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Friday, December 20, 2013
100% Participation is our Goal
Monday, December 16, 2013
Schools should be donation-funded only- DRO Herald LTE
Schools should be donation-funded only
Thank
goodness for people like the Katzes, who gave $250,000 to our local
school district. This is the way schools should be funded at the local
level – with people who can afford it and get the notoriety that it
gives them.
If all the people in
9-R who are still shocked about the failure of Amendment 66 were to give
$5,000 or $10,000, then everyone would be happy.
The
schools would have plenty of extra money, and the donors would be
lauded as local heros in the news while the rest of us would not have to
fork over tax monies we can’t afford.
Amendment
66 was doomed to fail from the get-go. The almost $1 billion a year the
state would have received for its schools was way out of line and just
plain greedy to ask for. How much of that money would have gone to the
schools? Probably a small percentage, but there would have been some
very wealthy state officials if the amendment had passed.
If locals donate, then the funds will be more transparent and easier to follow what they are being used for.
Let
those who can afford it help the schools do so. My wife and I over the
last 40 years have given tens of thousands of tax dollars to 9-R without
ourselves having children. Shouldn’t we get a tax break?
Thanks to the voters of Colorado for defeating this astronomically high tax.
Jay Turner
Durango
What irks is not loss of Amdt. 66, but the lies around it- DRO Herald OP-ED
What irks is not loss of Amdt. 66, but the lies around it
So,
it came as a shock – the results of the Amendment 66 vote back on Nov. 5
– when Colorado voters resoundingly said “no” to increasing funding for
the state’s schools. I guess I live in this dream world where I believe
people value my work, along with the roughly 50,000 other Colorado
teachers, and trust we try to make every school day better than the
last.
I understand the mistrust the
public has in me because I was so looking forward to splitting that
$950 million dollars among my fellow instructors, leading to a $19,000
pay hike per educator. Could you imagine the party? You would have been
invited, I promise.
But, I would be
willing to downsize that bash by adding the public education support
staff, too. Because schools play such an integral role in the
preservation and progress of our society, they require peripheral
support to carry out the charge of educating our youths. Schools tend to
the care of our children through the efforts of cafeteria staff,
principals, custodians, superintendents, coaches, human resource
directors, curriculum directors, bus drivers, classroom aides,
administrative assistants, counselors, librarians, computer technicians,
nurses and so on. I would provide a count of these important
individuals who contribute to the well-being and growth of our future,
but I can’t readily find one.
Lacking
this number, let’s just say 45,000 in order to make that total an odd
95,000 professionals who split the “jackpot.” Now we’re talking about a
$10,000 windfall, per annum, for that big party we’re planning. By the
way, that number fits the statistics presented by Kelly Maher, executive
director of Compass Colorado, an active opponent of Amendment 66. She
stipulates in her Oct. 11 Denver Post opinion piece that without the
“bloat” of support staff, Colorado teachers could realize a $10,000 pay
increase. But, with the passage of Amendment 66, we could have spread
the wealth to all. Oh, wait...what was that? It wasn’t meant to go to
salaries?
Well, alright. What if it
went to the state’s approximately 863,000 students? We could increase
money spent on them by nearly $1,100 per kid. According to Education
Week’s 2013 study, that would bring Colorado close to New Mexico’s
per-pupil spending. That state outpaces us by $1,664. I realize
mentioning our neighbors to the south flouts my argument, as it ranks
dead in the middle of all states in per pupil spending, while its
achievement places it near the bottom. So, if Colorado already
outperforms New Mexico with less money, who else might our children top
if we reduce our monetary commitment even more? Watch out, Finland.
But
Maher and other opponents, such as Amy Oliver Cooke of the Independence
Institute, reveled in 66’s defeat because, according to them, there
were no real reforms attached to the revenue; there was no way to make
sure the money went to instructional improvement instead of lining the
pockets of the fat-cat teachers and support staff. To them, Colorado’s
children are safe – for now – from the appetite of a greedy,
irresponsible and broken education system that could create real reform,
such as “higher expectations” and “real innovations,” without money if
they would just quit being lazy.
