One big chunk of raw meat to digest....
So, I'm back just in time to see the New York Times weigh in on the "Test Mess". This is one humongous article, chock full of information that has me jumping up and down either in frustration or celebration, so bear with me. I've got a lot to say here, but I'll try not to be too schizophrenic in my comments. For a much more concise summary that focuses on the class war angle of the article, go to Joanne Jacob's site (and scroll about half way down).
The article opens up with a scene from a classroom in New York City suburbs, where the teacher is preparing students for the eighth-grade English language arts exam:
This is not quite the way I remembered junior high, but in recent decades a highly progressive species of education, with interdisciplinary units and history fairs and do-it-yourself science projects, has become an upper-middle-class suburban birthright. And here O'Brien was drilling her kids to prepare for a test obviously designed for -- well, there was no very delicate way to put it.
So, right off the bat, we've got the sides established - progressive, laid-back education vs. stuffy old traditionalist tests...
New York's eighth-grade E.L.A. exam, which requires students to listen to a lengthy passage and answer questions and write an essay about its central themes and details, to answer questions about written passages and also write two other essays, is well regarded in the testing world; but nobody in the class...considered it an intellectually worthwhile exercise... Just about every eighth grader at Hommocks, and just about all of their teachers, are dismayed about the state-mandated tests...Over in Scarsdale, the wealthier suburb next door, the moms are fighting mad; last year, more than half of the eighth-grade parents took their children home when the tests were given.
So we shouldn't give tests that wealthy suburban kids consider to be too easy and not worth their time? They shouldn't have to go through the process of providing the state with valuable information about their achievement just because New York is trying to ensure that all of its children can read and write? And what a valuable lesson to teach your eighth-graders - "You're too smart and special for this test. It's not worth your time. Stay home and watch the Cartoon Network today." Funny, we're always being accused of making tests that only the wealthiest of tykes can do well on, and now they complain about how easy the tests are....
And in December, Congress overwhelmingly passed President Bush's education bill...at its core there is a requirement that all states devise standards for English and math and institute tests in Grades 3 through 8 to see that the standards are being met.
And the reason for this is that the goal of the bill is to have 100% reading proficiency in the U.S. within 12 years of the 2002-03 school year. The goal is not to test every child to the limits of his or her capability, and the lack of understanding about this is why we're already seeing this backlash from those who don't find the tests appropriate or challenging enough.
... Amy Wilkins, a policy analyst for the Education Trust, an organization that strongly backs testing as a tool for bringing equity to the schools, says that she finds it infuriating ''to hear the soccer moms say these tests are bad for black children.''
My jaw drops for the first time, in delight - an actual quote from someone who has something positive to say about standardized tests.
The academic value of this exercise depends, of course, on whether the test assesses skills important for a fourth-grader to master. There seems to be a very wide consensus that the E.L.A. test does just that.
And based on this, we can assume that "teaching to the test" might be a worthy endeavor, since that would involve teaching skills that are important, right? Right?
Kronin took me over to Mark Molina's eighth-grade English class...It was about six weeks before the E.L.A. test ... I leafed through the class textbook. It was titled ''Aim Higher English Language Arts, Level H.'' The book was divided into sections: Test; Pre-test; Exam Overview; Listening, Reading and Writing; and Post-test...Here was test preparation with a vengeance. The textbook was a training manual, and the curriculum was the test...Nobody defends this kind of regimented pedagogy
Oh, I guess not. So here's a teacher actually trying to teach the skills listed in the textbook with the full understanding that yes, the kids will soon take a test that this article has already noted is measuring important skills... but this approach is indefensible? Try as I might, I can't seem to wrap my head around the concept that teaching important skills and then measuring them jeopardizes education, so I'll move on.
...proponents [of standardized testing] actually agree with critics that tests that you can prep for aren't worth giving.
My jaw drops for the second time, in utter disbelief. I've been in this field for 10 years, I know an awful lot of psychometricians and test specialists, I have some knowledge of the inner workings of testing companies, and I have never heard anyone agree with a statement like this. It is utter nonsense. "Prep" as it is used here is short for "prepare", education is about preparing students for the real world, and these tests are a shorthand way to measure how well they've been preparing. We can all differ on what to test and how to best teach the material on the test, but to suggest that a good test is one for which you cannot or should not prepare is laughable. This claim may stem from a confusion over the fact that some tests supposedly do not benefit from nor require preparation, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or various personality inventories, but that doesn't excuse the outrageousness of it.
If you remove this claim from its educational testing context, you can see even more clearly how ridiculous it is - because you can prepare for the driver's license exam, does that mean the driver's license test is not worth giving? Let's keep those tests that require people to parallel park and demonstrate understanding of one-way signs, shall we? My car insurance rates are high enough as it is.
