I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

I taught high school in the mid-Nineties. As with all schools, there was one teacher who expounded on how challenging her class was. She frequently mentioned that she had high expectations for her students and that most often she was disappointed by the children of this school. When talking with one of my administrator friends, he explained to me, this talk was simply code for the fact that 60-70% of her students got a "D" or "F" in her class. The administrator saw this as a problem. He explained to a young wet behind the ears (from swim practice) intern that our role was to help students learn the concepts. If many students weren't passing it was on us. Either we needed to be better in facilitating learning, our measurement had bad questions or a bad scale, or we needed a new measurement.

Recently, I have heard the word rigorous used when describing why students are doing poorly on a measure. The most recent incident was when two speakers at a conference I attended explained that the reason students were now doing more poorly on a new assessment of standards than previous assessments of the same standards is that the test was more rigorous. Perhaps Vizzini might call this "inconceivable." Lets look at the situation:
                              Same population being assessed, check.
                              Same standards, check.
                              New Assessment, check.
                              New Scoring Rubric, check.
One may look at the situation and ask, perhaps "rigorous" doesn't mean what you think it means. Perhaps we have a bad scale designed only to pass a few students. Perhaps we have some bad questions that only a few kids can get. Or perhaps, we have a bad assessment overall.

We are finding that more "rigorous" often is test maker jargon for not many kids are going to get this. I was a swimmer. Swimming the 200 fly was more rigorous than swimming the 50 fly. No matter how slow you tried to go, there was no way around it, you were more exhausted after 200 fly than 50 fly. Doing a Tough Mudder is more rigorous thank doing the mile run. Failing a lot of students on an assessment isn't about more rigor, rigor comes through the experience, it's about trying to set the bar so people will fail, just like the teacher who was "challenging" or having "high expectations." Code words are code words and we need to recognize the situation. The more I think about it, the more I find these actions "inconceivable."