Locascio: Cage-busting and feeding the calves —- Teachers as decision-makers
There’s an old adage that you can’t make a calf grow by weighing it. Teachers can’t make young minds grow by continually testing them, either. In such cases, excessive focus on measurement can come at the expense of intellectual nourishment and exercise.
Efforts to reform education through exhaustive high-stakes testing has once again become a topic of criticism and commentary, with the Obama administration recently emphasizing the need for more moderation and coherence in the use of standardized tests. A recent study by the Council of the Great City Schools reports that typical graduates of an urban high school will have taken more than 110 mandated standardized tests in their K-12 career, a number that does not even include other tests “benchmarking” progress. The study found an average of 6.2 standardized tests per year for kindergarten students, climbing steadily to more than 10 high-stakes tests per year in both eighth and 10th grades. FairTest reports in another recent study that student “opt-outs” in protest to excessive testing are now at record levels.
Teachers and administrators have long recognized the opportunity cost of such extensive standardized testing — the time allocated to teach actual content and skills is sacrificed to prepare children for testing.
One of the other deleterious effects of excessive testing is the lost opportunities for teachers to personally engage in important decision-making relating to their classrooms. The constellation of teachers’ decision-making used to be widely acknowledged to include decisions relating to curriculum, instruction and assessment of students’ progress, as well as myriad other aspects of establishing and maintaining positive classroom cultures.
To be sure, teachers still make weighty decisions relating to pacing, classroom dynamics and responses to student behaviors, but many other facets of teacher discretion have been narrowed and dictated by testing. Too often the state standards — rather than being a foundation upon which curriculum is built in a manner most appropriate to individual classrooms and students — become for many teachers the entirety of the curriculum, absolving teachers of much curricular decision-making.
Similarly, the specific formats of high-stakes tests (mostly framed around “selected responses” like multiple-choice) dictate the format of classroom tests in a manner that limits students’ opportunities to utilize capacities for thought beyond memorization or skills beyond strategic test-completion.
The curriculum’s narrowing and crowding out of meaningful assessment limits the potentials for critical, creative and divergent thought and, even more troubling, leads many students to discount the value of such thought. Diane Ravitch has recently blogged about how demoralizing this phenomenon is for many excellent teachers. Despite pre-service teacher candidates getting repeated exposure to all manner of authentic assessments as a part of their teacher education programs, they find themselves similarly disheartened by the paltry classroom assessments in place in actual classrooms as they start their careers.
I have heard from many former students with this complaint and, frankly, our Locascio: Cage-busting and feeding the calves —- Teachers as decision-makers - Richmond Times-Dispatch: Guest-columnists: