A Facebook correspondent comments about the state of education:
The Oklahoma teacher’s blog post was right on the money. High stakes testing is worthless for actual education, and all about enrichment for test manufacturers.
And then they don’t come through – witness the debacle in Minnesota with Pearson. Which, being an old geezer, left me wondering whether it makes more sense to go back to paper tests – that’ll leave the hacker kiddies gasping for breath, along with the computerized testing companies.
While checking on the Atlanta cheating scandal, I ran across this recent article Ronald Lindsay, , which lays out the problems with standardized testing from the abstract point of view.
Conditioning a teacher’s employment or pay on their students’ performance on tests ignores a critical fact: Students’ educational attainment depends on many factors entirely outside an individual teacher’s control, not the least of which is the student’s home environment. Teachers have students for only a portion of each weekday. The “second shift” — to analogize to my hypothetical — namely, the parents and guardians of the students, have control over them for the other portion of each weekday and, typically, the entire weekend. Factors such as the education and socio-economic resources of the parents, as well as their interest in and support of their children’s education, have a significant influence on student achievement. A teacher cannot work miracles on a student who receives no educational reinforcement from the home environment.
Moreover, students are not identical in their natural abilities, nor have they all received the same educational preparation prior to entering the school system. If No Child Left Behind implies a commitment to strive to have each pupil perform to the best of their abilities, that’s a laudable objective. If it implies that we can realistically expect all students to perform well on standardized tests, that’s an impractical and unreasonable goal.
It makes me empathize with the Atlanta teachers who felt they were forced to cheat to hold on to their jobs. This excellent post is partially by a former principal-in-the-trenches.
However, getting rid of testing does leave me wondering how to assess the qualities of the school. True, we could simply wait to see how well the graduates of any given school do in the outside world – but that rather leaves the intervening classes in the lurch, as the saying goes. How did they do it in the old days? I confess I wasn’t really paying attention back when I was in high school – I was just trying to survive and didn’t really have time to wonder about how they assess, say, Mr. Smith the math teacher. Did the principals do the assessments? And if you had a biased principal? There is something to be said for objective measures.
The problem – like science – is doing the right easy thing is hardly ever easy. If it’s easy, you’re not doing it right.