If
I sound a little bitter and snarky now, you should have heard me before
I gave it a month. I would have written something right then, voicing
my near depression, but I was busy working on a rubric, clarifying
criteria for a peer-observation process the teachers at my school chose
to add to their workload for improving instruction. This, in addition to
their work installing the new Common Core Standards recently adopted by
Colorado, such that students are more engaged while teachers design and
deliver an embedded assessment that gauges progress and then informing
instruction addressing student need.
All
District 9-R teachers, like all teachers throughout the state, are in
the midst of the first, full implementation of the new educator
evaluations mandated by Colorado voters through Senate Bill-191. This
process calls for, minimally, one annual formal evaluation based upon at
least four supporting observations, each requiring a pre- and
post-conference. This cycle can’t begin until the teacher has completed a
meticulous, criteria-based self-evaluation for goal setting in both
professional practice and student achievement. Truthfully, it is a
valuable and rigorous process – but it is only half of the evaluation,
with student achievement data comprising the other. You should know,
though, that these aren’t all of the state-directed reforms required
right now.
So, my bitterness over
the defeat isn’t aimed at the voters. I get it. I am a taxpayer, too.
Taxes are hard to impose on yourself. The bitterness comes from the lies
told. The reforms are already in place without funding, and now schools
must tackle them with less everything. Kelly Mayer pointed out that
Amendment 66 would have cost families $250 per year. If my math is
right, that is about $21 a month. What percentage is that of your
monthly family phone plan? Mayer and Cooke may have “won,” but who
loses? The students.
On Monday,
teachers (and next year, thanks to 66’s defeat, fewer of them) will keep
teaching – not for the money or prestige, but because they care about
the kids. Do Mayer and Cooke?
John Hise is an instructional coach at Escalante Middle School. Reach him at jhise2@durango.k12.co.us.
It’s tough educating when funding is tight- Herald OP ED
It’s tough educating when funding is tight
Public
education is one of the greater gifts a community can provide a child,
and every parent hopes their child will succeed within an academic
setting so they can move forward and find success later in their lives.
A
few weeks ago, our state voted on Amendment 66, a ballot measure that
would have granted our public schools additional funding. However, that
measure did not pass and now Durango School District 9-R is facing the
dilemma of cutting $1.6 million.
The
most difficult thing I see within this process is that, over the course
of the past six years, Colorado has developed multiple state mandates
to implement a more effective learning environment for all students, yet
all of these mandates are unfunded, and districts are left to find
creative ways to ensure implementation. These mandates have increased
accountability measures, which cost money and take away student contact
time and funding that could be used to support students directly. The
requirements often entail additional testing or evaluation for the
students and are directly tied to annual performance evaluations.
Nonetheless,
supplementary testing is not all bad. The district plans to incorporate
School Vault and the use of common formative assessments within daily
school life to better tailor teaching to their students’ needs. Common
formative assessments will be used to inform instruction and focus
learning.
The largest obstacle
pertaining to the goals and focuses for the district is the added
expenses that come along with improving education.
Many
people believe decreasing class sizes is a fantastic way to improve
learning within classrooms, and many others see increasing class sizes
as a way to lower expenditures; however, there are huge problems that
accompany both scenarios.
If the
district was to decrease class sizes, it would have to realize one
crucial factor: To reach a significant change in achievement level it
would have to significantly reduce the class sizes by not just removing
one or two students, but removing five to seven. If this was the case,
it would cost more than $2 million.
On
the contrary, if the district were to increase class size notably, the
chances of having students slip through the cracks would increase, yet
it would be able to save more than $1 million.
