A Virginia teacher blames the SOLs (Standards of Learning) exams for his decision to leave the public school system:
Standards of Learning were introduced to make education better. But in my experience, they had the opposite effect. The intense pressure to raise test scores eventually squeezed the life out of school, both for my kids and for me...
The idea behind the SOLs is simple: Lay out what kids should know, test them on it and then hold the schools accountable for their scores...Beginning this June, students who do not pass the high school tests won't graduate; beginning in 2007, schools that do not have a 70 percent passing rate on the exams will risk losing state accreditation.
From the start, the get-tough tests rubbed me the wrong way. Implicit in the notion of "accountability" are the assumptions that: (a) education is a product, the input and output of which can be standardized and measured; and (b) it's high time for teachers and schools to quit slacking and get to work.
It's very hard for me to imagine what education is if there's no observable change in the student. Just because a test is standardized doesn't mean that something other than reading and math can be measured with it. And some teachers have been spending an awful lot of time slacking, though they call it "child-centered education" while others call it "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
I can see why good teachers don't like the tests. But there are an awful lot of bad teachers out there.
In my experience, teaching is more alchemy than science. Its fundamental elements -- connecting with kids and sparking their love of learning -- can't always be measured by a test.
Yes, but what the kid learns can be. What good is a "love of learning" if the students don't learn anything? And what kid is better off - one who is in love with learning and knows few facts, or one who considers some classes to be drudgery but has a solid grounding in factual knowledge nonetheless?
This is why it pained me deeply to find myself in a situation where I felt compelled to give a rarely engaged student a practice bubble test instead of letting him read a book he had discovered he loved. My teaching directly to the high-stakes test would better serve him in the short term. He had to pass to graduate, and it was my job to make sure he did. Engaging him with books and instilling the habits of mind that might make him a lifelong reader would have better served him in the long run. I didn't have time to do both.
Can anyone out there enlighten me as to why there isn't time to do both? I'm serious. High-stakes tests aren't given every day. I don't work in the classroom, so I don't see this first-hand. But I find it hard to believe that the SOL alone kept this one kid from reading this one book.
This teacher, by the way, wants a return to this version of a lunchtime "coffeehouse" in school:
I remembered past years' versions of the coffeehouse: desks draped with tapestries, espresso maker bubbling in the background. Kids recited poetry into a microphone or played confessional songs on guitar. All these changes in the way we taught were hard to swallow, I thought, as I finished my sandwich and headed back to class.
Could he be a little more obvious about being attached to the 1960's? I can't think of anything more annoying at lunchtime than poetry recitations or "confessional songs." And again, why does the SOL mean there's literally no time left to have students read entire books?
The principal, Cathy Crocker, stepped to the dais, a Midwesterner whose indefatigable cheer belied the pressure she was under to raise our school's test scores. She thanked us for our efforts, describing her joy at seeing such caring, dedicated professionals working so hard with students. My spider sense started tingling...We had to raise our scores, she told us.
One way to do that, she said, was "bell-to-bell teaching": Every child's fanny in a seat from the moment the bell rings until the end of class 90 minutes later. I wondered if the controlled chaos of the writers' workshop in my room qualified as bell-to-bell teaching.
I wonder if any teaching at all happens in some classrooms where teachers aren't taught how to control chaos. And why isn't learning to sit still for 90 minutes considered legitimate character development?
The teacher, Emmet Rosenfeld, sounds like a genuinely nice guy, so I don't want to sound like I'm picking on him. He's probably a great teacher. But is the public school system in Virginia one that would really benefit, right now, from lunchtime poetry readings? Is all the instruction that teachers must take to craft lessons that relate to tests an indication of too much testing, or too little instruction about testing in education programs? And if there's so little time available to actually teach in the classroom, is that because teachers haven't been taught to impart information in an efficient fashion? If the tendency is to let children "discover information" all the time, I can see why there would be little time left to teach them all the facts they should know.
Posted by kswygert at February 23, 2004 12:49 PM