about individual students, but about subgroups, the 15 or 50 or 100 students that form a particular class or attend a particular school. Such a use of test results is not valid. That is because no small group possesses the same full range of ability that the target group of 40,000 does. Small groups are always anomalies, containing a higher percentage of low achieving or high achieving students than the target group. Therefore, when the statistical analysis of the small group’s performance is generated, the numbers rarely match those of the huge target population. Yet the assumption made by those who do the small group analyses is that the small group numbers should mirror the target population. If they don’t, if the average success rate of a small group are lower, then the assumption is that the teacher or the school must be doing something wrong. If they are higher, the assumption is that the programs of practices of the school or teacher must be unusually good. Neither is necessarily true.
Making those assumptions is analogous to a teacher who analyzes a class’s test results row by row expecting each row to contain the same mix of students and therefore have the same rate of success as every other row. Then having determined which rows have the lowest rates, the teacher berates them for not working as hard or paying as much attention as the other rows, or better yet, blames him/herself for not teaching that row as well as the others.
Our schools, like those rows, reflect subgroups that vary greatly from one another based on socio-economic factors like wealth and poverty, ethnic background and immigrant status, family educational background and so on. From one part of the province to another, or one part of Metro Vancouver to another, those great variations in socio-economic factors have an impact on achievement in schools and on standardized tests. The differences are particularly evident when private schools, which admit only high achieving students in the first place, are compared to public schools that, of course, welcome students of all abilities.
Teachers and administrators are completely aware of the level of achievement of their students without being reminded by a standardized test. The irony is that after spending vast sums of money on these tests and their marking and analysis and hiring expensive Superintendents of Achievement to oversee the process, the Ministry will eventually realize that it is a fruitless exercise. Most jurisdictions in North America already have realized it (Google standardized testing for more information). The average scores generated by individual classes and schools will fluctuate from year to year by a couple of percentage points depending on the abilities of the student population for that year. For example in the last five years, the Boundary District success rate (percentage of students “meeting or exceeding expectations”) on the Grade 7 Reading Comprehension portion of the FSA has varied considerably: 79% in 2003, to 80% in 2004, 76% in 2005, 85% in 2006 and back to 79% in 2007. If one were to accept the Ministry’s rationale for the validity of these tests, those results would point to a serious failure of teachers and schools in 2005 and a remarkable improvement in the same schools and teachers in 2006. Such conclusions are obviously illogical and point out the clear weaknesses in using test results like these as a basis for evaluating school performance. The average scores for the entire province also vary because try as they might, the people making up the tests can never make them of equal difficulty.
Meanwhile the Ministry requires principals and teachers to chase after additional percentage points on their schools’ average FSA scores in order to create the illusion that steady progress is being made. Teachers know that this takes time away from the many other tasks that they are required to perform, most of which are of far greater importance.
That’s why teachers all over the province are opposed to the FSA.
Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008
The problem many teachers see with the FSA is not the test itself, but how the test results are used. The FSA is a typical standardized test, that is a test administered to a large number of students that compares their individual performances to a pre-established standard. Important information about individual students can be ascertained from such a test by comparing a particular student’s achievement to the entire target group, in this case, about 40,000 students in each of the two grades.
The FSA test results, however, are not primarily used in that way. Instead, conclusions are being drawn from those results, not about individual students, but about subgroups, the 15 or 50 or 100 students that form a particular class or attend a particular school. Such a use of test results is not valid. That is because no small group possesses the same full range of ability that the target group of 40,000 does. Small groups are always anomalies, containing a higher percentage of low achieving or high achieving students than the target group. Therefore, when the statistical analysis of the small group’s performance is generated, the numbers rarely match those of the huge target population. Yet the assumption made by those who do the small group analyses is that the small group numbers should mirror the target population. If they don’t, if the average success rate of a small group are lower, then the assumption is that the teacher or the school must be doing something wrong. If they are higher, the assumption is that the programs of practices of the school or teacher must be unusually good. Neither is necessarily true.
Making those assumptions is analogous to a teacher who analyzes a class’s test results row by row expecting each row to contain the same mix of students and therefore have the same rate of success as every other row. Then having determined which rows have the lowest rates, the teacher berates them for not working as hard or paying as much attention as the other rows, or better yet, blames him/herself for not teaching that row as well as the others.
Our schools, like those rows, reflect subgroups that vary greatly from one another based on socio-economic factors like wealth and poverty, ethnic background and immigrant status, family educational background and so on. From one part of the province to another, or one part of Metro Vancouver to another, those great variations in socio-economic factors have an impact on achievement in schools and on standardized tests. The differences are particularly evident when private schools, which admit only high achieving students in the first place, are compared to public schools that, of course, welcome students of all abilities.
Teachers and administrators are completely aware of the level of achievement of their students without being reminded by a standardized test. The irony is that after spending vast sums of money on these tests and their marking and analysis and hiring expensive Superintendents of Achievement to oversee the process, the Ministry will eventually realize that it is a fruitless exercise. Most jurisdictions in North America already have realized it (Google standardized testing for more information). The average scores generated by individual classes and schools will fluctuate from year to year by a couple of percentage points depending on the abilities of the student population for that year. For example in the last five years, the Boundary District success rate (percentage of students “meeting or exceeding expectations”) on the Grade 7 Reading Comprehension portion of the FSA has varied considerably: 79% in 2003, to 80% in 2004, 76% in 2005, 85% in 2006 and back to 79% in 2007. If one were to accept the Ministry’s rationale for the validity of these tests, those results would point to a serious failure of teachers and schools in 2005 and a remarkable improvement in the same schools and teachers in 2006. Such conclusions are obviously illogical and point out the clear weaknesses in using test results like these as a basis for evaluating school performance. The average scores for the entire province also vary because try as they might, the people making up the tests can never make them of equal difficulty.
Meanwhile the Ministry requires principals and teachers to chase after additional percentage points on their schools’ average FSA scores in order to create the illusion that steady progress is being made. Teachers know that this takes time away from the many other tasks that they are required to perform, most of which are of far greater importance.
That’s why teachers all over the province are opposed to the FSA.
Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008
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