In
either situation there are evident pros and cons, yet our district is
doing a good job of attempting to keep class sizes at a reasonable level
while still increasing them. A potentially positive alternative in my
eyes is creating appropriate class sizes where the needier students are
balanced out and distributed to strong teachers. Another possibility at
the high school would be to eliminate Small Learning Communities,
thereby creating realistic class sizes that are distributed to teachers
highly qualified in each content area, thus making class sizes more
manageable and using resources effectively.
Durango
9-R faces some tough decisions in the coming months, but Durango is not
alone. Districts across the nation are faced with the implementation of
the Common Core Standards, new accountability measures and teacher
performance evaluations.
Here in
Durango, we live in a community that values education, and we have a
school district that truly values what is best for students. Where will
the $1.6 million be cut from? That is the question. Currently,
Superintendent Snowberger is holding monthly roundtables to get feedback
from the community. Our community and school district must work
together to ensure our children receive the best education we can
provide, while adhering to new state mandates and cutting the budget.
Jessie
Brammer is a feature editor at El Diablo, the Durango High School
student newspaper. Her parents are Robert and Michol Brammer of Durango.
K-12 funding issues start to come into focus
K-12 funding issues start to come into focus
Written by Todd Engdahl on Dec 11th, 2013. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
The big issues facing K-12 funding were fully framed Wednesday for the legislative Joint Budget Committee, and staff analyst Craig Harper urged members to focus quickly on how to handle those questions.
Colorado Department of Education
In the wake of Amendment 66’s defeat, school finance is emerging as the top education issue for the 2014 legislature. School districts and some lawmakers are pushing for increases that would help restore some of the cuts of recent years.
But Gov. John Hickenlooper’s proposed 2014-15 K-12 budget suggests a relatively modest hike that basically covers just enrollment growth and inflation. The governor’s budget proposes more significant increases for higher education.
Harper met with the committee for four hours Wednesday during the members’ annual pre-session briefing on the governor’s proposed Department of Education budget for 2014-15. Harper’s presentation was based on a 139-page briefing paper prepared for the committee.
Harper made recommendations on some issues but didn’t make specific suggestions on others, noting they are weighty enough to require discussions between the committee and the department and decisions by the JBC and legislative leadership.
That sets up an interesting session on Dec. 19, when Colorado Department of Education officials will meet with the JBC to answer questions.
Here are the key points of the major issues raised during the briefing:
School finance
Harper suggested that the legislature needs to make key decisions on how much to spend on schools in 2014-15, how to balance that spending between the main general fund and the supplementary State Education Fund (SEF), how to maintain the health of the SEF over several years and how to reduce what’s called the “negative factor.”
During the recession, the legislature reinterpreted constitutional provisions that govern annual increases in school funding, deciding that those provisions applied only to base funding but not to the additional money used to adjust support to districts based on special needs. That mechanism, called the negative factor, allowed the legislature to spend less on schools than it otherwise would have. That gap now is estimated at about $1 billion.
Hickenlooper is proposing a $222 million increase in school funding for 2014-15 but no significant reduction in the negative factor.
The governor wants to take most of the increase from the SEF, something Harper disagrees with because he fears doing so will just put more pressure on the general fund in later years.
Many districts and education interest groups are pushing hard to reduce the negative factor. Harper’s briefing paper agreed that doing so would be a good thing to do – if lawmakers can find the money.
“Staff recommends that the committee and the General Assembly focus early discussions on the broader questions of how much to pay, how to finance any increases in appropriations, and whether to increase the minimum balance in the SEF. Staff recommends that the committee initiate discussions with legislative leadership, the education committees, and the governor’s ofice concerning those broader questions,” Harper wrote.
Harper also analyzed and made recommendations on several other education budget requests.
Testing
The Department of Education has requested $3.8 million (most of it from the SEF) for development and administration of new tests. (See this EdNews story for an update on those plans.
Harper’s briefing paper noted that many school districts are worried about being ready for online tests, particularly in 2015, and that there also are concerns about expected drops in achievement levels because of the transition and about the pressure of implementing multiple reforms. But he didn’t make specific recommendations about funding the request, suggesting committee members discuss the issue further with the department.