Now she [Alice Siegel, a teacher referred to earlier in the article] said: ''It's the same thing as whole language and phonics. If you said that you wanted to teach phonics, they said that you hated children. With whole language, it was very nice. You sat there with a big book, and everybody sat there blah blah blah. But everybody needs to know how to attack a word they don't know how to pronounce.'' In the world of education, a great deal of moral power attaches to practices that are aesthetically appealing; but justice is very often better served by the merely effective.
This is not news to anyone with common sense. The "merely" only serves to distract the reader from the concept that the best and most just method of teaching children might be one that's effective. Imagine that. And the comment that "they" could say you hated children just because you wanted to teach them using one of the most effective reading instruction methods possible is as devastating a judgment of "they" as I've ever heard.
Even if the kids do better, though, it's fair to ask whether the price has been too high -- whether all this test prep has killed whatever residual fondness the kids had for school or learning...Davis held a ''Saturday Academy,'' a euphemism for an extra two hours of voluntary test prep. The teachers insist, implausibly, that the kids show up well before 9 and wait for the doors to open...About 130 students in all eventually came...I talked to a dozen or so kids during the break, and they all said that they came to Saturday academy voluntarily, and most of them said they liked it...One girl, who kept her red ski jacket on all through the class, said that she so enjoyed the exercise of reading texts and learning to pull meaning out of them that she had started to read more on her own...I may be wrong, but I would have sworn they were having a good time.
Again, why is it news that teaching kids to master important skills in an effective manner is not irreversibly harmful to them and in fact might benefit them? We all know that adults often relish challenges and enjoy enhanced self-esteem from demonstrating mastery of new skills, so why the assumption that similar pressure from inside the classroom is so damaging to kids?
... I sat earlier this year at a breakfast table piled high with leaflets and talked with Jonathan King, father of two, professor of molecular biology at M.I.T. and charter member of the Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education, or CARE...King said he believed that the tests were turning the schools into ''a police state'' in which educational drill substituted for education. And while the tests, he said, were a colossal waste of time for his children, they were, he insisted, a catastrophe for minorities, who would soon be dropping out in large numbers as the state began withholding diplomas from students who had not passed the exit tests.
I don't believe that tests are one step down the road to Fascism, nor do I believe that educational drills cannot be real education. I do believe that the policy of using exit exams in high school is unsound and may very well be unfair. And I will keep tearing my hair out as long as the catastropic sound bites such as "police state" continue to take precedence over a reasonable discussion over the validity of exit exams.
CARE is a most unlikely vehicle for a national campaign against testing: the group's chairwoman, Jean McGuire, described the M.C.A.S. in a recent newsletter as a device for ''sorting and labeling,'' like ''the yellow star'' and ''the N-word.''
Yeah, that's one way to bring everyone together for the good of the children - refer to the psychometricians, test specialists and educators as Nazis and bigots. Way to go, CARE.
...an increasing number of states have come to the conclusion that students should not be permitted to graduate from high school unless they can pass tests in the core subjects. These tests pose very little danger to successful school districts, but they constitute a fearsome reality check in average or below-average school systems...The whole episode is a painful proof of the absurdity of thinking that testing, all by itself, will raise the academic performance of children who have muddled along in school for years.
All psychometricians are well aware of this absurdity, and many disagree with tests used in a way that may be invalid and result in this sort of damage. Too bad there's not one quote from a psychometrician anywhere in the article. Much better that the public continues to view us as Nazis and bigots (yes, I'm going to be upset about that CARE quote for a while).
The problem of human understanding is that people do not readily grasp a reality radically different from their own. It is, for example, taken for granted among activist Scarsdale parents, as it is among the crusaders at CARE, that testing is even more harmful for disadvantaged children than it is for their own,
...despite the fact that some people with experience in educating disadvantaged children, such as the folks at No Excuses, consider testing crucial for educational and personal development (scroll down to page 11 of the .pdf file)....
...that ''drill and kill'' can only crush young minds,
...again with the hyperbole! "Police state"! "The yellow star"! "Crush"ing young minds! Come on, folks. I read a lot of warblogs and anti-idiotarian blogs in my (ha) free time. There are plenty of places in the world that are police states and where the crushing (or exploding) of young minds is not just a figure of speech. Suburban New York and Massachusetts are not those places.
Whew. I think I'm done. Although I lost my cool a few times while reading this article, overall I thought it was pretty fair and much more even-handed than I expected from the NYT. I automatically cringe whenever I see "testing" as the focus of any mass-media production. It's almost never kudos, just complaints, complaints, complaints, despite the fact that there are plenty of schools out there who swear by testing as a necessary part of an effective educational process.
Posted by kswygert at April 9, 2002 03:56 PM