Everyone born or with children of their own since 1984, and every teacher entering the profession since 2001, knows what they loath about No Child Left Behind and its impact on public schools. High stakes standardized testing as accountability, and euphemistically termed as “education reform,” is now a permanent pillar of the American school. This is a fact we must embrace if we’re ever to reach something approximating the law’s impossible goal of 100 percent student proficiency — another euphemism, this one for “kids being good enough” — in reading, writing, math and now science by 2014.
If we focus on making a worthy test, instead of perfect standards, the problems facing American schools are salvageable.
Most people don’t mind high stakes testing, and correlated teaching to those tests, if a connection between value and the test itself is present. In my three years teaching in Washington and now Idaho, I’ve never heard a parent or teacher preach against the evils of driver’s education and its adherence to the written and driving assessments required to earn a license. Nor in my 26 years of using a doctor have I encountered patients who wish their surgeon did not have high stakes assessments required to enter and pass medical school — a school teaching them how to perform the surgeries their chosen profession demands or a board certification process requiring the demonstration of scalpel acumen.
With public schools, people object to both the dissonance between the test and its perceived value, as well as the predictable and obvious detriment the accountability movement has done to the profession of teaching. They hate the ever-evolving and indecipherable standards, and the limited progress these standards bring.
If parents saw a relationship between these high stakes tests, school improvement, and children’s academic success, not only would these same parents buy into standardized tests, but they would demand their children’s teachers teach to these tests. The key to fixing our schools at an instructional level lies in putting our best minds and our money in creating a meaningful test for teachers to teach to.
Teachers would get behind this as quickly as anyone else. I cannot count how many meetings I’ve sat through where frustrated teachers felt forced to build another new curriculum based on a test they weren’t familiar with and didn’t buy into. It’s why junior high and high school English teachers teach figurative language devices I didn’t type once while earning my English degree, ahead of literature and poetry as our best attempts to come to terms with the human experience. When onomatopoeia is assessed by salvation allegories or not, we replace the meaningful with the rote.
On a fundamental level, parents and future parents already envision teachers teaching to the test. Do you want your future eight year old to enter the third grade knowing they will be assessed in multiplication because it’s fundamental arithmetic, yet have an instructor who objects to teaching multiplication calculations and applications because it’s teaching to the test? Of course you don’t, because there’s obvious value between mastering arithmetic and potential academic and professional success.
Imagine an exam teachers knew in advance their students would take and parents had faith in the validity of. Something that assessed writing not just as a skill divorced from content, but as inextricably related to explaining the known world through the lens of science, civics and history. Would anyone moan about Mr. Smith teaching every lesson to this test, just as he teaches each driver’s ed lesson to the impending driving exams?
Every teacher with 12 years or less experience has been groomed for the era of alleged data driven instruction and accountability. We must stop pretending our standards, even the precious Common Core, are vehicles to shape instruction. It always has and always will be the test and its scores that drive administrators and through them teachers, in shaping your child’s curricula. Lets give them something worth teaching to.
Brian Marceau
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