BEST program
The state’s Building Excellent Schools Today construction grant program is at a crossroads, given that it’s almost out of money for making large grants and because a recent state audit found problems with program administration (see this EdNews story).
Harper recommended that the legislature pass a law to make BEST’s smaller cash grants subject to legislative approval. Another panel, the Legislature Audit Committee, is expected to introduce a bill that would tighten up on BEST requirements for local school district matches.
Other budget issues
The department is requesting a $3.1 million increase and additional staff to beef up its computers and information technology unit to meet the demands of managing the avalanche of new data that will be generated by various reform efforts such as the new teacher evaluation system.
Harper agreed that additional money is necessary but suggested the committee discuss the issue further with the department.
Several lawmakers at Wednesday’s hearings also raised questions about CDE’s current independence from the Governor’s Office of Information Technology, which coordinates IT services for a number of other state agencies.
On another issue, Harper suggested that the state’s English language learners law needs a broad overhaul beyond the $430,000 the department is asking for to provide additional assistance to districts. (Such a bill is in the works.)
JBC vice chair Pat Steadman, a Democratic senator from Denver, agreed, saying, “the issue is far bigger than technical assistance.”
Another department request proposes spending $2.8 million from the SEF to cover continued funding of the early literacy assessment tool required by the state’s early literacy law. Harper again recommended the committee discuss this issue with the department and with leaders of the legislature’s two education committees.
See the story here: http://www.ednewscolorado.org/news/capitol-news/k-12-funding-issues-start-to-come-into-focus
Colorado schools fare about the same year-over-year in accountability rankings
Colorado schools fare about the same year-over-year in accountability rankings
Written by Nicholas Garcia on Dec 11th, 2013. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Most of Colorado’s K-12 schools saw little change in their annual rankings by the Colorado Department of Education, and if that trend continues as many as 40 schools and their districts could face consequences from the state’s education department by 2016.
The results of the annual evaluations, or school performance frameworks, were approved by the State Board of Education and made public Tuesday afternoon.
Seventy percent of schools statewide are performing at the state’s highest level. Nearly 20 percent are ranked at the second level, 7 percent at the third level, and 3 percent at the lowest level.
Those results — which include charter, innovation and online schools — exclude designated alternative education campuses that serve high risk student populations.
Charter schools performed slightly better than the average: 75 percent were ranked in the top category, but about 10 percent were ranked in the bottom two categories, mirroring the statewide performance.
Innovation schools fared worse: 63 percent were classified among the best, while nearly 15 percent were ranked in the bottom two categories.
Online school outcomes were the most mixed and had the largest bloc of schools in the lowest categories: 21 percent were ranked above the rest while nearly half, or 48 percent, ranked in the bottom.
While there was also little year-over-year movement in alternative school rankings, the overall results were more mixed. About 40 percent of alternative education campuses were ranked on top, while nearly 13 percent were ranked at the bottom.
Schools — alternative or not — placed in the bottom two classifications, or “priority improvement” and “turnaround,” are placed on a five year watch, often referred to as the “accountability clock.” Schools must show significant growth or the school’s governing district maybe subject to a series of actions by the state’s school board, including having the district’s accreditation downgraded.
The state board does not accredit individual schools and the law which established the processes, the School Accountablity Act of 2009, restricts the authority of the state education department to mostly the district level.
A total of 190 schools are on the accountability clock. More than 80 found themselves there for the first time, and 40 are entering year four of the five year clock, Associate Commissioner Keith Owens told the state board.
Most of those 40 schools showed no improvement over last year.
“We want to see student outcomes improve quickly,” Owens said in a later interview with EdNews Colorado. “We don’t want them to wait. The hope is the clock puts pressure on these schools and districts. The outcomes that are happening are not acceptable to the state and these communities.”
Of the 40 schools entering year four on July 1, 2014, online schools make up a disproportionate amount of schools. Online schools account for 2 percent of all schools in Colorado, but 12.5 percent of online schools are entering year four.
The state may take action as early as July 1, 2016, if any of those schools don’t improve before then.
At that point a review panel will make recommendations to the state that the school be converted to a charter, awarded innovation status, be closed or managed by some entity other than the district. The state would direct the local district on the recommendations.
Schools and districts are allowed to appeal their ranking. This year 27 schools in 13 districts asked for their status to be upgraded. Thirteen schools appeals were approved, nine were denied and two rescinded their appeal.
Schools and districts that request appeals must provide the state with additional data demonstrating progress toward statewide performance indicators including achievement and college readiness, as well as evidence the institution successfully met its goals agreed to with the state the previous year.
Simultaneously, some districts, including Denver Public Schools, requested the state to lower rankings for 34 schools.
Owens told the board the requests were generally made to reflect the respective district’s own rankings.
See the story here:http://www.ednewscolorado.org/news/colorado-schools-fare-about-the-same-year-over-year-in-accountability-rankings
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
The Case for SAT Words
The Case for SAT Words
High-schoolers should know what "unscrupulous" means.
Jim Montoya, the College Board’s Vice President of Higher Education, in an interview on NPR, reiterated Coleman’s criticism of “SAT words.” Asked why the SAT is “always [testing] the word 'unscrupulous',” Montoya replied, “Yes, you're right. It's one of those words people identify as an SAT word. All I can say is that as we move forward, one of the things we want to make absolutely certain of is that the vocabulary that students are expected to know will be vocabulary that they will be able to use as college students, and which will be valuable to them.”
Coleman’s comments on vocabulary provoked little response at the time, although one commentator accused him of “sending a message that devalues language.” The notion that some words are not worth knowing is bound to raise the hackles not only of people who love the wealth and power of all kinds of words, including fancy ones, but also of people who know just how much importance educational experts attribute to what they call “lexical richness,” or a large and diverse vocabulary. Coleman just so happens to be both of those kinds of people, and he understands that the question is less what vocabulary students should learn vocabulary than how they should learn it.
The College Board’s unfortunate remarks make it sound like the choice is to decide which of two classes of words to teach and test—the technical (e.g., “hypothesis”) or the writerly (e.g., “unscrupulous”)—neither of which is particularly likely to appear in ordinary conversation. The real choice, though, is between treating vocabulary as part of a strong education that incorporates a lot of reading in all the disciplines or teaching vocabulary explicitly with word lists, flashcards, quizzes, and high stakes standardized tests. The surprising news is that the College Board seems to be adopting the first view, even if it has done a poor job in saying so.
***
There is a simple explanation why the SAT does not test words like transform and hypothesis. They are too easy. The linguist Dennis Baron, who runs The Web of Language, suggested that it is inevitable that some SAT words are on the obscure side. Baron said, “If [the College Board’s] goal is to [test] words that only the most massively memorizing kid is going to know. . . then [it is] going to have to reach. It’s like the spelling bee,” although he acknowledged that the SAT’s words are not as extreme as those used by the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which itself added a vocabulary test this year.The College Board has to preserve the difficulty of the Reading section of the SAT, because it a norm-referenced exam: It ranks students by percentiles along a bell-curve distribution. As a result, the exam must be designed so that only a small minority of test takers will be able to answer over 90 percent of the questions correctly. In contrast, most state standards assessment tests are criterion-referenced exams. They set a standard for test-takers to meet, with the hope that all of them will do so. Everyone cannot get an 800 on the SAT Reading section, but all the students in the nation could test at or above grade level on a Common Core State Standards assessment exam; indeed, that is the aim of the Common Core. The difference between the SAT and standards tests lies, ultimately, in what they are designed to do. State assessments are designed to identify failing students, while the SAT has historically been used to identify the most successful ones, those who can get into the relatively small fraction of selective schools among the nation’s 6,000-plus colleges and universities.
The Common Core Standards are unambiguous about the value of vocabulary. They state, “The importance of students acquiring a rich and varied vocabulary cannot be overstated.” They are just as clear about the importance of reading for this acquisition: “vocabulary acquisition eventually stagnates by grade 4 or 5 unless students acquire additional words from written context.” The Common Core is no enemy of language, but an advocate for its study within its natural habitat. It is a friend of reading.When Coleman and Montoya talk about the testing the words students “most need to know,” they make the SAT sound like a criterion -referenced exam, designed to shape teaching and curriculum. Instead of talking about measuring a student’s potential for academic success, they make it sound like the exam should play a role in shaping that potential. This is most likely not a mistake. Before Coleman became the president of College Board in 2012, he played an instrumental role in creating the Common Core Standards. It looks like he is now trying to bring the College Board’s work in line with the Common Core. In order to understand Coleman’s remark about SAT words, Georgia Scurletis wrote at Vocabulary.com, we need to understand how the Common Core thinks about vocabulary, and, in particular, about different classes of vocabulary.
The same cannot be said for the SAT. From the exam’s inception in 1926 and almost without interruption, the SAT has relied heavily on testing vocabulary, perhaps most notoriously in its antonym questions, which asked examinees to pick the best antonym of a stem word from among five choices. Since the mid-‘90s, the test has moved away from such contextless questions, which were particularly rewarding to those who memorized the dictionary definition of vast numbers of words. The problem has not gone away, however. Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Vocabulary.com, suggested that “a lot of what might be considered the traditional SAT words might have been a little esoteric and also very specific in their meaning,” which meant that “you just learned this strange-sounding word and its meaning and you’re done,” rather than learning the kinds of words that take on different meanings in different contexts.
On the current SAT, vocabulary is tested in two ways: within the context of reading comprehension passages and in discrete sentence completion questions. Sherral Miller, Vice President of Assessment Development at College Board, reported in an email that both the reading comprehension passages and sentences used in the sentence completions are drawn from published material; they are not written for the test. College Board does not use a word list for developing questions. The words they test, Miller wrote, “are all important words to know in academic and even civic life; words are not used if they are extremely rare or precious, overly discipline-specific, etc.” Questions are reviewed by high school and college teachers to determine their “relevance” and “appropriateness,” and their difficulty is assessed by field-testing with students. Miller did not explain what the criteria are for determining what is appropriate, relevant, difficult, or important to academic and civic life.
By far the most interesting revelation in Miller’s emails is:
Describing the current test, Miller explained that “passage-based items [i.e., Reading Comprehension questions] assess multiple-meaning, context-dependent vocabulary” while Sentence Completions, Miller explained, “require vocabulary knowledge but also knowledge of sentence structure and logic.” The shift in emphasis on the new SAT will likely require a significant change to the Sentence Completions format, if not its outright elimination, since a single fill-in does not lend itself to testing different senses of a word. The change might also affect the level of vocabulary tested. Currently, the context-dependent, passage-based questions test easier vocabulary, probably because asking students to tease apart different meanings of a word like baroque, which has been tested in Sentence Completions, is simply too difficult. If the SAT does hold on to questions involving difficult vocabulary, they might be even harder than those on the current test.Vocabulary in the new SAT will focus on multiple meaning words and phrases that ask examinees to determine their meaning based on the context in which they are used. Testing to see if the examinee knows the one and only one meaning of a word will no longer be tested in the new SAT. Rather, we will be testing students’ understanding of the meaning of words in context.
***
Why was vocabulary tested in the first place on the SAT? It is not just the SAT, of course, that tests vocabulary, but a host of school assessment exams and IQ tests. Vocabulary tests are easily administered, and the size of a person’s lexicon correlates surprisingly well with all kinds of desirable qualities. In apiece published earlier this year, E. D. Hirsch, the founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, argued that the “key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary” since “there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary.” Zimmer, too, said, “The scope of one’s vocabulary correlates quite well with general educational achievement and career success as well.”And why is vocabulary such a good index? Is it only an index? Is the size of a person’s vocabulary like the brightness of a parrot’s plumage, a form of display meant to signal fitness? Or is a lexicon more like a beak, a tool that the stronger and sharper it is the greater the chances are for its owner to thrive? Does knowing words show you are smart or make you smart?
If word knowledge plays the same role that plumage does, then studying vocabulary will do no more to cultivate intelligence than waxing and dying a parrot will add to its health. (Although a color and wax job might dupe a gullible bird into mating in the same way that using “SAT words” might make a person look intelligent without being so.) If, on the other hand, vocabulary knowledge is itself a mode of intelligence, then it makes good sense to invest significant resources to expand the vocabulary of children and perhaps adults, too.
James Lee, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota whose research examines the genetic basis of intelligence, provided some background to explain why vocabulary might be one of our best indicators of a person’s general intelligence and not just an indication of a person’s socioeconomic class, upbringing, and, education. These elements clearly play a role in determining what and how many words a person knows, as demonstrated in the influential work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley, who showed that educational inequalities among nine-year-olds from different socioeconomic correlated closely with the sheer number of words they heard in their first three years of life. For Hart and Risley, words are beaks.
In classical IQ science, words are feathers because, without denying the importance of exposure to words, there is more to vocabulary acquisition and knowledge than exposure. In older, behaviorist models of word acquisition, children were believed to learn words simply through association. A kid hears the word “ball” in the presence of said object enough times, and he links the sound to the concept.
Nowadays, Lee explained, thanks to the work of Paul Bloom and others, many psychologists think that word learning “is actually a quite rational process, and not , to concepts through repetition; they “parse what they hear into segments and use all the intellectual skills at their disposal to figure out what these individual words mean.” It is a small cognitive marvel every time a child or an adult for that matter learns a new word, which is why a large vocabulary can be a sign of an innate intellectual ability. Lee warned that much more study remains to be done on this subject. It seems likely that, given an equal playing field, differences in innate intelligence probably account for some differences in the sizes of individuals’ lexicons, so, yes, vocabulary can serve a plumage function. The problem is that we are a long way from a society in which all children grow up in rich linguistic environments, and the insidious effects that appear to be a product of this particular kind of poverty suggest that words are also beaks that allow us to think more efficiently and with greater complexity about our world.
***
There are two fundamental ways difficult words make us smarter: They bundle concepts together so that they can be recalled and mentally manipulated. And they help us cut fine distinctions in our thinking about the world. Some difficult words chunk and other chisel. Unfortunately, the same qualities that allow these words to contribute to our intelligence also make them more difficult to master and, thus, less frequently used in speech and writing, which only makes them harder to learn.Borrowing the concept of chunking from cognitive psychology, Hirsch argued in “A Wealth of Words,”
Of course, this chunking only works once you have mastered all the concepts that the word bundles together. “Topology” would not strike most mathematicians as difficult, but that is only because they are immersed in their particular domain of knowledge.Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose you put a single item into your working memory—say, “Pasteur.” So long as you hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you don’t need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope with your problem.
Someone looking in the dictionary at a definition of topology as it is used in math will almost certainly fail to understand its meaning, since he does not know the concepts the word brings to bear. What makes the word valuable to a mathematician is what makes it difficult for the layperson to learn the word. It is not simply that he does not encounter it enough; when chunking words are difficult it is because what they refer to is difficult. The way to master them is to master the domain in which they are found. Gaining such knowledge entails gaining such words.
Knowing when to use unscrupulous depends not just on repeated textual encounters with the word as it is actually used, but on repeated encounters with similar words, with the whole semantic family of synonyms and antonyms for unscrupulous, since it is through them that a person can learn how similar words are different. The literary scholar and former Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks suggested that the SAT “is stupid about what words are like. [W]ords get their meaning and have their force like iron filings, from a whole field of them,” which means that understanding a word means encountering a field of meaning. “If learning new vocabulary words in theory is a question of carving up conceptual space more precisely,” Nunberg said, “that can only come with reading and acquiring the conceptual distinctions.” The same is not typically true of the other class of difficult words, the chisels. They tend to be much more promiscuous, showing up in all kinds of domains, but tending perhaps to more writerly ones. Their aim is not to synthesize, but to analyze. The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg suggested that these kinds of difficult words make us smarter because they allow us to “carve up conceptual space more precisely.” Consider the example of “unscrupulous.” The Microsoft Word thesaurus provides as synonyms for “unscrupulous” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” “dodgy,” “immoral,” and “ruthless.” These words occupy a similar semantic space, but they are not equivalent to each other. One of the keys to speaking and writing eloquently is the power to select the most appropriate chisel for the context. You need to know, for instance, that it is appropriate to call the behavior of many mortgage lenders unscrupulous, but not to call a small child’s lie to his mother unscrupulous, since we do not expect young children to live according to principles. You would not find this distinction out, however, if you simply memorized the definition at Merriam-Webster.com: “not honest or fair; doing things that are wrong, dishonest, or illegal.”
The problem with semantic families is that they tempt the brain to take a shortcut, to go for the more familiar word and forget the less familiar one, particularly if someone does not see the difference between the two. The College Board might be right that most people will never use “SAT words” again after they learn them for the SAT, but that probably has much less to do with the words themselves and more with the way students learn them. “Unscrupulous” is only useless if you don’t appreciate why you would choose it over “dishonest” or “corrupt.”
Chunking words and chiseling words present a serious problem for the College Board as it reconsiders its approach to testing vocabulary. Miller wrote in her email that the current SAT “does not directly test domain-specific words” because “doing so would privilege those candidates who had content knowledge in that domain.” That would seem to rule out that the difficult chunking words, unless the College Board changes its policy on domain-specific words, which it well might in years to come, with the Core Curriculum in place. Flexible, chiseling words that represent more nuanced synonyms of simpler concepts (e.g., meretricious and cheap) present a different problem. After suggesting that knowing a word like “arcane” requires us not just to know its dictionary definition but to know its difference from “obscure” and “recondite, ” Nunberg said, “the College Board cannot ask you a question in which knowledge of the difference between “arcane” and “recondite” will be important to the answer.” The distinction is too fine and too open to challenge.
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If difficult vocabulary does disappear from the SAT, what will the consequences be for the language as it is written and spoken in this country? I suspect they will be negligible, given how little long-term benefit there is to flashcard-style studying. In an age when more and more people are carrying around multiple dictionaries on their phones and their reading devices, the notion of memorizing hundreds or even thousands of words could come to seem antiquated, like knowing how to use a slide rule or being able to spell. When I brought this up to Dennis Baron, he explained that often when new technologies with pedagogical impacts appear, such as the word processor’s spell-checker, the calculator, or the pencil with a built-in eraser, there are heated debates over whether the machines will prevent students from learning what seem like essential skills, such as long division, spelling, or taking the time to figure out exactly what you are going to write before you write. These technologies are not only assimilated; they eventually become essential to education. “Now instructors complain if students don’t run the spell-check,” Baron said.Technology could end up making it much easier for students to explore the meanings of difficult words within a meaningful context rather than a vacuum. Baron admitted there is some difference—the tablet dictionary will not work if you have to look up every third word. But the spellchecker is subject to much the same principle, and there can be little doubt that while it has had a negative effect on individuals’ abilities to spell it has had a positive effect on our society’s ability to do so. It is probably not a coincidence that the National Spelling Bee has become a live television event in the age when fewer people need to know how to spell. Perhaps this will be the fate of vocabulary, thanks in part to the new SAT. We will turn on ESPN to marvel at schoolchildren defining “rodomontade,” “byzantine,” and, perhaps, “unscrupulous.”
Read the story here:http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-case-for-sat-words/282253/
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